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Creative Breaths
Finding Your Writing Rhythm
Do you struggle to generate creative writing ideas? Perhaps you have plenty of ideas, but they rarely result in finished work.
You might find a better balance by reframing creativity as a breathing process.
The breath of creativity
I encountered this breathing metaphor in a new book about workplace innovation called Fire Up Innovation by Helene Cahen. She writes about the delicate balance of brainstorming ideas and assessing as a kind of breathing cycle, entailing two different thought patterns.
- Divergent thinking generates novel approaches to problems (inhaling ideas).
- Convergent thinking entails evaluating those ideas, deciding which to develop (exhaling judgments and action).
The metaphor predates the book — it’s embedded in the language. The word inspire comes from the Latin inspirare, or breathe into.
Creativity isn’t only generating ideas-you muse also assess them and figure out which ones to take further.
Innovation entails cycling through these phases like breathing: Diverge, converge, diverge, converge.
When we focus on one phase over the other, the process stalls. As Cahen writes,
