It's a rare pleasure to find so many insights in such a short book. A modern reader can't help but notice the stark contrast between A Technique for Producing Ideas and most modern books, which might have a few paragraphs' worth of insights, but yet always seem to be fluffed and padded out to at least 200-300 pages.
The author gives away a formula for creativity and idea generation that is simple, but not easy. And as a result almost no one will follow it. In the author's own one-paragraph summary, his process is:
* First, the gathering of raw materials--both the materials of your immediate problem and the materials which come from a constant enrichment of your store of general knowledge.
* Second, the working over of these materials in your mind.
* Third, the incubating stage, where you let something beside the conscious mind do the work of synthesis.
* Fourth, the actual birth of the Idea--the 'Eureka! I have it!' stage.
* And fifth, the final shaping and development of the idea to practical usefulness."
According to the author, there are two kinds of people, the "speculative" type of person, who generates ideas naturally, who obsessively combine, rearrange and play with those ideas, and who literally can't help but be creative. The other type of person--the author calls them "rentiers"--tend to be steadygoing, relatively unimaginative and not likely to become all that creative no matter how hard they try.
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This book is from the 1940s and it's had at least a dozen reprintings, but yet it has fallen off of the radar screen to a degree that it's difficult to find physical copies. Fortunately an online copy of A Technique for Producing Ideas in the public domain, and it includes a foreword by theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, author of the dense but very useful The Irony of American History.
Finally, here's my own brief reading list for creative thinking, idea generation and writing:
Steven King: On Writing
Julia Cameron: The Artist's Way
Anne Lamott: Bird By Bird
Natalie Goldberg: Writing Down the Bones
See also under the "To Read" section at the end of this post for a brief--and surprising--"for further reading" list that James Webb Young offers his own readers.
[Feel free to skim or even read the notes for this post: they aren't that long.]
Notes:
Foreword by Reinhold Niebuhr: [who wrote the dense but worthwhile book The Irony of American History, reviewed on this website.]
5ff "It would be wrong to suggest that any man, who has proved his own remarkable gifts of imagination, could fully transmit them by a 'technique.' There is an elusive quality in the creative individual which defies analysis and imitation. Yet there are techniques and modes of procedure which can be learned and transmitted; and Mr. Young has given us a very clear exposition of them."
Prefatory Note:
7ff The author claims here that he prepared the thoughts and ideas here on a Sunday afternoon "when I had to consider what I should say to a Monday class" at the School of Business at the University of Chicago. [Talk about sprezzatura!]
Chapter 1: How It Started
9ff You have produced a lot of advertising ideas. Just how do you get them?" "I thought at the time I had never heard a funnier or more naive question. And I was completely unable to give any helpful answer to it."
Chapter 2: The Formula of Experience
13ff "...the production of ideas is just as definite a process as the production of Fords... the production of ideas, too, runs on an assembly line..."
15ff [As with most things, they are simple but not easy, and as a result almost nobody does them] "If you ask me why I am willing to give away the valuable formula of this discovery I will confide to you that experience has taught me two things about it:
First, the formula is so simple to state that few who hear it will really believe in it.
Second, while simple to state, it actually requires the hardest kind of intellectual work to follow, so that not all who accept it use it.
Thus I broadcast this formula with no real fear of glutting the market in which I make my living."
Chapter 3: The Pareto Theory
17ff On Vilfredo Pareto's book The Mind and Society where there are two types of people: speculators and rentiers; On speculators, in the sense of people who are speculative (not the modern pejorative sense of the word), who are "constantly pre-occupied with the possibilities of new combinations." ("Please hold that italicized definition in mind, because we shall return to it later. Note particularly that word pre-occupied, with its brooding quality.") Here Pareto refers to inventors, people who come up with financial and business ideas, etc., people who "can not let well enough alone."
19ff The rentier: "the routine, steady-going, unimaginative, conserving people, whom the speculator manipulates." "I think we all recognize that these two types of human beings do exist."
Chapter 4: Training the Mind
22ff "Principles and method are everything" while "bits of knowledge are nothing," just "rapidly aging facts." [We do fall in love with the idea of spitting out facts, don't we?] "What is the most valuable to know is not where to look for a particular idea, but how to train the mind in the method by which all ideas are produced; and how to grasp the principles which are at the source of all ideas.
