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

In freewriting, always explain to yourself why you think what you think. Often, you’ll realize you have no basis for your belief. What then? Apply a little mental elbow grease, and come up with a belief that will better serve you.

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: Set your timer for twenty minutes, and start it. Tell yourself in freewriting everything you currently think of as necessary for a superior life. Include material and non-material criteria. Make sure you take away at least one item from that list that you’ll act on in the next three hours.

The first thing I do is read over my freewriting and see if there’s anything I want to save. I’m looking for ideas, observations, stories, and hypotheses. For want of a better phrase, I call each one of these a thought chunk. When I find a promising chunk, I cut it out of the freewriting document and drop it into a separate document that holds simi

Build an Inventory of Thoughts

This kind of writing is like the scientific method. You: 1. observe 2. hypothesize 3. experiment 4. note the results 5. ask, “What’s next?”

Try This: Think of an opportunity you’d like to investigate (changing departments, creating a new product, writing a book in your chosen field), and hold a ten-minute freewriting conversation with a paper advisor. Now, pick out some interesting point from that conversation, and use it as a starting point for ten more minutes of writing with a diffe

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.

If you put honest thinking into your written words, you spot situations that yawn to be changed.