Novel Approach

Having a clear runway doesn't mean you can fly the plane

There are some genuinely good personal growth books that you must read:

• If you need to get up off the couch, you need a Navy SEAL.
• If you need make your routines effortless, you need an entrepreneur.
• If open tasks are crowding out your thinking, you need a professional organizer.
• If you can't find time to concentrate on hard problems, you need a professor.

But how, exactly, do you actually do that deep work?

How do you work through those hard problems? How do you manage your mind through all those blank pages that keep staring at you? How do you think your way through complex issues with lots of moving parts?

For that, you need a writer

Over a fifty-year career of writing about very hard things, and a lifetime of studying great writers, I've managed to figure out my own mind. In the process, I've learned a ton of cognitive psychology.

More importantly, I've also learned that what works for me will work for just about everybody.

So far, I've put together just under thirty powerful tricks to make hard problems irresistible, all of them shamelessly approximated from my interest in how writers do things.

Starting

• The Lamott Splatt: Start with a horrible strawman; fixing it will be irresistible.
• The Chandler Bear-Trap: Forbid all work to force boredom, which will eventually force action.
• The Trollope Two-Step: Set a timer or a numeric goal to crowd out the censor.
• Hugo's Restraint: Modify your environment to support work -- before you start.
• Schiller's Apples: Add mood-influencing sensory triggers.
• Stevenson Brownies: Set a distinct time or place to do something difficult.
• Abraham Lincoln's Reset: Invest time in your tools, and you'll feel committed to start.

Continuing

• The Bradbury Override: Drop rigid schedules when impulse strikes.
• The Asimov Shuffle: Keep many projects open & switch when bored or stuck.
• Gaiman's Permission: Give yourself permission to daydream.
• The Angelou Airlock: Enforce strict boundaries on your mental states.
• The Hemingway Bridge: Quit at peak momentum in mid-task and restart tomorrow.
• The Twain Scratchpad: Capture unrelated or tangential thoughts for later.

Structuring

• The Cunningham Bypass: Plan exactly wrong, and watch yourself execute flawlessly.
• Christie's Guardrails: Keep notebooks of useful facts to constrain imagination.
• Nabokov's Puzzles: Break big problems into steps and rearrange them until things make sense.
• The Luhmann Scramble: Unlink and relink ideas until things feel smooth and realistic.
• Rowling's Countdown: Work backwards from the end goal, one backstep at a time.
• The Heller Grid: Build a map of desired state changes all along the path from start to finish.
• The Caro-Eco Web: Expand a complex problem into a mind-map to find hidden connections.

Deadlocks

• Doctorow's Pacing: Kill overthinking and spinning thoughts with physical movement.
• London's Goat Path: Let the work lead you, not the other way around.
• Dickens' Mirrors: Inhabit people who could find the solution.
• The Faulkner Muzzle: Let different parts of your brain each weigh in on a problem in turn.
• The Steinbeck Jolt: Use a physical or verbal anomaly to break unresolvable loops.
• Salinger's Doubts: Treat much of your thinking as if the narrator is naive.

Polishing

• Quiller's Knife: Enforce a strict contract or perimeter on problems and solutions.
• King's Guillotine: Kill your darlings; don't let clever stand in for correct.
• The Wallace Hedge: Mark all unqualified opinions with "[CITATION NEEDED]."

Stay tuned

I'm going to be talking about these things on this site, in videos on various social media platforms, and in my forthcoming book, "The Novel Approach: What writers can teach us about solving hard problems."