Accidental Genius

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.

There’s benefit in articulating what you’re thinking and feeling, even if you’re not 100 percent sure what you’re thinking and feeling. There’s also benefit in sharing your unfinished thoughts.

Since I was writing for myself, I didn’t name all the “characters” involved in the situation or hack through all the background information surrounding it.

Try This: Tell four stories during your next freewriting session.

Points to Remember • Assumptions help us lead productive lives. At times, though, formerly helpful assumptions can hinder us when we don’t realize they’re there or we misapply them. • How can we check for our assumptions? By using freewriting to play with a situation’s rules. • There are two ways to play with the rules: (1) Pretend an unfamiliar pa

You’re searching for a starting thought, what Peter Elbow called “a center of gravity.”

Their task is to list items that, for whatever reason, have energy for them. Items that radiate.

Do you see a thought you’d like to pursue further? • Is there an underdeveloped idea that needs elaboration? • Do you notice a relationship between ideas that you need to write about? • Are you struck by a thinking error that’s apparent only now that you’ve written it out? • Has a question occurred to you that bears investigation?

mini-sessions that add up to hours. • Make sure each session begins in a new direction—even if that direction is artificial and heavy-handed. 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.

secreting as soon as you come across an interesting topic and force you to forsake the reading temporarily. By all means, give in: Strip the intriguing piece of prose from the text or encapsulate it in your own words, slap it on your computer screen, and bang out ten to twenty minutes of non-stop opinion and excitement.