The Challenge of Writing - Decoding Creativity

Creating, writing is a challenge. You struggle, judge yourself, wonder why that idea seemed so great last night as you were trying to fall asleep. Or you edit and edit and wonder if you’ll ever get it right. Or you start and stop, start and stop. Seems like you’ll never finish anything.

It’s a challenge. Period. Even when you’re talented. Even when you’re published. Even when you’re brilliant. The only hope is to better understand your own relationship to the challenge, and feel better as you go through the process.

Enter the Write Without the Fight Challenge, which begins anew on Monday May 10th. To be that Buddah, zen, playful, calm, capable writer that you’d like to be, throughout the process, you need to know two things:

How that process works
How your brain works within that process

For over 60 years, scientists have been recording, defining, notetaking, and experimenting to bring that kind of knowledge into clearer view. And for the past 5 years, I’ve worked to bring this insight to my writer clients.

According to the Foursight theory of creative thinking, there are 4 ways your brain has to think to “create.”

These mental gymnastics take you through a cycle of Clarifying, Ideating, Developing and Implementing every time you want to create something – whether that’s what to have for dinner, how to end a scene you’re writing, or whether you should write a play or a novel.

Your brain naturally jumps through those four hoops to come up and create the solution. Fascinating, right? They’ve fully identified and defined the mental processes that are the ingredients of creating. It’s not a “dark box.” It’s not something you have to be “born with.” It’s something we all do, all the time and in the same way each time.

So what is talent? Why does ability differ? Practice, interest, the famed 10,000 hours of skill testing and improvement. It’s also a matter and what you’re exposed to, what you get rewarded for. But reward? Most writers struggle with reward and wonder if they’ll ever get any reward for their writing. And yet they still want to write. It has inherent reward. But I digress.

We understand the four thinking styles needed to create. But what only you can figure out is how you personally fit or fight that process.

How does your brain like to think? Your brain likes some kinds of thinking, and resists other kinds of thinking. It’s what makes you, you.

You gain energy, sometimes, get excited, dig right in. You mope and procrastinate other times, bec the task at hand drains you of energy. No wonder you don’t feel like doing it.

This crossroads of the process and your own brain is the meat of the Write Without the Fight 5-day challenge.