Craft of Writing: Brain Dump

Dear Reader,

This week's post is similar in spirit to my previous one on the merits of keeping a journal. I picked up the concept of a 'brain dump' from Ryder Carroll's Bullet Journal blog. It is a place where you write down all of the random thoughts that hit you. It is supposed to help free up your mental processing energy for the tasks you have at hand. Some people keep a brain dump page in their bullet journal. Others make have an entire notebook dedicated to this. Either way, the practice of using a brain dump is brilliant.

It keeps a record of ideas that come to you as they arrive. Because they're recorded, you can flip back through them and pan for the ones that are really useful to you. While 'buy dog food' may not be vital to developing a plot outline for your book, if you're making a shopping list at the end of the week, that note is going to be helpful. One may wonder, what manifestation of a 'brain dump' do I use.

I keep a daily journal that is functionally my brain dump. I started out with the intention of recording my thoughts about the day's events, but the time I was using it switched from evenings to mornings. Now, I just free write about whatever is pressing on my mind for two pages. I distinguish this from The Artist's Way's morning pages by the fact that the goal of the morning pages is different from a brain dump. The morning pages are focused more on building one's artistic strength and are ideally a place where one experiments with ideas and concepts in a free form way.

A brain dump is just that. It need not be full sentences. It can literally be a list of words. It does not need to be artistic, in fact this may hinder the process of using a brain dump if one tries to inject artistry into it. It is simply a place to off load the random (and not so random) things on your mind so that you can focus on other tasks.