Michael DeLon
If you’ve tried to write a book before, you know the experience.
You sit down in front of your computer and open up a blank document. You position your hands over the keyboard, ready for words to flow out like a gushing stream.
But nothing happens.
You can’t think of anything to put down on paper. Your mind is blank.
You have writer’s block.
It’s a common problem, caused by a common mistake. When they decide to write a book, most people just sit down and start to write. That’s a big mistake. Before you write a word, you need to invest some time in the Brain Dump.
“Brain Dump.” It sounds like a dump truck depositing its payload. And in essence, that’s what this stage is. You need to drop your mental payload onto a piece of paper so you can see and organize everything that’s rumbling around inside your skull.
The Brain Dump is a process of simply writing down every idea you can think of that you might want to include in your book. Many of these ideas will never reach the printed page—that’s okay. The goal is not coming up with good ideas, but ideas. Period. All of the book-topic-related information inside your head needs to come out.
When we did a Brain Dump for this book, here is one set of thoughts we wrote down. These sentences were the genesis of this entire chapter:
“The Brain Dump is a process of simply writing down every idea you can think of that you may want to include in your book. Many of these will never see the printed page. That’s ok. What you’re trying to do is to get out of your head everything you can related to your book topic. DO NOT attempt to organize, categorize or”
That’s where the original notes end. Seriously! We didn’t even finish the sentence! And that’s exactly the point of the Brain Dump. You don’t have to worry about punctuation, capitalization, spelnig wrods corektly, or anything! Just dump.
You can have all sorts of different ideas during the Brain Dump. Write them all down! Any of these are fair game:
Don’t overanalyze. It can be easy to get bogged down on one particular point, but keep moving on. Don’t be concerned with getting everything in the proper order at this stage. Simply get your ideas out of your head and onto paper—you can rearrange them later.
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And when we say “idea”, don’t take that to mean a neat and tidy concept. This is a messy step. You don’t have to express yourself crisply, or even coherently. And don’t bother coming up with snazzy titles or one-word summaries at this point. Just jot down whatever enters your mind.
I typically work in full-sentence format during a Brain Dump. That is, instead of writing down “brain dump before outline,” I write down: “you really need to do your brain dump before your outline because you have ideas first that way. If you start with outline you’ll run out of ideas. Brain dump first makes outline easier later on."
See what I mean? When you think of something, don’t be afraid to elaborate on it a bit. Attach some phrases or sentences to the idea so you’ll be clued into its meaning when you return to outline. You can even use sentence fragments! Don’t worry, no grammar inspectors here.
To begin the Brain Dump, open up a blank document on your computer. Name it “Book Brain Dump” or something similar, and make sure it’s saved to a location that gets backed up often. You do not want to invest this much time and lose your work due to a hard drive crash. How do I know? It has happened to me. Don’t let it happen to you.
Another good Brain Dump tactic is to use Mind Mapping software. This software enables you to record ideas in a non-linear fashion, which can be helpful when you have dozens of ideas flying out of your head. You can create text bubbles each with a different idea, and then organize them later.
I have used Mindjet’s MindManager, as well as XMind (which has a useful free version and optional paid pro features). Other options are FreeMind and SimpleMind (which is available for iPhone as well as Mac).
Or go old school. Get a piece of paper and a pencil and go to work. Just make sure it’s a BIG piece of paper—you are going to have lots of ideas. Believe me: once the ideas start flowing, you’ll hardly be able to stop.
Michael DeLon is the founder of Credible Author. When he's not helping people become authors, he loves reading great books, playing games with his wife and daughters, and meeting up with good friends for early-morning coffee.
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