How to Write a Novella in 24 Hours by Andrew Mayne

Author:Andrew Mayne [Mayne, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-10-27T00:00:00+00:00

One Weird Trick to Boost Your Creativity

Sometimes you need to come up with a lot of ideas. Right now I'm a little obsessed with 2-sentence short stories, so I've been trying to think up as many as I can. I might sit down and have 30 of them, or I might struggle for one before going to bed. You never know when inspiration might strike. A creative mind is always on (unless it's not).

I have a little thing I do to make this easier. I'm a big believer in creating the shortest path from your brain to the real world. A lot of really good ideas never make it into reality. Shortening the path is helpful. This is one way to do that.

I've used this method over and over again. When we were planning the first season of my A&E television show, Don't Trust Andrew Mayne, we needed hundreds of ideas for magic effects. Fortunately, I had a database of concepts to start from – an actual, literal database.

Compiling it was pretty painless. If you use Google Drive, you're probably familiar with its ability to create forms. This is an easy way to collect email addresses on a website, fill in questionnaires etc. But forms don't just have to be something you share with the world. I create forms for myself. For the TV magic stuff, I created a form to input an idea whenever I had one. The form let me add fields for the kind of trick and other useful information that made it easy to sort through. All the data goes into a spreadsheet you can sort through at your leisure.

Here's where it gets kind of cool. On your iPhone or Android device you can save that form to your home screen as a web app. I keep a couple on my main screen. Whenever I have an idea, I press the icon and the form pops up. It's pretty easy to just dictate whatever I want if I'm on the go or just too lazy to type. I click submit and BOOM. Idea saved.

You can customize your form however you want. You can create a general idea database, or be more specific. I like to have different spreadsheets for different projects.

Step 1. Go to Google Docs and create a new form

Step 2. Fill in the fields for what information you want to capture

Step 3. Open the form link and save it to your phone home screen as a web app

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