Thoughts fly up and fade away, lost forever if not captured. Many are transient, deservedly ephemeral — but others offer true insight, wealth that could be shared with others, foundations to be built upon, pregnant concepts that need tender care before they can give birth to a discovery.

How to preserve new notions, especially during those critical few minutes or hours before they solidify?

• Write — completed notes if there's time and the idea seems important enough; in any event, carry a scrap of paper and a pencil stub for jotting down at least a few phrases, to aid memory when the creative moment has passed.
• Draw — sketchy or detailed, artful or crude, symbolic or realistic, on top of an existing picture or ab initio; this is especially valuable for nonverbal musings that can't easily be expressed in words, or for diagrams of links among concepts via a compact graphical map.
• Tell — let someone else in on the idea; bounce it off a friendly, noncritical listener, or if a recording device is handy use it as a temporary buffer.
• Repeat — review notes or sketches, revisit themes, revise scribblings, replay tapes; return to wrestle further with issues and strive to recognize connections they may have with other areas of thought.

Saturday, September 04, 1999 at 16:08:34 (EDT) = 1999-09-04

TopicThinking - TopicArt - TopicJournalizing - TopicWriting

(correlates: AwesomelySimple, HerodotusMisunderstandsEvolution, MagnaFortuna, ...)