Accidental Genius

Points to Remember • A relaxed 90 percent is more efficient than a vein-bulging 100 percent effort. • When you begin freewriting about a thorny subject, remind yourself to “try easy.”

Build an Inventory of Thoughts In the past few years, I’ve made it a habit to write regularly. Some of the things I write find their way into books, posts, and articles immediately. But as you can imagine, much of my writing is done to clarify my thinking. Private writing. It’s not meant for publication, at least not right away.

Try This: Call to mind a problem that’s bugged you lately, a problem with seemingly no solution. Freewrite for ten minutes about what’s obvious in it. Simple facts. Facts about the situation, what you think, what others think, what has been tried, what you could try, what’s holding things back, what’s rational, and what’s irrational. Don’t create a

one. When searching for one great idea, we demand perfection from it, depress ourselves, become desperate, and end up latching on to sub-par notions. • Go for lots of ideas. Keep your threshold low. One idea leads to the next—if you let it.

When you write fast and continuously, you pretty much have to adopt an easy, accepting attitude—you don’t have much choice.

You can’t create a killer idea from thin air. You’ve got to have material to work with. You need an inventory of thoughts to draw from. If you don’t write things down, if you’re slow in writing them down, or if you try judging their worth too soon, you won’t have anything to create with, just thin air.

1. When looking for a single idea, we often demand perfection from that idea.

As you go about your day, then, keep your eyes open for stories and other kinds of material to use in your writing. At first you may not recognize something as worthy of writing about. But remember: If a story or a detail or an observation is interesting to you, then it’ll probably be interesting to members of your audience. We are more alike than

If you’re interested in learning more writing marathonlike ideas, see “The Loop Writing Process” in Peter Elbow’s “Writing With Power.”

Facts ground you by moving your attention from your tangled thoughts to the tangible world.