You’re writing, composing or painting — doing any work that
employs your creative intelligence — and you run into a wall. You can’t see how
to proceed. What to do?
“When I hit a wall, I usually stop and do something else,” noted
the singer-songwriter Carole King. “This effectively turns the problem over to
my subconscious mind, which keeps working on it under the radar. When I return
to the task, my subconscious has often solved the problem before my ego has
time to assert control.”
King is describing a technique I‘ve used successfully
throughout my writing career, and so did my friend and mentor Elleston Trevor,
the British novelist who wrote “The Quiller Memorandum” and “The Flight of the
Phoenix.”
Elleston advised that you forget about the project entirely
and let your already-programmed unconscious mind work on the problem without
flogging it.
To that end, he recommended any semi-automatic activity that
would keep you busy without absorbing your attention — driving, shaving, mowing
the lawn, that kind of thing. The old saying about “sleeping on the problem”
taps into the same wisdom.
And then, sooner than you’d think, without conscious effort,
the detour around to your creative roadblock simply appears before you.
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