Essential Prose | Zoë Westhof

photo by lomoa

This last segment of the “How to Focus Your Ideas” series is technique-free. Honestly, I’m much more comfortable speaking in abstracts and striving to understand the elusive “big picture,” rather than talking systems. It was really fun to dissect my brainstorming process and frame it for other people to try out, but like I said — I’m still figuring it out myself.

The process of writing those two posts pushed me to explore the balance between creativity and organization. The classic right brain / left brain battle. Your comments, which both challenged and agreed with me, reinforced my notion that “effective” and “productive” are both so subjective. As many of you pointed out, you do what works for you.

This final post is about what it means to open the floodgates. Often, it’s not coming up with ideas that presents the problem — it’s taking them seriously, and plunging in. If you have a hard time grabbing hold of those ideas and taking them seriously, hopefully the first two posts were helpful.

Opening the floodgates can be scary. You have this idea you’re getting excited about, you’ve nudged it along a bit and even honed it into a sharp little beam of light. As long as you give that idea refuge inside you, it will remain sheltered and unstained. But the moment you expose it to the grit and sweat of skin, the moment it passes through your lips and fingers, you are vulnerable.

I’ll be the first to admit: I have yet to develop a flawless connection between thought and action. Sometimes the link is smooth, and I don’t wait long before allowing certain ideas to emerge. Writing blog posts, for example, has been a powerful way for me to accept that vulnerability — to let those thoughts be stained with sweat and grit, not only from my skin, but from every other person who brushes past my words.

But when I have big, broad ideas, like the ones I’ve been trying to focus, it’s easy to get attached to the exhilaration and the hope to create something as wonderful as I’ve imagined. I’ve done the idea dump, I’ve navigated the idea dump, but what if my idea can’t cut it out in the wilderness? What if it disintegrates as soon as I stick my toes out the door?

You see what I’m getting at. If you just keep planning, pondering, mapping, and tidying, you can’t fail. Your ideas are kept pristine in your little sanctuary. But if you take a step past all that brainstorming and focusing, you might find a small fracture in your idea. You might even see a shatter, a rupture, or an explosion. It makes you anxious to think about such awful things happening to your beloved idea, so you fall back onto the easy, cushy solution: keep it inside.

A Sappy Aside

I’m going to get uncharacteristically personal (er, sappy?) for a moment. My first serious relationship was with a guy we shall call Evan. Evan and I were together for nine months (no, this has nothing to do with unplanned pregnancy), and then he lied to me. A big, awful lie that was covered with a smaller, awful lie, and on and on, until I was completely drained of any trust for him. For the next couple years, I pushed down my penchant for openness and trust and went straight for the guys who I knew I couldn’t trust. Why? If I didn’t bother opening up to trust them in the first place, I didn’t risk getting hurt. It’s a simple game, and many of us have played it.

But after a couple years, it got really boring. Sure, I wasn’t getting hurt, but I wasn’t getting anything marvelous either. I was resigning to romantic mediocrity, all in the interest of warding off possible stains, shatters, or blows. I eventually admitted to myself that most worthwhile things require risk. Because when you’re playing around with something you hold dear (like your own feelings, for example), every move is a risk, big or small. Since that epiphany, I’ve cried over lovers, I’ve been frightened, and I’ve been separated. But I’ve also been elated, spilled out my pretty little heart, and I’m currently goofy happy.

Now, that little dose of sappiness was a small example of what I guess you could call my “life philosophy.” But I’d rather you didn’t, because that sounds a bit lofty for my tastes.

Here goes: Unless you are perfectly content with the monotony of a stable, hum-drum existence, OPEN THE FLOODGATES.

Whatever that thing is that gets you kinda-nervous-kinda-excited-but-mostly-crapping-your-pants, you should probably do it. [Disclaimer: I write these articles in good faith, under the honest assumption that my readers are not prone to desperate, brainless, or just plain dumb actions. If "that thing" is riding a motorcycle with your feet, you probably shouldn't "just do it."].

What’s “That Thing”?

