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

Who should you speak with? Dialoguing with a variety of people, in a host of far-out ways, makes for a paradigm-smashing experience:

you’ll constantly see me asking myself questions like: • What was I thinking here? • How else can I say that?

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.

One of the keys to making the marathon work is Ezra Pound’s rallying cry, “Make it new.” Each time you formulate a starter thought, demand that it sends you in a new direction.

Try This: Set aside part of a morning, and do two to three hours on an idea you’d really like to explore. During your sessions, take no phone calls and answer no e-mail.

“go with the thought” I had just put on paper.

Slow writing, in fact, is counterproductive. Keep up the pace, so your internal editor loses its grip. Ray Bradbury says, “In quickness there is truth.”

One of my favorite storytellers is John Vorhaus, a writer of mystery novels, books on writing technique, and manuals on how to win at poker.

To open up a word, write down four things: a word for study, the generally agreed-upon definition of that word, your thoughts on the accuracy of the definition, and a personal definition that suits your eccentric tastes.