How Beethoven’s 3-Step System Can Help Your Writing
My problem has always been ideas.
Sure, there have been times where an idea pops into my head and the words simply flow out of me. But that doesn’t happen very often. On a typical day, I still have to mine ideas from my brain like everybody else.
Once the idea arrives, I’m left to figure out how to develop it into a complete piece. Creating content from an inkling of inspiration isn’t easy, so this is usually where the writer’s block starts to kick in for many of us.
Fortunately, there’s something we can try.
While reading Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit, I came across a simple, yet awesome, technique for developing creative ideas. (Also, take this a further evidence of the power of reading while in a creative rut.)
Here’s what Twyla says:
“Beethoven, despite his unruly reputation and wild romantic image, was well organized. He saved everything in a series of notebooks that were organized according to the level of development of the idea. He had notebooks for rough ideas, notebooks for improvements on those ideas, and notebooks for finished ideas, almost as if he was pre-aware of an idea’s early, middle, and late stages.”