“That thing” might be a really big step, or it might be something that seems like no big deal when you tell your friends. Anything.
It could be:

Sending an e-mail to that guy you used to work with re: your zany and brilliant idea.

Sitting alone for eleven hours straight to write the first chapter of your novel.

Paying for that gym membership so you can’t afford not to go.

Telling your family that you’re going freelance.

Filling out a grant application for that really big idea.

Whatever it is, go pencil in a block of time and do it. The big secret is that failure doesn’t mean you blew it. It doesn’t mean irreversible, mortifying catastrophe. It means you’ll have to try a different way, or three more times, or maybe a whole new idea. Of course, these steps I’m talking about should be viable — not shoveling your entire life savings into the next make-money-online scheme. It’ll probably take a lot of nerve, guts, cojones, moxie — whatever you wanna call all that good stuff — and if that’s not your style, please give it a shot just this once. Even on an itty bitty part of that big fat idea.

This brings to mind the GTD practice of immediately acting on whatever can be done in two minutes. Except that I’m not limiting you to two minutes. But the idea is the same — just get the ball rolling, launch into gear, get cracking… whichever tired old saying you prefer. Don’t settle into that hum-drum existence just because it’s safe. Go somewhere new.

So, where are you going?
Add your comments below, or click the title of this post if no comment form is visible!

If you enjoy this blog, I invite you to subscribe by e-mail or by RSS reader (links are near the top of the sidebar).

photo by fotologic

As the second post in a series about collecting and nurturing your ideas, this post will discuss the whole nurturing bit.

If you’re anything like me, your idea dump was a bit untidy. Perhaps it was even a chaotic eruption of words and squiggly lines. All that mess can be pretty rough on the eyes. Once you’ve opened the spout and allowed those ideas to get some oxygen, it makes sense to sort them out a bit so that you actually want to look at them.

Many people have a natural inclination to sift through their idea dumps and find those shiny nuggets of brilliance, but that inclination usually fades with time. Put that messy mind map to the side for a week or two, and it’ll seem pretty overwhelming when you pick it up again.

I therefore encourage you all to put the techniques below into motion soon after dumping your ideas. Once again, the techniques I present won’t be fancy. The simpler and easier the method, the more likely you are to do it. My only hope is that these straightforward posts will stir you to action.

As you set out to create a map of your idea dump, here are two basic options for navigation:

Spruce it up.

Draw a new, neater version of your mind map. Or, if you made a list, arrange the ideas in clusters.

Outline it.

Reformat your idea dump as an outline.

I’m going to use one example to demonstrate these two ways of navigating your idea dump. I recently brainstormed a slew of ideas on how I can use new media in current and future projects. I’ve been reading up on this topic quite a lot in recent months, so it was only a matter of time before these ideas needed to escape. Below, you have my messy-mindmap idea dump.

Although it’s fun to look at that mind map and think how chock-full of ideas my little brain is, it’s not so fun to look at it and actually try to decipher. Because it’s pretty inaccessible, I worried that I would turn to the next notebook page and fail to confront that mind map ever again. It’s important to move swiftly into the navigation phase to truly give your ideas a fighting chance, so today I plowed my way through the mayhem.

Spruce It Up

This is the method I usually stick with. As I revealed in the first post of this series, the mind maps that have previously graced these pages were cleaned up for your viewing pleasure. The mind map above clearly was not. When I re-drew those other mind maps, it pushed me to take a second look at each idea I had scrawled out.

This second look is the chance for quick filtering — maybe you wrote the same idea twice, or maybe a couple phrases were just mindless chatter leaking out among the ideas. As you redo your mind map, the connections you automatically drew will be solidified, and you’ll trim the useless fat.

Since a few of you recommended Inspiration software in the comments section, I decided to use a trial version to spruce up my mind map. Though I stand strongly behind my pen and paper for letting those ideas come tumbling out, I do concede that computers are a nifty way of tidying things up. Behold the results:

If you did your idea dump as a messy list or through the first stage of clustering, spruce it up by finding those clusters and circling them. Although related ideas will probably be in the same area of the page, you’ll most likely want to rewrite your clusters to make them neat and accessible.

