If I were guaranteed success, the project I’d take on would be …

• Vary the session lengths and specific techniques you use during your bouts of freewriting. • Talk to yourself, on paper, about any resistance you’re feeling about your problem or about the freewriting method itself. (“I don’t feel like doing this.”) • Dumping a lot of details and information on the page often in and of itself suggests a solution.

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.

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.

Start scribbling, then remind yourself that you’re simply looking to put some decent words and ideas down on the page; you’re not trying to produce deathless prose and world-beating ideas in the course of a single night’s writing.

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

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

try not to get too concerned about or devote too much time to any particular draft. A colleague of mine, Barry Tar-shis, calls this approach taking passes at the material. I work on the document for a while; then I leave it and work on something else. I come back minutes, hours, or even days later, and take another pass at it. Over and over the cyc

Not only do I use focus-changers whenever I write privately, but I use them in public documents, too. As you comb through Accidental Genius, you’ll constantly see me asking myself questions like: • What was I thinking here? • How else can I say that?