Does this scenario sound familiar? You’re starting to write or build a mind map and your creative brain decides to go on the fritz.
No ideas. Nada. Zilch. What do you do now?
Mark Levy experienced this phenomenon during his daily writing “freewriting” practice. This is the habit of capture your flow of consciousness, either in handwritten or digital notes.
The idea is to keep going for a set amount of time, without stopping, capturing everything that comes to mind. By doing so, Levy explains, you can side-step your mind’s automatic self-censorship tendency. This enables you to capture raw, real thoughts and ideas.
But what happens when you run out of ideas to write about?
Levy’s solution, which he describes in his book, Accidental Genius, is “focus-changers” – a set of 35 open-ended questions he can ask himself that requires him to comment on something he’s just written. It keeps his mind and his fingers moving and helps him re-gain his writing momentum.
“What was I thinking here? How else can I say that? Those are two of my favorites. They push me to see again what I’ve done and think I already know. They also challenge me into generating fresh thought, even after I believe I’ve run out of road,” he explains.
He then shares a lengthy list of focus-changers he has cultivated, and encourages readers to come up with ones that are meaningful to them.
I liked this list so much that I copied and pasted it from my Kindle reader app into Xmind, where I grouped and regrouped them into related topics.
Click on the mind map image below or this link to view a larger version.
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