Outline It

This method works if you like looking at lists. Maybe mind maps make it easy for you to unload the ideas, but you think lists are prettier to look at. Or maybe you made a messy list, and you want your clusters to be nice and orderly. Although we usually think of outlines as a means of breaking down a story or a single project, they can also be useful for creating an anything-list that is visually accessible. All those indents, letters, and numbers make it easier to digest chunks of your idea dump.

I must admit that I cheated on this step. Inspiration software has a handy tool that allows you to convert a mind map into an outline. Witness the magic:

Now, scurry off and try one of these techniques to bring some method to your madness. I know people can be very particular about their chosen tools of organization, so please share below if you have a distinct method that works wonders for you.

In conclusion, I have a little game. If any of you made a mind map or a messy list that you wouldn’t mind sharing, scan it and post it on your blog. If you’d like to put even more sweat into it, show us your idea dump pre- and post-navigation. Once you’ve posted your masterpiece, send me the link to your post either in the comments or by e-mail. I’ll gather and post a little collection of these links here, so everyone can get a peek into your mind!

Look Inside the Mind of… :

TJ Hirst

Add your comments below, or click the title of this post if no comment form is visible.

If you enjoy this blog, I invite you to subscribe by e-mail or by RSS reader (links are near the top of the sidebar).

photo by SideLong

If you’re expecting this post to to take the GTD world by storm with some groundbreaking, über-productive system I’ve invented, you can stop holding your breath. No drumroll here.

This series is not about a productivity system. It’s about the art of collecting and nurturing your ideas. I’m talking to the people who have so many ideas that they can’t spit any of them out. Or the people who have the shadow of an idea looming over them, but they can never quite put their hand around it. Or anyone who wants to see what’s haunting the back corners of their minds.

You could say it’s an in-depth look at only the “collection” stage of Getting Things Done. If you’re looking for productivity hacks and new ways to gussy up your Hipster PDA, there are scads of websites out there that can do the job better than I can. I once tried to GTD-ify my Moleskine, and I ended up drowning in a heap of binder tabs, Sharpies, and calendar print outs, as I secretly yearned for the simplicity of my scribbles and scrawls. Those tabs were ripped out four days later, and the mind-of-their-own scribbles returned.

But I’m not out to slam GTD. The core principle of GTD is actually what I’m going to focus on today. I’m just going to skip all the bells and whistles — the fancy software programs, the tricked-out binder clips — and explore the motivation for collecting and cultivating those ideas in the simplest way possible.

First, I’d like to talk about the glories of pen and paper. Here’s the thing: I sometimes have a little too much faith in my memory. When I get into bed, it usually takes me a little while to fall asleep. Those long minutes before sleep stretch over my day, snaking their way through the piles that I’ve amassed throughout the day. The dark is indulgent and empty, allowing strange thoughts and connections to emerge from those tangled piles. Sometimes, little bits of brilliance even rise to the surface.

More often than not, I reassure myself that they will still be there in the morning. I decide that it’s wiser to let my body continue its slow drift toward slumber, and so I choose not to write anything down. As you’re all probably predicting, those bits of brilliance have usually vanished by morning. If not vanished, they’ve settled down into the depths of my brain, where they’ll be a long time in returning to the surface.

All I had to do was write it down. It’s an absurdly simple solution that I so often ignore because I fancy my brain a dexterous idea-juggler. But the truth is, I’m a klutz. So when I ignore this absurdly simple advice, my mind starts scrambling around, trying to make sure none of these jumbled ideas slips into the cracks. I lose focus, and most of the ideas aren’t even given the chance to focus. This is the core principle of GTD: by recording (or, “collecting”) your ideas, you free the space in your mind to concentrate on doing. The way I look at it, you free the energy wasted on trying to remember those ideas, and use it instead to focus your ideas.

What do I mean by “focusing your ideas,” you ask? If we take a very literal definition of “focus,” we can see it as a way of concentrating something into a sharp beam. If our ideas are sliding about and struggling to gain a steady foothold, there’s not much chance we’ll give them enough energy to create that sharp beam.

