Working Without Working: The Creative Night Shift
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Working Without Working: The Creative Night Shift
In short, you may be actually writing only two or three hours a day, but your mind, in one way or another, is working on it twenty-four hours a day—yes, while you sleep—but only if some sort of draft or earlier version already exists. Until it exists, writing has not really begun.”
John McPhee • Draft No. 4
Most striking at first is this appearance of sudden illumination, a manifest sign of long, unconscious prior work. The role of this unconscious work in mathematical invention appears to be incontestable, and traces of it would be found in other cases where it is less evident. Often when one works at a hard question, nothing good is accomplished at ... See more
Mandy Brown • The unconscious machine
I brood, thinking of ideas, in the automobile when I’m driving to work or in the subway or when I’m mowing the lawn. By the time I get to the paper something’s there—I can produce.
Mason Currey • Daily Rituals: How Artists Work
The shower or stroll removes you from the task-based focus of modern life—paying bills, answering e-mail, helping kids with homework—and deposits you in a more associative state.
Steven Johnson • Where Good Ideas Come From
Scientists call this process “creative incubation,” referring to the process your brain undergoes after it’s introduced to a problem (such as a potential plot line). Research shows that the brain unconsciously works to find solutions to the problem even when your attention is occupied by other tasks. This helps explain why many people experience fl
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