hit those keys

3. mix & match

Brainstorm. This word gets used often, but just what does a person do to get their brain to storm? Where do ideas come from?

Everywhere and nowhere. All around you and only from inside you.

Our minds have a handy habit of disdaining lonely, unattached fragments of information. Sometimes all you need to do is juxtapose two wildly unrelated bits and then see what kind of connection your mind forms between them. You can give this process a nudge by intentionally sitting down with some random input (where's that list you made yesterday?), stipulate a time limit (set a timer, say 15 minutes?) and/or a length requirement (at least five sentences?) and GO.

Here's an example, below, if you need one... The words were chosen randomly from the dictionary:

• crucible
• bowl
• Briton
• gay
• plummet
• fairyland
• nationality
• roughen
• oxbow
• pullet

 

I was the first person in our high school he told: "I'm gay." I don't know what I expected when Phil sat me down on the grass and then stared at his shoes, but this wasn't it. What I knew then about gayness could fit in a fingerbowl. At least I knew enough to know that this conversation was a crucible and what we were refining was courage (his) and forbearance (mine). Still, my confidence plummeted; what could I say? I was a pullet waiting for a skillet. "How do you—um—KNOW?" was the best I came up with. "There was this Briton...." he told me, shyly. That confused me since gayness was enough of a topic without bringing in subtleties of nationality. The whole conversation became like an oxbow lake, cut off from the flow of its beginnings. I mentioned how once I had ridden through the lowlands of Scotland in a dense fog. "It was almost like fairyland," I prattled, and then clapped my hand over my mouth. What had I SAID?


(1 paragraph, 15 minutes,
9 out of 10 random words used)