I said in the last chapter that there are many places to collect your "spark" to begin brainstorming. However, this won't come naturally at first. For most writers, myself included, the temptation is to go gung-ho and start writing, without knowing fully what you're going to write about. And while that may work for journaling, it won't work when you're trying to write a coherent story people will want to read. Either you'll get burned out partway through, or your story won't make sense.
Collecting ideas is fun, but you have to train your mind to do it. There are several ways to do this. One is to simply have a reminder on your phone or on a sticky note to look around you and do an "idea scan". Do some thinking about the details of things you see around you, or about how a social issue affects society. Then do some journaling about it. But there are other more fun ways to accomplish this.
1. Get involved with the writing community. When I was younger, a childhood friend and I used to write stories together. We would alternate chapters and neither of us could predict what would happen next in the silly little works we came up with. Another way to get involved is to enter quick-write challenges like the ones justwriteit does, since that will force you to do a lot of brainstorming for your project if you want to commit to it.
2. Scramble your ideas. This tip comes from a book I really love called Spilling Ink: A Young Writer's Workbook, by Anne Mazer and Ellen Potter. The basic idea is that you rapid-fire write down concepts - as silly and serious as you want - onto small strips of paper. Then you pull out three random strips and write a story about them, no matter how weird or off-the-cuff they may seem. This is also a really fun event if you participate in an in-person writer's club, because each person will take their three ideas and make them into something unique.
3. Use writing prompts. These are great for simply getting the spark easily, but they're also good for training yourself to brainstorm and explore ideas. I find myself writing brainstorming maps in my journals that never become novels, just from a story prompt I saw online.
4. Write poetry. Poetry can be the training wheels for writing prose because it's supposed to be less-fleshed out and more focused on sound. It also trains your mind to think in a different way and experiment with the way words fit together to communicate a theme.
5. Practice. Writing and/or brainstorming every day is essential to training your mind. You can't be a good weightlifter if you never lift weights. You can't be a good artist if you never draw. You can't be a good writer if you never write, or write only when you feel a burst of inspiration (though that euphoric high is pretty awesome).
In the next chapter, I'll discuss something that many new writers (my younger self included) often ignore before we write: research.