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Fueling the old creative fires takes a bit of practice
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Location: Blogs Sly Comments |
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| Posted by: Emory Schley |
4/21/2007 5:49 AM |
People sometimes ask me how I come up with so many different subjects to write about. The plain and simple answer is: I really don’t know.
Years ago, when I first was assigned the responsibility of writing a weekly column, I tussled with that problem of what to write about for quite some time. You could come up with a few ideas here and there, but you sit down to make a list of them, and pretty soon, you start repeating the same column ideas. The trick, I guess, is to somehow break yourself out of that mental rut.
You’ve probably heard the old story that if you place a man in an unknown, featureless landscape (like a desert) without benefit of compass or any other direction-finding device, he will eventually start traveling in circles as he tries to find his way home. I think trying to come up with subjects to write about regularly is just like that, only in a mental sense, of course, not a physical one. You start thinking in circles.
One technique I have found quite helpful, is that I clear my mind, poise my fingers over the home row on a keyboard, take a deep breath and then just let the words start flowing through my fingertips. I don’t even know, sometimes, what I’m writing about initially, but I stick with it, and it soon becomes clear. I guess it’s sort of an automatic, intuitive, subconscious action that goes on somewhere deep within the gray matter. The trick, of course, is to do that AND to keep it interesting enough to attract readers.
Having a wide-ranging curiosity about a great many interests comes in handy, too. That allows you to pick and choose, from a vast catalog of interesting subjects. Talking to a number of people about a number of different subjects is bound to hatch a couple of ideas, as well. Sometimes, browsing through the library’s shelves, or just typing in random phrases in Google will give birth to some pretty decent seeds from which you can harvest some “fruit.”
I guess it’s much like anything else in life – it takes practice, and with a sufficient amount of practice – it becomes easier and easier, almost second nature, when you can put your brain into “neutral” and just let it coast along until it comes across something interesting enough to write about! |
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