How Is the Book Structured? It’s divided into sections: this introduction and three additional parts. In the first part, you’ll learn the six secrets to freewrit-ing. In the second part, you’ll explore methods of using free-writing to ideate and solve problems. In the third part, you’ll discover ways of using freewriting to generate public works,

“Stories only happen to people who can tell them.”

Try This: Over the next two days, use your freewriting to come up with a hundred possible solutions for one of your dearest problems. That’s right, 100. Some of the solutions can be mundane, others can be outrageous, and still others can be silly.

When I’m finished doing this focused freewriting, I read it over and separate the dead from the living. The dead stuff—babble, off-point notions, wrong-headed thinking—I delete or save to other documents for use in a future project (Chapter 25). The living stuff—on-point ideas, interesting turns of phrase, experiments that could stand further

Have I made it clear, then, that writing in detail about anything elevates the subject out of the abstract class (such as automobile) and into a hard nuts-and-bolts reality where our minds can rap their mental knuckles against it (a red Firebird, with black leather seats, and a small American flag on the antenna snapping in the wind)?

I’ll also use chunks as thought-starters for exploratory writing. In essence, I’m keeping an inventory of thoughts on my computer. I’m stockpiling ideas, stories, and prose

I know three ways to make a difference in this world, and they are …

What’s kitchen language? Coined by Ken Macrorie, it’s a phrase that describes the language you use around the house when you’re lounging in knock-around clothes, as the television hums in the background, and you yap with your best friend on the phone.

Customize business books as you read them: underline, dogear, question, argue, agree vehemently, write in the margins and on the blank end papers. You’re reading the book to get workable ideas, and the best way to find the workable ideas is to be active as you read. • Through writing, try applying the author’s ideas to your own life. Even if you