A wonderful and eclectic chat with Joel Friedlander on how authors can use light bulb moments in their work …
Topics covered :
Where do light bulb moments come from?
What blocks light bulb moments?
How to use your whole brain and whole mind
The beauty and power of Mapping Your Mind
The importance of meditation and the breath in ideas generation
Find out more about Joel and subscribe to his brilliant blog which is full of help for authors and publishers – and get a copy of his book too – www.thebookdesigner.com
One of the most amazing feats we can perform is to consciously control which parts of our brain we are using.
Once mastered, you can then put this under ‘unconscious control’ and increase your creativity several fold.
A good example of this is when you learn to ride a bike or drive a car. Once learned, you can do something else and multitask without having to give what is an amazingly complex task a second thought.
Now I should say the the whole left and right brain model is both simplistic and only serves to help us understand that we can be in different states of mind. Our left and right brain functions are caused by our state of consciousness not the generators of it and what is processed by the physical left and right are nowhere near as separate as perhaps currently thought. It is a good approximation thought to help us get our mind around what is one of the most complex structures we currently know of in the Universe – our own brains.
In simplistic terms, however, what happens is that the right brain learns a process and hands it to the left to handle automatically.
To understand how the right and left interact, do the following exercise:
Step 1: Write down the word MAGIC on a piece of paper
Step 2: Then write it down two more times
Step 3: Now write it down backwards
Step 4: Then write it down backwards two more times
Step 5: Notice how when you wrote the new word backwards for the second and third time how much you speeded up, probably copying the word you first wrote. Notice how the third time was even quicker than the second time.
Note that I haven’t purposely written it down backwards in this blog as this would spoil the effect. What is happening is something like this.
Step 1: your right brain decoded the sentence above and sent it to the left to handle
Step 2: the left brain repeated the task twice with a modicum of right brain holistic supervision
Step 3: either your right brain forms a whole picture in your mind’s eye of MAGIC backwards and then tells the left brain to write it OR your right brain gets your left brain to write each letter down and then forms the picture of it backwards – perhaps correcting itself with the position of the A and I and G and M after the first attempt
Step 4: when you repeat it, your left brain either copies what it sees on the page or uses the right brain whole image and processes the whole synthesised word
Now repeat the same exercise with the word POWER but this time do it with your eyes closed to experience the difference.
Now this might all sound a bit trivial and we perform complex actions like this every day without giving them a second thought. Just being able to do this is magical. If you really think about it, being able to comprehend that we are doing it is even more magical – and the beginning of a new level of mind control.
If you would you like to learn more about these techniques, make sure you get a copy of Tom’s new book to find out where ideas really come from and how you can make sure yours actually happen …
There are two really common reasons why authors and bloggers get writer’s block.
The first is a lack of inner confidence about their writing ability.
The second is a belief that they simply don’t have the time to write.
These first types of blocks caused by lack of confidence can be caused by an innocent criticism of something written earlier – like an essay that got a black mark at school perhaps.
The solution is to identify the old gestalts and replace them with new patterns that are much more useful. Note though that this doesn’t mean deleting bad memories though as these are useful source material for a writer.
Incidentally, these first type of blocks are something I deal with in more detail in my book Blocks …
To deal with the second type of block, perceived lack of time, there are many excellent books on how to improve your time management. One I specifically recommend for authors is Time Management for Dummies by Clare (no relation) Evans.
Books like this are brilliant at pointing out where you can claw back time by better managing your day. Additionally, I would like to propose a more lateral and fundamental approach to time management – and that’s to change the perceived speed of time itself.
Now this might seem far fetched, or in the realms of Doctor Who or Back to the Future, but scientists are coming to the conclusion that our reality – our space and time – are linked to our consciousness. In fact, it’s more accurate to say that it’s our very consciousness that actually creates our reality. So all you need to do to change time is to make a change in your consciousness.
I am sure you have heard about athletes who have been “in the zone” – a sort of timeless place – or perhaps you have had a light bulb moment where in less than a second, you get a flash of inspiration – a whole picture for a new idea. If you were able to MRI scan your brain at this moment, you would see both the right and left hemispheres light up in synchronism. For that split second you were Whole Brain (or even Whole Mind) Thinking. A brain scan would show that your brain was generating alpha and probably even theta waves.
Now you can access this state while meditating. When I mention this to authors, their first reaction is that they don’t have time to meditate. I know it sounds counter-intuitive but I can testify that 20-30 minutes meditation before a writing session will deliver not only the time back by a factor of 3 or 4 but also much better quality writing.
“But I can’t make my mind go quiet,” is normally the next protest swiftly followed by, “I’d like to meditate but I don’t have time to learn how.”
Well, if you hear yourself saying this, help is now at hand. You don’t need necessarily to enter an ashram.
This visualisation will help you experience the meditative state in just 11 minutes …
After you’ve listened to it a few times, you will even find it easier to enter the meditative state while you are in what is normally thought of as the waking state.
For a writer, this become significant as time seems to stretch out so that in a single hour you write what would normally take a whole morning or afternoon.
The benefits to your productivity are therefore immense and you will be amazed at your output in all areas of your life. People who have used machines even get comments of how well they look.
Addendum:
I can highly recommend reading Steven Taylor’s excellent book called Making Time – it explains in great detail on how this all works and how you can start to control time to your advantage.
A wonderful and eclectic chat with Joel Friedlander on how authors can use light bulb moments in their work …
A wonderful and eclectic chat with Joel Friedlander on how authors can use light bulb moments in their work …
There are two really common reasons why authors and bloggers get writer’s block.
To deal with the second type of block, perceived lack of time, there are many excellent books on how to improve your time management. One I specifically recommend for authors is 
Addendum: