“A 5-Step Technique for Producing Ideas circa 1939”

Somehow bumped into this Brain Pickings post about a 1939 book called “A Technique for Producing Ideas,” by James Webb Young:

Young — an ad man by trade but, as we’ll see, a voraciously curious and cross-disciplinary thinker at heart — lays out with striking lucidity and clarity the five essential steps for a productive creative process, touching on a number of elements corroborated by modern science and thinking on creativity: its reliance on process over mystical talent, its combinatorial nature, its demand for a pondering period, its dependence on the brain’s unconscious processes, and more.

Here are the five steps:

STEP 1: GATHERING RAW MATERIAL

STEP 2: DIGESTING THE MATERIAL

STEP 3: UNCONSCIOUS PROCESSING

STEP 4: THE A-HA MOMENT

STEP 5: IDEA MEETS REALITY

An excerpt from the book about gathering raw material:

Every really good creative person… whom I have ever known has always had two noticeable characteristics. First, there was no subject under the sun in which he could not easily get interested — from, say, Egyptian burial customs to modern art. Every facet of life had fascination for him. Second, he was an extensive browser in all sorts of fields of information. For it is with the advertising man as with the cow: no browsing, no milk.

This is absolutely true: Curiosity. Browser. Two keys to a “really good creative person.” And if you aren’t constantly coming up with story ideas, you are narrowing your path to Hollywood. Ideas are the lifeblood of the film and TV community. Therefore doesn’t it make sense to be generating ideas? After all, it was Nobel Prize winning scientist Linus Pauling who said: “The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.”

By the way, April is on the horizon. And yes, once again I will be running the Story Idea Each Day for a Month series.

For more of the Brain Pickings article, go here.