Ideas are writing’s currency. They are also a dime a dozen. Writers feel considerable pressure to put their best work on paper. For starters, their ideas must be unique and interesting enough to catch the reader’s attention. What follows then is the story, and it has to live up to expectations. Overall, it is a tall task, so it is no wonder many writers feel a sense of dread when they sit down and stare at the muted, blank white page on their desk. Fortunately, I’ve learned to bypass this fear. That very same blank, white page speaks to me of opportunity and an inescapable sense of freedom. Personally, I find writing offers a sense of escapism, and the best ideas appear when you let your mind drift freely. In other words, you learn to master the art of effective daydreaming.
Daydreaming comes naturally to me. Even now, I fondly recall spending my lunch breaks in my high school’s garden. I would lie down on the grass and watch the clouds above, enjoying the silence and solitude. These sessions were also primetime for my creativity. My mind would swim with random thoughts, the initial sparks of ideas that I would incorporate in my stories later. I still daydream to this day. Much like an artist’s sketchbook, I have one of my own filled with one-liners and random thoughts that serve as sparks for stories I formulate later. When I switched to writing as a full-time career, I realized I could make a few tweaks to this daydreaming hobby of mine and better harness it for my creative purposes.
For starters, I leaned on a little bit of science to help me out. We have all heard the classic line about the need for a writer to read other books and learn more about the world to write their own book or come up with new ideas. There is scientific grounding for this. Reading primes our brain’s Default Mode Network (DMN), the neural autopilot responsible for daydreaming and spontaneous imagination. What we read and take in about the world around us shapes the visual, emotional, and social content of our daydreams. Essentially, reading fuels our subconscious, but that is not all there is to it. How we read also makes a difference. Silent reading leans on our visual cortex to decode words. This means there is less room for our brains to wander. On the other hand, audiobooks don’t care about our visual channel. This allows the brain’s DMN to drift and generate daydreams much more frequently, causing you to zone out of the narrative and sink into your thoughts.
So, how do we leverage this? Since reading fuels our subconscious, it helps to take frequent pauses. Stopping to reflect on what we are reading, like the sensory details, character motives, or underlying themes, allows our minds to actively construct the story’s world, rather than push the narrative forward. In this manner, we get to experience and deeply immerse ourselves in what we are reading. These pauses also help trigger your DMN and transfer what you have read from short-term to long-term memory. Contrary to belief, the whole process prevents cognitive overload. Throughout, we remain engaged with what we read. Similarly, by switching up what we read, we can also prevent our daydreams from becoming repetitive and diversify our ideas. Using this combination of neural simulation and schema activation, where we experience what we read and activate our working memory (cause the reading mind tends to remember things, no matter how small the detail), we continuously fuel our subconscious.
When our minds drift, the intake becomes real estate in the form of mental models or schemas that later serve as the foundations of the thoughts and ideas that populate our daydreams. To get to this point, we have to begin by slowing down, and that’s a major no-no in a day and age when everything moves at breakneck speeds. My success in this aspect came from natural circumstances. Once you become a parent, you don’t have as much time for things you love as you did before. Similarly, when you do get the time, you are too tired to make the same level of progress. So, you’ve got to adopt the turtle strategy. Small and slower, but consistent, bites towards greater goals. I applied this approach to my reading (audio and visual), writing, and social media intake. Obviously, when you have a kid, much of what you read or watch also follows their preferences. For the last few years, my daydreams have largely focused on ideas for children’s stories, fairy tales, and fantasy. Recently, I have switched things up and started gradually getting back into my favorite genre: science fiction, and right on cue, I have enjoyed my latest palette of dreams about apocalyptic scenarios and hard sci-fi survival horrors.
So, for writers who are struggling to find ideas for their stories, I suggest setting that pen aside and letting your mind unwind. Take some time during the day and daydream. It may not feel like it, but you are still making those writing milestones by letting your mind drift. Support your mind’s supposed “procrastination” by tailoring your cognitive intake of the world around you to match your writing needs. This can be through books, newspapers, podcasts, TV, etc. The only disclaimer I place here is to be mindful of your intake and not let it slip into overindulgence that pulls you away from the actual writing. Oh, and have a writing journal! You’ll never know when those random ideas and scribbles come together to make the perfect story!
Take it from the legendary Poe,
Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.
The Pensive Reverie 