My daughter gave a presentation to a high school group about her career as a musician / songwriter / producer and got the question.

How do you start writing?

Her answer: I never stop.

Never?

She makes notes on things that catch her attention. Writes them in a journal. Engages with stream of consciousness writing; setting a timer for five minutes and just going for five minutes.

Which raises a question.

The product of stream of consciousness writing can sometimes unearth gems, can evoke content our conscious mind can engage with but never directly create. 

I think.

Definitely it hurts my brain whenever I think too hard about digging for treasure like that in our own minds. Because if it's treasure, if it's in our own minds, why should we have to go digging for it?

Why isn't it just there?

Oof.

Not my favorite question, for sure.

The answer I've come to understand, though, is this is a classic case of accessing.

Accessing?

Yeah. Think of the final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark where it's revealed that the Ark of the Covenant is being stored in a massive, endless warehouse, tucked underneath a mountain of similarly sized wooden crates. In order to locate the specific crate later, you either have to already know where it is or you need a catalog system to identify its location. And the reason I describe this scene is that sometimes...

Our brains work like that.

Either we know where the treasure is... we know how to locate the treasure... or we don't know where it is at all.

It's lost.

The crate is still where it was placed, of course. What's gone missing is the connection to that memory. To that fantastic idea.

The human brain, thankfully, has more than one way to such access ideas and answers. One way is to directly interrogate our minds. Another way is to not.

Which brings me to diffuse thinking.

Now, I know diffuse thinking works. I rely on it a bunch. It's paid off big time a bunch.

I also kind of know how it works. That is, it's intentionally abandoning concentrated, analytical thinking in favor of relaxed, unfocused thinking that wanders on its own, meandering as it will, making loose associations and connections as the mind wanders. And after all that...

An idea.

An answer.

An un-blocking.

Wait. What? Howwwww????

That's the part I don't know. 

What I do know is that directly focusing on a creative challenge and then engaging in an activity that's a low bandwidth activity like walking or taking a shower or even sitting on the shore of a lake... triggers the process.

It even works if I focus on a particular thing before going to sleep. Often something in my brain puts in an overnight shift that delivers as soon as I wake up in the morning.

Whatever it is that's delivered, though, I've gotta write it down, type it out, record it right away because it has no shelf life. It's kind of there and gone so I have to capture it as soon as it appears in my conscious awareness.

Don't know why. That's just how my brain operates.

I think of it as an extra gear I have to solve problems. Something inside my own mind that goes to work while I'm not paying attention. Even when I'm not conscious. Something's in there. Working in the background.

So yeah.

Blank pages suck. 

Writer's block sucks.

Coming up empty sucks. I won't lie.

But knowing how my mind works means that blank pages, unanswered questions, and coming up empty are all signs that I need to think in a different way. And because I'm paid to be impressively creative on a deadline...

I do that.