The Place For My Writers Notes

original posting 8 July 2009

I think someone asked about this...took a bit of pondering to get here. Hope it helps.

Where to start, where to start?

A bit long, and probably confusing. But take a look, and let me know what you think. Ready? Set?

Creative thinking, lateral thinking, critical thinking -- isn't it all just thinking? Well, yes and no. It's a bit like common sense. It may seem obvious, but common sense is not always common. In the same way, thinking, and especially the creative or lateral thinking flavor, is something that anybody can do, but far too often they don't. We'll talk a little bit about what trips us up along the way.

In fact, one of the first points that I like to make about creative thinking is that it is important to try to identify and separate several different kinds of thinking -- particularly what we sometimes call black hat thinking, critical thinking or criticism. Writers often think of this as the internal editor, the part of us that says this won't work, here are all the little pieces that are wrong, and so forth. Black hat thinking often blocks or stops our green hat thinking -- creative, new ideas, exploratory, imaginative thinking. But we need both.

And in fact, we also need our red hat thinking, our feelings and emotions -- white hat thinking, where we deal with information and data in a very objective way -- yellow hat thinking, where we explore how to do things -- and blue hat thinking where we pop up and look at the process, worry about overviews and summaries and models. We need all these, but we need to be able to say right now I'm going to do green hat thinking and put the others on the hat rack for a while. Postpone the criticism, feasibility, emotions, measurement, and even process thinking and focus on new ideas, alternatives, exploration and imagination.

Give yourself a chance to be creative. Unfortunately, a lot of our education, business experience, and even life experience focuses on teaching us to be critical, to quickly point out problems, reasons that something won't work, and so forth. Creative thinking gets squashed when we do that. Give it a chance. Put your green hat on, set the black hat aside for a while, and take a look at the world as it might be.

So, first point -- when we do creative thinking, we postpone criticisms, questions of feasibility, and other roadblocks to the imagination. Put your green hat on and ride your imagination into the world of alternatives and possibilities.

Second point. The human brain loves to grab the first thing that looks semi-reasonable, and then fret and worry about how to make it fit. And we'll defend that choice, even when something better was just a little further away. It's funny, the same person who very carefully goes through an entire menu before making any choice, when faced with a problem or question, often jumps to the first available, easily remembered and visible, solution. Far too often, these are not the best answers.

So one of the responses is to decide to always challenge yourself to develop a quota of alternative answers before picking one. As a writer, you're often trying to figure out what problem your character faces. Now before you pick one and start madly expanding it, decide that you are going to come up with 10 potential problems. If that's too many, aim for five. Or if you find 10 potential problems is too easy, aim for 20 or 50. But make your list of potential problems quickly, without locking into the first one that looks reasonable. Put some down that are unreasonable. Remember, point one -- no criticism! Unlock the doors of imagination and let the wild ideas in! Push yourself to think of just a few more problems, a few more ideas, no matter how wild, no matter how odd.

Fairly often, we find ourselves putting down a few cliches, the same tired ideas that we've used before. Then we have a few that are a little less common. And then we find ourselves coming up with some odd ones. What if an elephant sat on the car? Wow, the character is not going to get to work now. Put it in the list. What if... Often those last ones will be the really exciting ones. And even if you decide to go with one of the usual ones, at least you know what some of the alternatives are.

So, the second point is to develop a quota of alternatives before making a selection. Build yourself a menu and try something interesting, don't just settle for the same old thing that only sort of hits the spot.

Third point. One of the great strengths of the human brain is forming associations. Metaphors. Give us even a partial image or pattern and we happily fill in the other parts. One of the exercises I used to do when teaching creative thinking was to put up a picture with 6 dots on it. They were carefully constructed using random numbers. And I would ask people in the room what the pattern was. People always saw patterns there. Rorschach tests, the thematic apperception test, visual illusions -- is it a table or is it two faces? -- they all illustrate our ability to find or impose patterns or relationships even on random data. So one of the tools that we can use for creative thinking is to deliberately set up opportunities to form associations. Take five words randomly from the dictionary -- flip the pages and pick the first noun on each page. Now, link those up! Or go to Wikipedia and use the random article link. Visit your favorite quote archive and grab a handful of random quotes. Then let the brain do its dance, finding relationships and associations. Go ahead and follow those out. Or take a set of categories -- I like to use the general metaphors of journey, war, game, organism, society, and machine. For each one, fill in a specific example. And connect those with whatever you are working on.

The third point then is to use your human ability to associate. Random stimulation, a set of categories or metaphors, or whatever you like -- let yourself make the connections. Then use those connections.

Fourth point. As humans, we tend to make a bunch of assumptions, hold expectations, and not look beyond the boundaries. We know how things work. For day-to-day life, it really helps to simplify things. But for creative thinking, we often want to take those assumptions -- make them explicit, and then try reversing them. Or exaggerate things. Or even very simply step into the world of wishes, and ask ourselves what we would like to have happen instead of what we expect.

When I teach project management, one of the exercises we often do starts with assigning people to teams. Then we give out the assignment, which involves each team sending an observer to look at something and report back to the others in the team who try to build a similar object. There are time limits, and a fairly large number of teams fail to build their object. I think that's interesting that the rules do not indicate that teams cannot cooperate or exchange information, and yet I have never had a class where they tried that. The exercise was developed by a professional trainer who has used it for some years. I asked if they had ever had a class where the teams tried to cooperate. No one has ever tried it.

If they did, it would make the exercise much simpler to do. But they assume that the teams are competing, I guess.

Challenge the assumptions, the expectations, the boundaries. What if the sun only came up once a year? I'll bet we'd pay a lot more attention to sunrise. Heck, people might even get up and celebrate it. Or what if...

Fifth and last for now, do you remember those mazes on the placemats? You were supposed to start here and trace a line to the hamburger or the fish or whatever in the middle? Did you ever notice that starting at the middle and tracing backwards to the start was a lot easier? Another principle of creative thinking is to try looking at whatever you're working on from the other end. Or upside down. Change the point of view, and see if it's any easier to deal with. I sometimes think this is one of the best pieces of advice for writers. Starting with the beginning is hard -- you don't know where you're going, and figuring out how to get there can be really complicated. Starting with the ending, and then working backwards -- it might be easier.

So change the point of view. Try different roles or characters. Try different angles -- what does it look like from overhead? Play with it!

Pretty simple stuff really, isn't it? Hold off on criticism. Explore alternatives before making a selection. Use random stimulation or lists to exercise your association ability. Challenge assumptions. And look at things from lots of different directions.

That's my summary of creative thinking for today. There are plenty of articles and books, but that's at least a beginning. And like most things, practice, practice, practice. Remind yourself to spend a little time using these tools regularly.

Hum. Reviewing this, I'm reminded that I usually try to point out that this is the beginning of a process -- create new ideas, prioritize and select, plan, and do it. Just coming up with a list of wild and whacky ideas is good, and lots of fun. But sifting out the good ones, figuring out what to do with them, and then carrying it out... you have to do that, too.

But for right now, green hats on! The next exercise, the next problem, the next time you start a story -- postpone criticism. Set yourself a quota of alternative before picking. Use random stimulation. Challenge assumptions. And try looking from up there!

Creative thinking... by the numbers?