Accidental Genius
Using Writing to Generate Your Best Ideas, Insight, and Content
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
NEW EDITION, REVISED AND UPDATED
When it comes to creating ideas, we hold ourselves back. That’s because inside each of us is an internal editor whose job is to forever polish our thoughts so we sound smart and in control and so we fit into society.
But what happens when we encounter problems where such conventional thinking fails us? How do we get unstuck?
For Mark Levy, the answer is freewriting, a technique he’s used for years to solve all types of business problems and generate ideas for books, articles, and blog posts.
Freewriting is deceptively simple: start writing as fast as you can, for as long as you can, about a subject you care deeply about, while ignoring the standard rules of grammar and spelling. Your internal editor won’t be able to keep up with your output—you’ll generate breakthrough ideas and solutions that you couldn’t have created any other way.
Levy shares his six secrets to freewriting as well as fifteen problem-solving and creativity-stimulating principles you can use if you need more firepower—seven of which are new to this edition. Also new to this edition: an extensive section on how to refine your raw freewriting into something you can share with the world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Like any coach worth his salt, Levy aims to train, equip and motivate readers to extend their success in business and life. But the technique he espouses is unusual: private writing. A director of special projects at book distributor Bookazine, Levy provides examples of how he has used the practice of nonjudgmental, quick, exploratory writing to supercharge his own sales and management achievements. His clear, concise directions on honing one's critical thinking, changing focus and quieting one's internal editor will encourage readers to start exploring his method immediately. Levy's advanced exercises--involving thought-sparking phrases, precise details and personal interpretations of buzzwords--should expand the ways in which practitioners can observe their own thinking process and tap into previously inaccessible creative resources. Levy also includes the instructive tale of Tom Wolfe, who was badly blocked and adrift while trying to conceptualize an article on a custom-car designer for Esquire. Wolfe's astute editor told him to stop worrying the project to death and just write him a memo that got all of his notes down. The result of that simple-sounding but perspective-changing instruction was Wolfe's famously innovative article, "The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby." With an enthusiastic foreword from Tom Peters that will help draw business readers, Levy's canny guidebook could garner the kind of steady sales of such writing books as Henriette Anne Klauser's Put Your Heart on Paper. Author tour.
