Divergent Thinking To Increase Your Creativity? Now There’s An Idea

Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash

As someone who’s ‘other’ work, apart from being a writer, has included communications and marketing, I’ve been exposed to some let’s say ‘interesting’ ideas about creativity. I’ve worked with agencies that fulfil the stereotypes – the kind of places where bright and sockless young things in quilted sweatpants sit on beanbags in Contemplation Rooms to discuss about how ‘synergizing’ will ‘move the needle’.

But in among the bullshit there are some ideas which have credence and are genuinely useful applications to the creative writing process. Two of these are Divergent Thinking and its counterpart Convergent Thinking.

Here’s a simple video which explains the two concepts. It’s a bit businessy in tone, but the principles for writers are there:

This folds in neatly with the piece I wrote last week about what the humble daffodil can teach us about embracing the Discomfort Zone. If you haven’t read that, then give it a whirl.

What I also mentioned in that daffodil article (and in the one I wrote for my Paid Subscribers, called Don’t Dismiss The Power of Play) was how useful it was to be playful with our writing. Divergent thinking is in many ways an example of that playfulness. This is rooted in research. Studies have explored connections between playfulness in young children and divergent thinking. A clear link was found between behaviours of divergent thinking in play during childhood and those displayed in later years, in creative adults.

My interpretation of this is simple – be playful and imaginative in thinking up LOTS (the more the merrier) of ideas for when you get bogged down in writing a story or a book, then mess around with those ideas, see which ones click, in order to crack on with renewed enthusiasm.

As an aside, this is not just about creativity. Divergent thinking is a way to increase your mental well-being. Research has show that people who don’t utilise divergent thinking generally in their lives can get overwhelmed by the same ‘repetitive’ answer or thought processes, leading to feelings of anxiety or depression. Being able to create multiple ideas actions can be of benefit in reducing stress and anxiety.

Gerard Puccio’s book Creativity Rising, highlights four key principles for divergent thinking:

1. Defer judgment means to hold evaluation until a later time.
   Deferring judgment requires the ability to suspend skepticism and to entertain the potential value of every alternative you might generate. This can be more difficult than it sounds (not that we’re saying it sounds easy in the first place). Particularly in Western cultures, we are not taught to suspend judgment. We are taught to be decisive, which people generally take to mean: decide immediately. While there are many cases where a quick decision is required, premature judgment is the enemy of creative thinking.

2. Go for quantity is to be a fluent thinker, generating many ideas, options, and alternatives. 
   Quantity breeds quality. The more alternatives we generate, the more likely we are to find a promising option and, ultimately, produce a creative breakthrough. We can think of quantity in two ways: in particular and in general. In the particular, it is beneficial to seek a quantity of ideas when engaged in divergent thinking; that is, when addressing a particular problem. In general, a habit of divergent thinking leads to a quantity of ideas, which means we have more possibilities to play with in our lives.

3. Make connections is to combine things that had not been combined, or to draw inspiration from one thing when working on another. 
   Making connections is essential to the creative process. New thoughts or ideas are very often a combination of previously unrelated thoughts or ideas, which assume a new form as they intersect or are looked at from a different perspective. Most new consumer products are the combination of different parts that, when put together, create a new whole.

4. Seek novelty is to pursue the goal of originality. 
   There is no creativity without originality. Thus, the guideline “Seek Novelty” is both a reminder and an encouragement to generate options that are new and unusual, options that go beyond the obvious and the familiar. Creativity is not just originality, of course; creative solutions must also be useful, valuable, and appropriate. But that determination comes later. The divergent phase is the time to pursue novel responses.

The simple graphics below show how we can take these ideas and make them work for us when writing, particularly during the development process of taking a first draft and making it shine.

For me, divergent thinking in writing is about creating a number of ‘what if?’ scenarios around a character or situation or narrative. It’s about saying to yourself: “Okay, there’s an obvious story here, but is there something more compelling, something richer to be explored if I just dwell on things a little longer and come up with multiple ideas.”

As part of that process, we writers should try to adhere to the four key principles outlined by Gerard Puccio. We shouldn’t dismiss any ideas in the process of creating them, just let them flow. We should go for quantity of ideas initially, not self-edit to just a few. We should be open to making connections. And we should actively seek novelty, because that’s where interesting possibilities are formed.

These ideas can be as random as you like - that’s the playful bit:

• What if my character responds to bad news by running out of the house naked?

• What if my character finds safety in a busy restaurant/park/roller disco during a crisis, rather than reaching out to friends?

• What if a fluorescent green alien life-form suddenly landed on my character's front lawn?

Divergent thinking isn’t a time-suck. It only requires a little more time than normal because it doesn’t take that long to come up with ideas if you open yourself up to possibility (as long as it holds true to the character and within the story world).

Convergent thinking comes into play when you have those ‘what ifs’ in place. You make connections between ideas, see which ones are original and give you energy and enthusiasm, start to form an idea of how that can take your story or character or situation forward.

There's a quick exercise below which you might want to try which helps with developing your divergent thinking skills. Give it a go. You might surprise yourself.

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Divergent Thinking Exercise: Using Book Title Prompts

If you use these try spending 10 minutes create at least 10 ‘What if…’ scenarios each for a couple or more of the book titles I have listed below (I find book titles are often good for creative ideas).

For example, using the title of Denis Johson’s ‘Train Dreams’ as a prompt, then three what if’s might be:

• What if the main character can only dream when on a train.

• What if a mother who lost her child in a train accident has beautiful dreams of meeting the child on a station platform.

• What if a person wakes up from a dream to find the train they are on is stopped in the middle of nowhere and all the other passengers are gone.

Book Titles

Record Of A Night Too Brief

Burning Down The House

How The Light Gets In

The Half-Known World

Things Fall Apart

The Outsider

Light Years

Push

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