In the last post I introduced Bertrand Russell’s notion of planting ideas in the unconscious mind. He explained how with a “sufficient amount of vigour and intensity” it is possible to set the recesses of your psyche to work at solving a problem*. If you practice this you soon find that ideas emerge, connections manifest and solutions present themselves in your writing. These are not dependent on conscious effort but rather emerge unbidden at the most opportune moment.
Or at least they can if you establish a practice of planting these ideas. There are a range of ways in which you can plant ideas. In trying to think about how I plant ideas, I started to think about where I encounter ideas in a typical week:
- Conversations with the people I find most interesting to talk to. I suspect most intellectual conversations have some value in planting ideas, in the sense that you say things and you hear things which connect to what you’re working on. But there are certain people it’s particularly energising to talk to, in relation to whom connections emerge more readily because of the overlaps in intellectual interest and intellectual style. These conversations are important but non-urgent, as the productivity gurus say and you should make the time for them.
- For avoidance of doubt I am not suggesting it’s comparable, but I talk to Claude about my ideas regularly. As I’ve written in Generative AI for Academics, the process of explicating the ideas has a value in its own right and the the reliable sophistication of the responses provides a prompt to further ideas. It’s not quite a collaborator but I’m increasingly strident that it’s empirically incoherent to simply call it a tool. It often reflects back my own ideas in a way that helps me get to the essence of what I’m trying to say, as in when I just shared this post with it and it responded by talking about “the broader ecosystem of influences and interactions that shape our thinking and fuel our creativity” 👌
- I listen to lots of podcasts. I often worry that I listen to too many podcasts which prompts me to deliberately choose silence in order to let my thoughts breathe. But conversational podcasts can have a similar effect to conversations with people. Obviously they’re not as enjoyable, but the intellectual effect can be similar, if you’re listening to conversational podcasts featuring conversations between people you find interesting. I also listen to lectures on YouTube and tune into webinars but this has to be a more active form of listening which, oddly, I’m only really able to do consistently at home if I’m doing something else like cleaning the house.
- I read a lot. For a whole range of slightly depressing biographical reasons, the quantity of my reading dipped for a number of years, but I typically read 30-100 pages a day of a mix of academic and non-academic books. For the first time in a long time I’ve slipped out of reading fiction before I go to bed, which is a shame but mostly because there’s just so much interesting non-fiction I want to read. I’m often taking notes which, even if extremely brief, seem to register something about the text in my mind. In part it’s a commitment to come back and engage more fully with it later, which I do probably 50% of the time (and I also use readwise.io to get e-mails which show me Kindle highlights and associated notes). But simply the fact of making the note seems to be the first stage of ‘planting’ an idea. (I read papers far too rarely, which I’m trying to address)
- I read through past blog posts. This might sound self-indulgent but, as I’ll discuss in a future post, I’m increasingly convinced this is a crucial part of the creative process. Reading your own work is having a conversation with yourself. The blog makes it easy to do this, either recent posts which are churning in my mind for some reason, or old ones which randomly resurface through audience interest which happens continually with a popular(ish) 14 year old blog. I still struggle to motivate myself to read through my books and articles, even though I think it’s necessary for me to read The Public and Their Platforms if I have any hope of (finally) finishing Platform and Agency this summer.
- I take notes of ideas as they occur to me throughout the day. Particularly if I’m mid-book I will write everything down in Omnifocus, even if it’s extremely brief. These fleeting notes are things I can come back to later. I will take voice notes through ChatGPT. I will write physically in a notebook. I will obviously write on this blog. I sometimes have digital notebooks I write in as well. If I’m not mid-book I’m much less disciplined about recording everything, as opposed to recording the things which move me in some way. Because when I commit to writing down everything, it’s quite an intrusive practice in the sense that the more I look, the more I find ideas occurring to me all over the place. If you ever see me starting typing frantically in the middle of a meeting, it’s usually this rather than responding to e-mail.
- I reflect on the ideas which emerge as I’m writing, particularly on the blog. The role blogging plays in my creative process means that most, not all, ideas I have emerge here in some form before they figure in long-form writing. But usually these ideas are only partially formed until I give them more shape in a longer text.
- The one thing I rarely do is meditate on a problem with “sufficient amount of vigour and intensity” in the way that Russell advocates. I know what he means by this, in the sense that I’ve tried going for long walks with a single problem to think about. I’ve started writing in a physical journal again in part to identify these underlying conceptual problems in order to bring them out and focus on them more intensely e.g. if Claude is neither a tool nor a collaborator, what is it? But it still feels alien to how my mind works, as it has when I’ve tried in the past. I like skating the connections in the cultural system, rather than facing off with a singular problem. I will persist thought
Where do you encounter ideas in a typical week? Are there encounters you have which you might not register as encounters? In the model I can feel emerging through these posts, I would like to distinguish between (a) encountering ideas (b) refining those ideas (c) planting those ideas (d) explicating those ideas in writing. If you try and jump to (d) without getting (a) to (c) working then writing will inevitably be a struggle.
*It’s worth noting what a different environment Russell lived and worked within. His life was unusually frenetic for a Cambridge professor of his era, whizzing between Cambridge and London while balancing a range of academic and political concerns. But it was still a world without e-mail, smart phones and social media. Even if I suspect Russell would have rather taken to Twitter as a vehicle for political intervention, the fact these distractions were not there shapes how ‘planting’ works in practice. It’s striking that he talks about planting ideas for months, whereas I tend to think of it as a matter of days at most. There’s a set of speculative sociological questions here about the lived experience of temporality in creative work, but I suspect most people reading this will be operating on the same time scale as me for entirely quotidian reasons.
Mark Carrigan 