Some common pre-writing strategies are:
Brainstorming: Write down all the ideas that come to your head. Most likely, you'll gravitate towards one specific idea to write about.
Clustering: Know what big factors fall under your specific topic, then organize your ideas into those big factors. Then pick one of the big factors.
Free-writing: Write about one specific idea for a period of time.
Looping: Looping happens after free-writing. After you finish writing, pick an idea that you would like to dig deeper in.
Venn Diagram: If you are doing a writing piece that requires compare and contrast, you can draw a Venn diagram to organize your ideas.
Pros & Cons List: If you are doing a writing piece that requires pros and cons, you can quickly make a list to separate your ideas.
Listing: Simply list all of your ideas.
5Ws & 1H: 5Ws is Who, What, Where, When, Why and 1H is How. Base all of your ideas on these questions. If you can't answer a question for an idea, then maybe you need to do some extra research.
Example:
1. The best day of my life was when...I won the spelling bee.
Strategies Used
Brainstorming, Clustering, Listing
Support Statements (3)
1) I got an award, trophy, and a medal.
2) Afterwards, I was able to go to Jamba Juice.
3) My family was extremely proud of me.
