Brain Briefs by Art Markman

Author:Art Markman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sterling

One reason people are afraid to show their ideas to other people is that they suffer from a variant of imposter syndrome. That is, they feel like they are the only one among their peers who struggles to do things competently. They worry that if other people knew how much effort it took them to do something that is merely acceptable, then those people would recognize them as the frauds they really are.

The thing is, almost all people curate their public face. Look at people’s Facebook pages. Every family is beautiful and smiling. Every kid is doing well in school. People don’t generally post the mistakes they make or the problems they are experiencing. What you see of other people is what they are choosing to show, and they don’t usually decide to broadcast all their flaws, errors, and failed ideas.

A big part of being successfully creative is overcoming the sense that you don’t really deserve to be thought of as a creative person. All writers have constructed horrendous sentences and entire passages that don’t make sense. They have written boring stories that are completely derived from something written by someone else. They have written incoherent statements from time to time.

Other people are probably not going to think badly of you if you show them something that isn’t perfect. They might even be a little relieved that you—like them—are human. They might even offer some advice to help you make it better.

When worrying about what other people are going to think of your work leads you to edit all your ideas before you even give them a chance, you miss opportunities to consider possibilities and refine your thinking. Sometimes a bad or mediocre idea is just a stepping-stone to a better one.

The only way to generate an idea is to draw it out of memory somehow. Information comes out of memory in response to whatever you are thinking about at the moment. For example, think about a class you attended at some point in your life. That wasn’t so hard to do, was it? We asked you to think about a class, and you did.

If you want to change what you are thinking about, you need to ask your memory a different question. One way to do that is to let those seemingly bad ideas out first. You just might find that the initial, perhaps bad idea makes you think of something else that is a little better. Over time, the terrible idea you started with becomes a good idea—perhaps even a brilliant one.

In order to keep writer’s block at bay, writing needs to become a routine in which you sit down, get things out, and then edit them after that. The prolific author Stephen King seems to come out with a new book about every twenty minutes (oh look, there’s another one). He has also written a lot about his own writing process. His big secret? He writes every day. Each morning, he gets up and writes for a few hours.

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