: Re: How specific should I get when brainstorming with what-if exercise? I had a few experiences with what-if style brainstorming technique. In those exercises, I found I got lost in minute details.

Not a direct answer to "how specific", but a technique you might find useful not to get bogged down in details: instead of writing a list, make it a tree.

In your example, "writer", "actor", "programmer" are all children of "talent". "Talent", on the other hand, is the only child node of "doesn't want to work with his father". Having arranged your ideas like this, you immediately, visually, see where you are going after a multitude of sub-sub-sub-branches, and where you haven't explored other alternatives at all.

When I'm unsure how my story should develop, I find it useful to construct such a tree with about 3 children per node, and I usually make it about 3-deep. That said, my 3-deep wouldn't be just variations on a theme (writer, actor, programmer), but directions the story could go - choices a character makes, or something that happens to the character. Then the next step would be possible consequences, etc. I'd be looking for significantly different options, so I could weigh them against each other.

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: Re: How specific should I get when brainstorming with what-if exercise? I had a few experiences with what-if style brainstorming technique. In those exercises, I found I got lost in minute details.

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