Four Ways to Unleash New Ideas

In my writing life, I’ve had to learn not only how to harness ideas and produce something from them when they start to flow, but how to keep them flowing in the first place. Here are four simple tips that might be useful to anyone hoping to summon up fresh concepts or find new approaches to a project.

1. Keep a Notebook

Henry James famously urged the novice writer to “Try to become one of the people on whom nothing is lost.” He was speaking to the importance of not missing the little glimmers that move fleetingly through the mind—those brief, seemingly inconsequential images or concepts which just might prove to be an odd piece of some larger idea. If you let these little bits of thought come and go, if you shrug and idly say, ‘Huh,’ and allow them to fade away unrecorded, how can you ever know whether or not these pieces might have been patched together into a whole? You must capture them when they come. Don’t trust them to stick around very long on their own. Keep a notebook in your pocket (and a pen). Think of the notebook as a butterfly net. If a strange-colored thought catches your eye, swipe!

Emerson said it beautifully (and I’ll be posting more about this great mind soon):

Let me record day by day my honest thought without prospect or retrospect, and I cannot doubt, it will be found symmetrical, though I mean it not, and see it not.

2. Block Out Time in Your Calendar

I’ve long had an uncomfortable relationship with calendars. Something in me recoils from those neat little numbered boxes. I guess I’m loath to believe that the beauty and possibility of a day can be shrunken down to such strict geometry. But recently, while trying to balance various freelancing responsibilities amidst my main enterprise of drafting a new novel, it became clear that I’d have to get over my reservations and buy a weekly planner. There were just too many tasks and deadlines to bear in mind.

I did not compromise my convictions, mind you. I was still firmly resolved to see that the calendar served me. I would use this tool to help me manage my time, rather than let the tool dictate my every moment. So I sat down with the planner and reserved significant blocks of hours for novelizing. There: those hours were now spoken for. I’d dedicated them in ink. All other tasks must now defer to the primary importance of these working periods. If you’re hoping to generate ideas, you’ve got to make it clear to your own subconscious that you’re creating conditions to help the ideas to arrive.

The novelist Kazuo Ishiguro employs a useful working method whenever he comes to a critical stage in his writing. He lets it be known to friends and associates that he’s dedicated his time exclusively to the project at hand. He names the procedure A Crash. “I’m having A Crash,” he announces. He won’t be returning calls. He’ll be unavailable to discuss all matters save those relating to his work. And by simply giving his undertaking this formal designation, he finds that people are more inclined to understand and respect his aloofness. They forgive him their unreturned calls. “Oh, he’s having A Crash,” they say quietly, and smile.

3. Take a Walk

It’s not always useful to sit down at a desk and demand ideas of yourself. Creativity is an impish, testy thing. Sometimes, if mine suspects there’s too much weighing on its appearance, it refuses to show up. One of the best ways to get ideas flowing is to take a paradoxical approach: get your mind off the matter. Get outside of your house or office and outside of your head. But I’m not saying you ought to distract yourself with thoughts about other things. The idea is to try not to think at all. Take a walk. Breathe. Clear your mind by counting your steps or measuring your breath.

There’s a corollary to this point, which I’ve found extremely useful. It comes from Ernest Hemingway and has been cited fondly by many writers in interviews. It goes like this: In your non-working hours, make it a habit to train your thoughts away from the project at hand. Try to remember that this avoidance of thought is as much a discipline as the act of working steadily. Here’s how Hemingway put it in A Moveable Feast:

I learned not to think about anything I was writing from the time I stopped writing until I started again the next day. That way my subconscious would be working on it and at the same time I would be listening to other people and noticing everything, I hoped; learning, I hoped; and I would read so that I would not think about my work and make myself impotent to do it.

And Hemingway’s last remark brings me to my fourth tip…

4. Read, or: Get Inspired

I don’t quite believe inspiration to be an airy and fickle cosmic messenger, as is commonly supposed. The way I see it, inspiration is an ever-existent thing. It surrounds each one of us all the time, in the fruits of other’s creativity, the works of other artists old and new. Inspiration is a kind of worldwide creative circuitry that anyone can tap into.

(Of course, the most powerful inspiration—that which produces work of blazing, timeless significance—truly is an almost mythological force. A winged, two-headed lion, maybe. A creature of great wildness and ferocity, not to be trapped. But while this kind of world-altering inspiration just might be a bit supernatural, after all, and surely can’t be corralled and domesticated, even it can be harnessed for a while.)

The best method I know for accessing writerly inspiration is to open and lean over the pages of a good book. And I think every field or discipline must have a counterpart to this action. So read, view, or listen to good work by dynamic people in your field. Try to understand just why these people’s achievements stir you as they do. What creative seed do they water inside you? How might that seed be brought to flower, and in what way will the resulting creation differ from or add to the inspiring achievements that preceded it?

In other words, pay attention to your rising voltage as you read. Isn’t that your own unique current, just waiting to be spliced into the global circuit of inspiration?

Here’s how Joseph Campbell talked about reading (more on this fellow soon as well):

Read the right books by the right people. Your mind is brought onto that level, and you have a nice, mild, slow-burning rapture all the time…When you find an author who really grabs you, read everything he has done. Don’t say, ‘Oh, I want to know what So-and-so did’—and don’t bother at all with the bestseller list. Just read what this one author has to give you. And then you can go read what he had read. And the world opens up in a way that is consistent with a certain point of view. But when you go from one author to another, you may be able to tell us the date when each wrote such and such a poem—but he hasn’t said anything to you.

Try out each of these tips in turn. Or combine them for a powerful cumulative effect. And may you enjoy an embarrassing abundance of ideas!

You might also enjoy:

“The Lonely-Novelist’s Five-Point Productivity Plan”

“Daunting Task? Learn to Whip It”

“Understanding the World Through the Thomas Theorem“