For me, thinking divergently is a mania. I do it as much as possible. That is, I push myself to see things from odd angles and slam together ideas that don’t conventionally connect. (Steve Woodruff might say I’m restless.)
Because of this self-induced push to be creative, I’ve come up with some curious ideation techniques. I call them “situational techniques,” because they help you use your immediate surroundings to produce ideas.
One situational technique I often use is book surfing. I stumbled upon it years ago while organizing my home office.
My office was a mess. The bookcases were jammed with hundreds of books. There were so many books, in fact, that they spilled onto the floor. What’s more, the subjects were shuffled together: fiction, science, sports, psychology, poetry, history, magic, pop culture. Finding a specific book was rough. When I wanted to read one, I first had to recall its thickness and jacket color, and then I’d go on a tedious and uncertain hunt.
After one particularly frustrating hunt, I pulled the books from the cases, piled them in the center of the room, and started to shelve them in a more logical order. Doing that required that I think about each book’s content.
Would I, for instance, ever again open this copy of “The Executioner’s Song,” or should I donate it to the library? Would I more likely read Ray Bradbury’s “Zen in the Art of Writing” if I shelved it with the author’s novels and stories, or if I put it with the other books I owned on writing technique? What about my copy of “Send ‘Em One White Sock” by Rapp and Collins? When I first read it, I’d found many of the strategies useful. What were those strategies again?
In giving each book a cursory look, ideas started coming to me without much trying.
I got ideas based on a book’s content (“Bradbury says to write a story out of ‘pure indignation.’ So, if I were to write such a story, I’d write about the time . . . “) and title (“‘Send ‘Em One White Sock’ is actually one of many tactics in the book. So, if I were to write a book about positioning and wanted to title it by a single intriguing tactic, I might call it . . . ”).
The ideas also came from picking up two unrelated books at once (“Hmm, ‘Moneyball’ is about using metrics to measure a ballplayer’s ability, and then there’s ‘The Collected Screenplays of the Coen brothers.’ If I combined these two, I’d get a statistical way of measuring a Coen brothers’ screenplay. Or, I’d get a dark, funny screenplay about a baseball statistician”).
By the time I’d shelved the last book, I’d written down 87 ideas I didn’t have when I started my impromptu project.
Why, then, does book surfing work and how can you surf, too? First the reasons:
Reason #1. To get ideas, we regularly need to fill ourselves with new thoughts, stories, and experiences. That way, we have a fresh inventory of stimuli to draw from. The more information we take in and actively think about, the better we’ll be at using it.
Reason #2. The randomness of the information coming at you keeps you on your toes. It’s almost like attending an improv class. You’re forced to deal with what comes up.
Reason #3. In my version of book surfing, reorganizing my books really was the primary goal. Coming up with new ideas was secondary. The pressure to create, then, was off.
Now that you understand the purpose of this exercise, I challenge you to stand in your office (even if it’s on top of your book piles) and come up with three new ideas to write about. Send me photos of you amongst your books, and I’ll share them with blog readers.