Non-linear overflow - Harness your idea overflow - Apply

Writing FAST - Jeff Bollow 2012

Non-linear overflow
Harness your idea overflow
Apply

The beauty of writing FAST is that the faster you write, the faster you’ll write. That’s not a riddle. It’s a fact.

Your writing feeds on itself. Speed fuels more speed.

The problem is that you’ve got too many ideas, and each one sparks another, which throws you off on stray tangents.

It’s always the same. Even with the Talkation technique.

You sit down to begin “blasting through” your work, but you end up in the middle of nowhere, lost and confused, and convinced that writing is better left to foolhardy authors who can just keep their stupid mysterious aristocracy.

No!

In this chapter, we’ll harness that overflow, and keep you on track. I’ll show you a simple technique to make sure you never get lost again.

A way to stay focused on your target, while your mind is swirling.

And I know what I’m talking about here. I’ve got a very long history of coming up with one “brilliant” idea after another. And the techniques in this chapter have saved my sanity.

It’s not just talk.

See, you might know this stuff already. You might think, Yeah yeah, I’ve gotta stay focused. We’ve heard it all before.

But until you can stay focused and make it all the way through your writing, you don’t really know it. Not in your gut. And that’s where you need to understand it.

Staying focused is the key to writing fast. Keeping your mind clear of distractions (both outside — like my blinking email icon [hang on while I check that] — and inside, like your thoughts themselves) is absolutely essential.

And that’s what this chapter is all about.

Keeping you on track, when your mind is working overtime.

Non-linear overflow

Last chapter, we talked about how the speed of your fingers will never match the speed of your mind.

With Talkation, you’ll write fast. But your Idea Factory will always be faster.

Remember, this thing is cranking out idea after idea after idea. Each one sparks the next, in an endless chain of thought.

But here’s the problem.

Your mind is not organized like a book. A book is linear. You start on Page One, and read each subsequent page to the end. The ideas build on top of each other. And as they do, a picture — the idea of the book — forms in your mind.

But your mind doesn’t work like that. Nope.

Your mind is non-linear. It’s a mesh of neural pathways. There’s no “Point A to Point B.” If I throw out the word yellow, and give you a moment to free associate it, your mind will go in about sixteen different directions at the same time. A lemon. A car. A flower. Teeth. A friend named Yolanda.

But those ideas aren’t building. They’re linked by association. By the common thread. In this case, “yellow.”

Your mind forms pictures by grabbing those links and locking them together. But how the ideas are linked depends on the thought, and what it means to you. In your mind.

Well that’s great for us. It allows us to think laterally. It fuels imagination. It helps us draw meaning out of our ideas and our memories.

But we certainly can’t write that way!

The reader can’t follow our non-linear train of thought. (What does Yolanda have to do with yellow?!). Because the reader’s mind is moving in a different non-linear direction!

Those stray thoughts are for you. To make the idea clear to your mind. But to transfer that idea into your reader’s mind, you’ve got to keep it linear. You’ve got to build that idea. You’ve got to stay focused.

And when you can’t stay focused, it’s the stray idea that throws you off course. I call it “Overflow.”

It might not be a bad idea — heck, it might be exactly what you need! — but you’d better not let it get in the way, or your writing will get very very stuck.