So here’s my “system” for giving those ideas some steady ground. Take a seat, boys and girls, ’cause this is sure to blow your mind.

1. STEP AWAY FROM THE COMPUTER

2. WRITE IT DOWN

3. LET IT ALL HANG OUT

A stroke of genius, no?

Now comes the fun part. We’re gonna talk about how to write it down, and how to let it all hang out. How to dump out all those ideas you’ve got inside.

Limitless Listing

This idea sounds completely boring and lame. A list, Zoë, really? Yes, really.

1. Take a seat, or lie on your stomach with a pillow between your elbows (my personal favorite brainstorming position).

2. Pick your topic.

3. Decide on a time frame (four minutes, say) or a space frame (three notebook pages).

4. Start listing words — big ones, small ones, phrases, sentences, or even made-up ones — and do not censor yourself. Let it all hang out. Press the mute button on that “reasonable” part of your brain that tells you your idea is too zany, too costly, or just plain dumb.

5. Do not stop listing until your space is filled or your time is up.

This method is my favorite way to haul in a whole mess of ideas that I barely knew existed. When I first started rethinking the direction of this blog, I got nervous that I wouldn’t be able to think of enough post ideas. So before I wrote anything new, I lay down on the couch with a notebook and pen and let loose an eruption of possible posts. Within four minutes, I had jotted down a load of good ideas, some of which you’ve already seen manifested in my past few posts. These ideas all connected to broader notions that had been floating around my mind, but the simple act of writing it down in an automatic stream allowed these ideas to focus into tangible, sharp beams.

Your lists will naturally produce sub-lists, as the ideas splinter into handfuls of concrete specifics. That’s how this series came about. First, I wrote “focus your ideas” on the list. Then I wrote “idea dumps.” Then my mind had a lot more to say about that, so “write it down,” “simple lists,” and “stupid weird ideas” all got stuffed into a sub-list.

If you don’t already use this method, try it out. Start listing new ways to incorporate photos into your writing. Or character ideas for that one-act play you’ve been meaning to write. Or PR techniques that won’t cost you a dime. If you don’t squeeze out at least a few ideas that you didn’t know were lurking around, e-mail me and say you want your money back. Or your time, since my blog charges no entry fee at the door. I’ll figure out some crafty way to hand you back those minutes.

Mind Mapping and Clustering

You’ve already seen my mind-mapping madness here and here. But as I pointed out, those maps were colored and cleaned up for your viewing pleasure. I work with two types of mind maps: the messy brainstorming ones, and the pretty organizational ones (which we’ll discuss in the next post).

Here’s how to do your own messy brainstorm mind map:

1. Write your topic in the middle of the page, then draw a box or circle around it.

2. Start writing down associations as you think of them, connecting those words to the original square/circle with a line. Again, let it all hang out. Just keep the pen to the paper, and don’t worry about whether or not your connections make sense.

3. Keep going until you have a web spread across the page. You could give yourself a time limit for this one too, but I usually don’t.

Clustering is similar to my messy mind mapping. To cluster, you write the topic in the middle of the page, then write down associations anywhere on the page. Basically, you’re not stopping to draw the connecting lines. Once you’re finished, you’ll start drawing circles around related “clusters,” but that will be part of the next post on navigating your idea dump.

Keep It Simple

There are plenty of other brainstorming techniques out there — starbursting, cubing, the 6 Qs, etc. — and lots of articles describing how to use them for problem-solving. In this post, I’m aiming to give our creative ideas a solid foundation to work with. A fighting chance, at least. The conviction behind this post is so utterly simple that I started to question if it was even worth a whole blog post.

But now I’m confident that it does. Even though some readers may scoff at my small offering of “techniques,” my main motivation for writing this is to remind you — and myself — why certain small, simple approaches can provoke significant changes.

In the comments of my last post, a lot of people said that creativity was about making connections, being brave enough to deviate from the easy and the ordinary, and honestly revealing your distinct perspective. All those points come down to allowing yourself to entertain new possibilities. To allow yourself to take a chance. And that’s why I think these techniques work — because they only ask that you switch into automatic mode, and let your brain spout forth whatever’s bottled up back there.