Chapter 5: Combining Old Elements
25 On two general principles, the first is "...an idea is nothing more nor less than a new combination of old elements."
26 "The second important principle is that the capacity to bring old elements into new combinations depends largely on the ability to see relationships."
27-8 On the relationship between advertising and psychiatry; on words as symbols of emotional experiences; also on words and symbols as used in propaganda and the field of political action. Example notions: "Can words, studied as emotional symbols, yield a better advertising education than words studied as parts of rhetoric?" "What is the one word-symbol which will best arouse the emotions with which I wish this particular advertisement to be charged? And so on."
28-9 "Consequently the habit of mind which leads to a search for relationships between facts becomes of the highest importance in the production of ideas. Now this habit of mind can undoubtedly be cultivated. I venture to suggest that, for the advertising man, one of the best ways to cultivate it is by study in the social sciences. A book like Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class, or Reisman's The Lonely Crowd, therefore becomes a better book about advertising than most books about advertising." [Interestingly, I found Veblen's book on one level written so poorly that it was nearly unreadable, but at the same time it spawned some half a dozen articles at my old food blog Casual Kitchen because it really got me thinking about a wide range of subjects.]
Chapter 6: Ideas Are New Combinations
30 "With these two general principles in mind--the principle that an idea is a new combination, and the principle that the ability to make new combinations is heightened by an ability to see relationships--with these in mind let us know look at the actual method or procedure by which ideas are produced." [Respect for a tight thesis sentence]
31"This technique of the mind follows five steps. I am sure that you will all recognize them individually. But the important thing is to recognize their relationship, and to grasp the fact that the mind follows these five steps in definite order--that by no possibility can one of them be taken before the preceding one is completed, if an idea is to be produced."
31-2 "The first of these steps is for the mind to gather its raw material... Gathering raw material in a real way is not as simple as it sounds. It is such a terrible chore that we are constantly trying to dodge it."
32ff "The materials which must be gathered are of two kinds: they are specific and they are general. In advertising, the specific materials are those relating to the product and the people to whom you propose to sell it... Most of us stop too soon in the process of getting it. If the surface differences are not striking we assume that there are no differences. [Ed: Note the solipsism trap here: if you don't see a difference there must be no difference!] But if we go deeply enough, or far enough, we nearly always find that between every product and some consumers there is an individuality of relationship which may lead to an idea."
35-6 On gathering general materials: on being the kind of person who can get interested easily in any subject, a characteristic of "every really good creative person in advertising whom I have ever known." Also on being "an extensive browser in all sorts of fields of information."
36 "Now this gathering of general materials is important because this is where the previously stated principle comes in--namely, that an idea is nothing more nor less than a new combination of elements. In advertising an idea results from a new combination of specific knowledge about products and people with general knowledge about life and events."
37 On kaleidoscopes, creating new patterns with an enormous number of possible combinations; using this as a metaphor for combining elements of the world that are stored away in our mind's pattern making machine. [Note here also Julie Cameron's idea in The Artist's Way of scheduling "artist's dates" where you go out, alone, into the world, with an eye for finding random ideas--another form of gathering general materials.]
38 "This, then, is the first step in the technique of producing ideas: the gathering of materials. Part of it, you will see, is a current job and part of it is a life-long job."
38ff On learning "the index card method" to write down items of specific information as you gather them, one item to a card; over time you will gradually classify them by subject. "Eventually you will have a whole file box of them, neatly classified." The value here is it discloses gaps in your knowledge, it keeps you from shirking the material gathering job, and it forces your mind to go through the expression of your material in writing. A second idea is to do a scrapbook method: see for example Sherlock Holmes' scrapbooks that he indexed and cross-indexed for all kinds of odd bits of material; this can help you build a useful sourcebook of ideas.
40-1 "Once I jotted in such a book the question: 'Why does every man hope his first child will be a boy?' Five years later it became the headline and idea for one of the most successful advertisements I ever produced.
Chapter 7: The Mental Digestive Process
42ff On the "masticating" process [note Natalie Goldberg's book Writing Down the Bones talks about "composting" in a similar way]: you take all the details and materials that you've gathered, and let the "tentacles of your mind" feel them over: look at things at different lights, bring different facts together and see how they fit. Also on not doing this too directly or too literally but instead engaging this process indirectly and obliquely. "...it is almost like listening for the meaning instead of looking for it. When creative people are in this stage of the process they get their reputation for absent-mindedness."
