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.

Karl said that for the moment I should forget about the proposal. Instead, I was to write him a letter. He called it a talking letter. He asked me to write down anything that came to mind about what I wanted the book to be, and how I thought I could help sell it. My letter was supposed to be nothing formal, not an act of literature, just one friend

How then would you use concept substitution in your freewriting? Use the page to ask and answer these four questions: 1. What problem am I trying to solve? (Be general in your wording here. Nothing too specific. Examples of good general problem statements: “How do I build a fan base for something unknown?” “How do I sell a product to a market that

How were fan bases built for ideas and initiatives in other fields, such as politics, music, philosophy, medicine, manufacturing, engineering,

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: 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.

Try This: Make a list of five common jargon words in your industry, and open up each for five minutes.

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.”

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