I hope all of you will go do a mini-brainstorm when you finish this post. Do it on that question you’ve been keeping on the tip of your tongue, or that one project you just haven’t had the time to think about. I’m really curious to see if these bare basic methods are as effective for you as they are for me. If you get glorious results, I’d love to hear about it in the comments. Or maybe there’s a method that works much better for you — I’d like to hear about that too.

Add your comments below, or click the title of this post if no comment form is visible!

If you enjoy this blog, I invite you to subscribe by e-mail or by RSS reader (links are near the top of the sidebar).

photo by pacificit

We creative types just love ideas. We want to be original, imaginative, and exciting. We want to write groundbreaking stories, paint mind-shattering canvases, and compose inconceivable verses.

But creativity these days isn’t limited to the novelists, the painters, and the poets. We’ve come to the so-called “Information Age,” when everyone’s going into raptures about creative thinking, to the point that it starts to sound like a boring cliché. But as tired as it may sound, it’s true — creative thinking is a most valuable asset in the unpredictable, ever-changing world we inhabit. Marketers have to be creative. Programmers have to be creative. Journalists, teachers, and chefs? They won’t stand out either unless they’ve got creative ideas.

We’ve barreled past the Industrial Revolution, when learning techniques and following set procedures were the required skills. Back then, creative people like the weavers and the silversmiths were completely squashed by the arrival of factories and machines. But they are now redeemed, as those big company owners are currently scrambling about howling that they need more creative minds so their company can survive.

Yet conflict arises. Creativity, it so happens, is also traditionally associated with disorder. If you search for “creative genius” on Google Images, Albert Einstein and his legendary wild ‘do shows up on the first line. Homer Simpson shows up on the second (I’m not joking). Two very different manifestations of disarray, no doubt, but very telling indeed.

But creativity doesn’t have to be a chaotic mess. For some people it will be, but for other people, that mess actually holds them back. This series is about wading through the mess to find the nuggets of gold.

If you’ve read my other posts, you’ve probably noticed that I’m big on figuring things out as I go along — jumping in and starting to act. What you probably don’t know is that I have a huge pile of ideas milling around my mind, ideas that have not dared to venture outside the warm corners of my mind. The problem with these ideas isn’t that they got paralyzed by over-planning, or that I threw them out into the world cold and unprepared. The problem is that there are just too many of them. I get overwhelmed, and brush them to the side.

How to Find Those Nuggets

That said, I’m presenting you all with a series on how to focus your ideas. Preposterous!, you may be thinking. Why would we want to hear it from someone who’s struggling herself? Well, hear me out. My idea is that as I’m figuring out how to focus my ideas (since I just love that “figuring out” business), I can let you know how it’s going for me — let you know what works. Ideally, you folks then join in the discussion and tell me if it works for you, or if you have a completely different and brilliant method for us to try out.

The impending first post, elegantly titled “Idea Dumps: Letting It All Hang Out,” will discuss the painfully obvious, yet extremely effective method of writing it down. I promise, it will be more exciting than it sounds. I’ll use a spellbinding example to demonstrate different ways to collect your ideas, whether you like scribbling words or making pretty pictures.

The second post, “Navigating the Idea Dump,” will discuss how to organize those ideas that you’ve written down, so you don’t look at that illegible piece of paper and end up tossing it in the trash. Once more, we’ll follow an example through various methods.

The third post, which is currently unnamed in order to keep you in dreadful suspense, will talk about actually starting your creative project. Again, whether it’s a collaborative writing project you want to launch, or a marketing workshop on building your brand, we’ll talk about what it means to open the floodgates.

I warn you that all post titles and content are subject to change without notice, especially if some of you savvy readers comment below or e-mail me with suggestions.

And because I like picking your brains, here’s another question I’d like to throw out there: What is creativity to you? Where does it fit in your life?

Add your comments below, or click the title of this post if no comment form is visible!

If you enjoy this blog, I invite you to subscribe by e-mail or by RSS reader (links are near the top of the sidebar).