44ff Tentative or partial ideas will come to you: put these down on paper regardless of how crazy or incomplete they seem, "get them down." The author calls these "foreshadowings of the real idea that is to come." Also, you will start to get tired of trying to fit things together, but the author says wait for your mind to have it second wind. And then you will get to a hopeless stage where "everything is a jumble in your mind, with no clear insight anywhere." [I am in this state almost all the time...]
45ff Now you're ready for the third stage, where "you make absolutely no effort of a direct nature. You dropp the whole subject, and put the problem out of your mind as completely as you can." Here you "turn the problem over to your unconscious mind, and let it work while you sleep." [See Joseph Murphy's The Power of Your Subconscious Mind which talks about this repeatedly.] The author also gives an example of Sherlock Holmes dragging Watson off to a concert right in the middle of a case, and how this irritated "the practical and literal-minded Watson."
Chapter 8: "Constantly Thinking About It"
48 "Now, if you have really done your part in these three stages of the process you will almost surely experience the fourth. Out of nowhere the Idea will appear. It will come to you when you are least expecting it--while shaving, or bathing, or most often when you are half awake in the morning. It may waken you in the middle of the night."
50 The ideas come "after you have stopped straining for them, and have passed through a period of rest and relaxation from the search."
Chapter 9: The Final Stage
52ff "In this stage you have to take your little newborn idea out into the world of reality. And when you do you usually find that it is not quite the marvelous child it seemed when you first gave birth to it." On patient "working over" of the idea; this is where many good ideas are lost, most people are not patient enough to go through with this "adapting part of the process."
53 On losing your attachment to the idea and submitting it "to the criticism of the judicious."
53 [Here follows a one-page summary of the entire book] "This, then, is the whole process or method by which ideas are produced:
First, the gathering of raw materials--both the materials of your immediate problem and the materials which come from a constant enrichment of your store of general knowledge.
Second, the working over of these materials in your mind.
Third, the incubating stage, where you let something beside the conscious mind do the work of synthesis.
Fourth, the actual birth of the Idea--the 'Eureka! I have it!' stage.
And fifth, the final shaping and development of the idea to practical usefulness."
Chapter 10: Some Afterthoughts
55ff The author here expresses his thankfulness for all the letters and input from readers; he describes different fields in which people applied this book totally outside of advertising; then he emphasizes that readers continue to build their "store of general materials in the idea producer's reservoir." He gives an example from his own life after moving to New Mexico as he became interested in a whole new range of subjects, and as a result he developed several new advertisements, ideas and businesses. The author emphasizes that he was interested in these new subjects for their own sake--for his general reservoir--and not specifically for making advertising effective. "I am convinced, however, that you gather this vicarious experience best, not when you are boning up on it for an immediate purpose, but when you are pursuing it as an end in itself." [On deliberate eclecticism, purposelessness in learning; on basically being an autodidact for no specific reason, just being insanely curious, etc.]
59 "Of course, if you consider that your education was finished when you left college, and wouldn't be caught dead with a copy of, say, one of Jane Austen's novels under your pillow, go no farther." The author gives an example here of learning how 19th century gentry would scorn people in "the trades" but then applying this idea of snob appeal to the modern era lends itself to producing great advertisements for various luxury goods that basically play off the same social status phenomenon.
60 Comments here on seeing people who seem to always have good ideas off the top of their heads, but reminding the reader about all the process which happens prior to that that we don't see.
60-62 Finally comments here about how words themselves are ideas [see here Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson], or better yet "ideas in a state of suspended animation" as the author puts it. "We can collect ideas by collecting words." Finally, the author offers three books "which will expand your understanding of this whole idea-producing process" listing The Art of Thought, Science And Method and The Art of Scientific Investigation. [See below for full information on these and a few other books mentioned in the text.]
To Read:
Vilfredo Pareto: The Mind and Society
Thorstein Veblen: The Theory of the Leisure Class
David Riesman: The Lonely Crowd
S.J. Hayakawa: Language in Thought and Action
Graham Wallas: The Art of Thought
Henri Poincaré: Science and Method
W.I.B. Beveridge: The Art of Scientific Investigation