Think Before Writing

American journalist Christopher Morley once said: "The problem is to teach ourselves to think, and the writing will take care of itself." There are two important types of thinking that writers can utilize to enhance their writing skills. These types of thinking are especially useful in developing and refining ideas or topics to write about. Creativity experts define creativity as the production of something original and useful which, they say, is achieved through a combination of divergent and convergent thinking. Divergent thinking involves generating many unique ideas as a starting point in the process. This type of thinking has also been referred to as brainstorming. It involves using free association to spin as many ideas off of an original idea as possible without any restraints or parameters. It is a kind of warm-up exercise for the brain. Convergent thinking comes next. After the generation of as many ideas as possible, convergent thinking involves focusing in and combining these ideas into the best result. Both are necessary to develop useful, refined writing. Employing a process such as this will result in ideas or topics that are thought out in advance and have the best chances of resulting in successful writing. It is tempting to jump into writing projects without doing the necessary thinking work first. Train yourself to think first and write second. The results will make your writing shine.