Semi-regularly, I’ve been doing something I called “Paper Therapy.” The idea was simple: “Write on paper till your brain has nothing left in it.”
This stupidly simple idea has often been miraculous in helping me clear my mind and think of ideas or options that I was unable to just “think in my head.”
And I observed many others felt this way as well, for example:
Writing is a miraculous process. You find things you never knew were inside your own head— @littlecalculist
and:
I write with my hands on paper as much as I can to get my eyes off of the monitor and my hands off the keyboard. Yes taking notes on something like evernote is more useful down the road, but for me there is something more free about jotting notes on paper. It gives me a mental break, a physical break, and if I come up with something really useful, I’ll type it in a note program. As an added bonus, the retyping of it usually lets me come up with something new to add. — http://gorban.org/post/14162629940/thinking-time
When I was going through the PersonalMBA Reading List, I came across a book called Accidental Genius by Mark Levy, and I immediately wanted to read the book because it talked about a concept called freewriting which sounded eerily similar to what I used to call “paper therapy”. So I bought the book from the Kindle store and read the entire book on my iPhone with the Kindle app.
One of the revelations as I was reading the book was that freewriting has been used as a technique for ages, especially by prose writers.
So what is freewriting? As Mark Levy says:
As expansive and impressive as the mind is, it’s also lazy. Left to its own devices, it recycles tired thoughts, takes rutted paths, and steers clear of unfamiliar and uncomfortable territory. You could say that one of its primary jobs is to shut off, even when there’s important thinking to be done.
Freewriting prevents that from happening. It pushes the brain to think longer, deeper, and more unconventionally than it normally would. By giving yourself a handful of liberating freewriting rules to follow, you back your mind into a corner where it can’t help but come up with new thoughts. You could call freewriting a form of forced creativity.
Freewriting is a fast method of thinking onto paper that enables you to reach a level of thinking that’s often difficult to attain during the course of a normal business day.
As I mentioned earlier, freewriting is nothing but writing profusely on paper. It doesn’t matter what grammar you use, it doesn’t matter what you write because nobody else is going to read it, it doesn’t even matter whether you even read what you wrote! What’s important is to get the thoughts flowing and externalizing it by doing the physical action of writing fast on paper. If you can’t think of what to write, write gibberish. If you get distracted by other thoughts, write down those thoughts! The idea is to not filter anything out, these are your real thoughts and you need to externalize them.
The point is to extrapolate to write continuously. If you wrote about a problem, what are the causes and possible solutions? If you wrote about a dream, write about how and whether you are following those dreams. If you had a nightmare, write about the possible subconscious meanings of the nightmare. If you suddenly remembered some random quote from a book you read ages ago and forgotten about it, then write about that and what it means to you. If you had an altercation, write about whether it occurs frequently or whether there is a pattern. Try to explore your mind and try to explore the facts as much as possible.
The result of this exercise can only be felt, it’s hard to explain. The liberation you feel and the sudden “lightness” you feel is amazing.
Mark goes on to explain six secrets of freewriting:
Trying easy will help you in any area of your life. Conventional Wisdom tells us that we have to give no less than 110 percent to keep ahread. Yet conversely, I have found that giving 90 percent is usually more effective.
It’s like the first day of gym – they make you do so much exercise and you’re so sore the next day that you never go back. Don’t do that! Instead work till you reach the edge of your current capacity and then stop. Repeat it the next day, and so on. So, if you feel you can only write 500 words, do only that much, don’t push yourself beyond that. If someday, you feel you can write more, go right ahead.