Writing FAST - Jeff Bollow 2012

Create a power grid
Attach your lightning rod
Focus

To use this lightning rod, we have to attach it to the right spots, or it won’t work. Each bolt of lightning — each idea — can fuel your work, or it can fry it. And you don’t want to fry it.

So, instead, you’ll plug that rod into the Power Grid.

Have you ever seen a picture of Los Angeles at night? The entire L.A. basin is laid out like a grid. Thousands of little square blocks sitting in orderly rows.

At night, from an observatory overlooking the city, you can see the street lights sparkle in perfectly symmetrical lines that go all the way to the horizon. It’s quite beautiful.

Well, imagine your writing spread out across that grid. It doesn’t matter if it’s a thousand-page novel, or a one-page letter. See it there on the ground. Picture each page spread end-to-end, every page touching the edge of the page next to it.

The first page of your writing is at your feet. And your pages stretch as far as the eye can see. The last page is at the horizon.

And hovering over your pages is the Power Grid. Instead of city streets, those sparkling lines are electric currents. Energy pumps through them. You can see the pulse of the current.

Now imagine that each square of the Grid hovers over one page of your writing. Can you see it? Energy — your idea — flows through the Grid, buzzing around the edges of every page.

When you attach your lightning rod to this grid, you can harness those stray bolts of lightning, and pump them straight into the power line. You’ll pump your ideas right into your writing. And when you do, each bolt of lightning goes exactly where you need it.

That’s what this final step in the Focus stage is about. It’s about “focusing” your idea onto that grid.

And we do it by creating a Plan.