Accidental Genius: Using Writing to Generate Your Best Ideas, Insight, and Content

Suppose I want to write an article. The first thing I might do is warm up with ten minutes of freewriting and fast exercises. Maybe two or three of them. For the most part, I steer clear of business ideas. I’m writing about a world event that has my attention, a dream I had, a story I remembered, a TV show I watched. I may play the opposites game (

Try This: Right now, take an hour to comb through your writing and start making your own thought chunk documents around the themes you most commonly write about.

Try This: Mark Bowden said a writer should always be working on the most ambitious thing he or she has ever done. What writing project would most stretch and excite you? Start now by using freewriting to help you.

These chunks, by the way, aren’t mere fragments. They’re complete thoughts. That’s what makes this method work. If I read a chunk even a decade from now, it would make sense to me.

By using some of these collected phenomena bubbling in your head, you will have a book that has your stamp on it and is unlike any other. When I’m working with clients, I tell them to temporarily put aside considerations of others and of worldly success, and I ask that they make a list. What kind of list? It’s an inventory of everything that fascin

Before approaching your day’s writing, give yourself some uncomplicated, easy-to-do rules to follow. Doing so will focus you. • Different parts of the creative process call for different rules. You can create a warm-up rule, an ideation rule, a writing rule, and so forth. Don’t, however, weigh yourself down with rules. Their sole purpose is to help

we study the fascinations list, move items around, add to them, group them, and look for themes. Believe me, we find themes. It’s like what Edward Tufte meant when he wrote that “the act of arranging information becomes an act of insight.” We get new ideas just by recombining what’s in front of us.

One of the warm-ups I use might be called the opposites game. I read about the concept in John Vorhaus’s The Comic Toolbox. It was created to help people write sitcoms and other comedic work. The rules take some explaining, but playing it is simple and fun.

Try This: Write for ten minutes about a situation that physically and mentally exhausts you. Don’t try to solve anything in this bout of writing; just get the details down.