The following was taken from an electronic newsletter published by Dr. Firestien, on September 6, 2001Welcome to Insights From The Road, the e-newsletter of creativity from "The Gold Standard of Creativity Training," Roger L. Firestien, Ph.D. Enjoy!
It Takes Two
Recently a good friend of mine was working on a major writing project. She procrastinated for months. When she finally began, she described the writing process as "agonizing."
As soon as she had written a page or two, she would edit and re-work it. She was a good writer, but too hard on herself. She asked me to coach her on the project and I agreed. As part of the coaching process, we watched the movie "Finding Forrester."
In the movie, Sean Connery plays William Forrester, a Pulitzer Prize-winning recluse who never gave the world a second novel. Living alone off his royalties in a Brooklyn apartment, Forrester reluctantly becomes friends with a neighborhood teenager, Jamal Wallace, a talented 16-year-old basketball player whose secret passion is writing.
In one scene, Forester and Jamal are sitting across the table from each other at typewriters. As Forrester begins pounding away at the keys, Jamal just stares at a blank sheet of paper. Forrester stops and asks Jamal why he isn't writing. Jamal replies, "I'm thinking." Forrester bellows at him, "Don't think. Just write. Write anything!" Forrester then delivers one of my favorite lines in the movie: "You write the first draft with your heart. You re-write with your head."
In our book, "Creativity Unbound," Blair Miller, Jonathan Vehar and I discuss the idea of the writer's mind and the editor's mind:
"Great authors are of two minds. One is the writer's mind, the wildly imaginative, freewheeling renegade. The other is the editor's mind, which goes back after the writer's mind has done its work and weeds out the extraneous, non-value-adding words, phrases and ideas. Not even the greatest writers can perform those two functions at the same time. In fact, the great writers are vigilant about keeping those two functions distinct."
This same principle applies to all creative thinking. Alex Osborn, in his breakthrough book "Applied Imagination," noted two distinct kinds of thinking that are essential for being creative. One is divergent thinking, which is generating lots of options. The other is convergent thinking - judging those options, focusing and making decisions.
Good news! We all do both kinds of thinking every day. The secret to becoming more creative is to become conscious of which thinking mode you're in, so you can separate your divergent and convergent thinking.
So next time you want to get more creative - whether it's for a major writing project or just to make your office more efficient - first let the writer's mind loose. Go for some wild ideas. Don't judge your ideas; just let them flow. Then, after you've generated many options, apply the editor's mind to sort and refine those ideas.
Once you separate the writer's mind from the editor's mind, you'll be amazed how creative you can become.
Now, go get creative out there!
Sincerely,
Roger
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