Accidental Genius

After four to six weeks of sessions, he’s produced 200 to 300 pages. He prints them out, reads them, and asks himself, “What am I saying here? What’s useful to me? What’s useful to other people? What’s crap?”

forward. He sets a topic in mind, like “consulting” or “organizations,” and has conversations with himself on the page. He follows side trails, doesn’t worry about style, doesn’t edit, and doesn’t look back at what he’s written. When he’s produced ten double-spaced pages, the day’s session is over.

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.”

And if you’re not sure that you have enough material to be a writer, my advice to you is this: Start writing, regularly. As you freewrite day after day, you’ll gain material as you go. Some of that material, some of those stories, will be created on the page. Other material, other stories, will be created without effort as you lead your life.

Pick the most valuable idea and the least valuable idea in this book, and write for ten minutes on each.

When you “open up a word,” you redefine that word (or the phrase that contains it) so it has personal meaning.

When you have to come up with an idea, don’t try coming up with just one.

The rule to follow is this: During freewriting, always wrestle with a subject where it holds the most energy for you.

At this point, I want a clear picture of what I have in my master document and what I still might need to add. To get this picture, I take a pad and pen and comb through my onscreen work. For each chunk of prose I read, I sum it up on the pad in a sentence.

But you don’t often make ideas better by complicating them. At times we fall prey to our own smarts. We trap ourselves with notions that sound good but don’t work in practice. So how do you escape your own intelligence? I follow the advice of Ken Macrorie. Rather than “trying to be lucky with a Great Idea,” he said, “reach for a fact.”