Accidental Genius

When I asked Steely what makes for a superior prompt, she gave the following advice: “Make your prompts short and open-ended. For instance, ‘After the storm …’ is a good one. It’s only a few words, and it could be about a childhood rainstorm, a thunderstorm, a fight, or it could have nothing to do at all with storms.”

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

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?

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.

A timer, preset for ten or fifteen minutes, energizes you in your thinking campaign, because it specifically limits the amount of work you have to accomplish in a single bout of writing.

Once I had all these sentence-long summations on my pad, I’d read through them to see what still needed saying. I’d write down as a sentence in the appropriate spot anything that came to mind.

In the few minutes I spent writing this, I realized that the improv ethic—go with what you’re given—isn’t the cumbersome, rain-soaked woolen overcoat I thought it was. Rather, this philosophy liberates the mind by giving it a specific ground zero to begin thinking. Throughout my subsequent freewriting, I referred to this improv strategy again and 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.

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