Communication as Spellcasting

If we are to build an Empire of the Mind, we have to learn more creative wizardry. Here are ten elements of my process I hope you can use.

“How do you come up with that?” asked a reader, John, about an article.

“I’m weird,” I replied.

Being a man of reason and reflection, John was not altogether satisfied with my response.

“I was hoping you'd describe some method that would enable others to perform similar intellectual feats,” John wrote.

Up to that point, I hadn't really given it much thought. I was flattered to read that someone considered my writing a feat of intellect. Still, I knew weirdness had to be an ingredient somehow.

John invited me to practice metacognition, which is a fancy term for thinking about thinking. So at John’s prompting, I gave my creative process more thought.

If there is any method to creativity’s madness, at least with respect to my own, I should do a little introspection and see if I can find some patterns.

This is the product of that introspection.

Before I proceed, I want to emphasize that this is no exercise in self-aggrandizement. Instead, it is the ongoing fulfillment of a promise to train together in subversive communication. If we are to build an Empire of the Mind, we must be more than monks; we must become missionaries. We must be more than warriors; we must become wizards.

Method and Madness

The thing about creativity is that the possibilities are endless. So, we might as well list ten.

1. Align head, heart, and gut.
   One who writes only from the head can leave readers cold with stiffness or verbosity. One who writes only from the heart will come across as gushy, empty-headed, or saccharine. One who writes only from the gut will surely shoot without aiming. The trick is to find centeredness, which involves aligning the cognitive, the affective, and the visceral (head, heart, and gut). People want to feel what you write, as much as they want to think about it or act on it. From the perspective of your receiver, that means a threefold braid:
   
   - Intellection. Help them think.
   - Invocation. Help them feel
   - Inspiration. Help them act.
   
   I can tell you from bitter experience, Dear Reader, times when I have written a political rant in haste and anger, I have lost readers and even paid supporters to the unsubscribe button. That smarts, but disciplines. There will be no subversive communication if we are unable to persuade others. We can’t just be warriors with bludgeons. We must also be wizards casting spells. Perhaps the wizard-warrior Gandalf the Grey is the model we need.
   

2. Let apparently distinct ideas have sex.
   Call it pop dialectics a la Hegel, or “ideas having sex,” following one of my favorite writers, Matt Ridley. But the general idea is that two concepts can be creatively combined, even if the ideas are distinct or seem to be in opposition.

   
   For Hegel, that might mean a thesis meeting its antithesis and producing something novel that transcends (and includes) aspects of both. For Ridley, that might mean one innovation bumping into another—say, the marriage of the computer and the phone—to generate something wholly new.