You Can’t Think Your Way into a New Idea

Image credit: Junior Ferreira @juniorferrier_

Ideas are everywhere, with two caveats. First, you have to notice them. Second, they’re not all good. By that I mean, worth developing.

What is a good idea? One that turns you on rather than shuts you off. One that keeps generating more ideas which improve one another. It is an unshakable rule that you don’t have a really good idea until you combine two little ideas…. That is why you scratch for little ideas. Without the little ideas, there are no big ideas. (Twyla Tharp)

We all have rituals to coax out new ideas. Rituals do their magic by alerting our brain’s creative right cerebral hemisphere that it’s okay to deliver something new despite the left hemisphere’s nay-saying. Before I start (or return to) a writing project, I handwrite for ten minutes by the clock about whatever comes to mind, without lifting the pen off the paper, without backtracking, without thinking, one word after another. What I produce is not the point (though sometimes I get lucky). The sole purpose of this exercise, a.k.a ritual, is to alert my creative self it is safe to come out and play.

Because the right cerebral hemisphere interfaces directly with the outside world, it is comfortable with the new. It processes reality via sensation and bodily awareness. It processes time as a connected flow, always in the present. The right has no words—it thinks in images. It creates everything with a narrative arc such as dances, symphonies, novels.

The left cerebral hemisphere contains the speech centers, gets its information from the right hemisphere, and processes time as disconnected moments. It focuses only on what it recognizes— it rejects the unfamiliar—in what the right sends it. Then it translates that slice of familiarity into words, which we hear in our heads. It is critical and analytical; it revises and polishes. It cannot create.

New ideas come from physically doing (right brain), not from thinking in words (left brain). Choreographers move, painters apply brush to canvas, I hand-wrote the draft of this essay. Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow. (Henry David Thoreau)

Timed writing sessions help the right hemisphere because a time interval is itself a narrative arc with a clear beginning, middle, and end. If you write to a random prompt using a timer, you will reliably generate a piece with an arc. Astonishing but true. Research suggests that our brains learn and create best in 25-minute intervals followed by a short break.

Don’t try to create and analyze at the same time. They are different processes. (Sister Corita Kent, The Rules) When the timer goes off, I put away the draft without reading it for at least a day. That prevents the Critic from deleting me off the page.

Scientist Louis Pasteur famously said, Chance favors the prepared mind. Things often don’t go as planned. The Critic will insist that’s a disaster, but your creative right brain may see it as a stroke of luck and use it. Habitually creative people are, in E.B. White’s phrase ‘prepared to be lucky.’ The key words are ‘prepared’ and ‘lucky’…. In creative endeavors, luck is a skill. (Twyla Tharp)

To recognize a stroke of luck, you have to be open and present. To embrace luck, you have tolerate ambiguity and be willing to hold several options open simultaneously, all right hemisphere functions. The left hemisphere can’t stand that. The Critic wants to go with the first option—she wants closure. Remember: The Critic can’t create. If you do what she says, the work will be derivative. Do we want that? Of course not.

I give the Critic her due when revising. But when creating, I ignore that voice as a mindfulness practice.

Afterword: Did you know May is Mental Health Awareness Month? Want to know more about the good work mental health practitioners do? Read my clinical memoir! “A book so good that you have to read it twice.” Check out the reviews on Amazon, where the book is available in print or ebook versions (free on KindleUnlimited).