By John R Hewitt » If you are having a problem generating ideas for your books or articles or would like to write your stories faster and more efficiently, then initially mapping your ideas on paper can really help.

Start off with an idea and write it down on a piece of paper, or preferably within your article journal to be saved for a later date. Then draw a ring around this idea and start to thing of the topics to be included within your article that obviously relate to your main premise. As you think of a topic draw a line from your initial circle and then write the topic down with a ring around it.

Do this for all the topics that occur to you and also branch of in the same way from the topics themselves. You will then have a page that resembles a chemical diagram but outlines your story clearly and more importantly visually. This will then allow you to string these bubbles together into a workable, readable story.

Let us take an example.

You have you page open and you think of "starting your own business" as an idea for an article. You write this down on the page with a circle around it. You then think of "expenses", "pitfalls","doing what you love","develop a routine","take it seriously" and so on. All of these ideas then branch out from your beginning circle.

You then look at the "doing what you love" bubble and add branches from here such as "personal satisfaction", "not having a boss","self worth" and so on. You can now see a visual representation of your article and can then bring all the bubbles together with your own writing style.

This approach also works great for essays, business writing, writing speeches or reports. The bullet points are mapped out and you can see how to build the written piece. The possibilities are indeed endless.

Now before you start the article you can map another article idea out and then another article idea and so on until you find that you have a wealth of articles just waiting to be written.

By keeping these article maps in your journal then you can look back if you ever suffer from writers block and see the articles that you have created. Not only is this great for your self confidence but from these past ideas new ones can be sparked.

This approach, being visual by actually being there on paper, gives you the sense that the article has actually now been written and you just need to bring the bubbles together. This will speed up the whole article writing process yet still retain the clarity and efficiency that makes the article readable.

Now, there is no point in mapping these article ideas out if you do not actually write them! This sounds so obvious yet procrastination can rear its ugly head here and get you to make lots of maps but not actually write the article out and publish it. If this happens to you then map one article, write one article and make this a habit.

Article mapping will reveal just how many ideas you have contained within you and will show you visually just how creative you are. From that point there is no stopping you.

To your writing success!

• John Hewitt is a full time freelance writer. He has worked in many fields including music, the restaurant industry, film work and as an RSPCA animal welfare officer. For more of his articles and poetry, visit www.john-hewitt.com.