Horizontal Thinking

Generating Ideas That Go Nowhere to Make Room For The Better Ideas

Horizontal thinking might be one of my favorite thinking exercises for idea generation and creativity. It is also one I find not a lot of people have experience with, or even understand what it is for. So, let’s quickly talk about how our brains work, and then jump into why this exercise can be so powerful.

Your brain is wired to take shortcuts. You can call this lazy, or you can call it efficient. Either way, that’s what it does. It finds the fastest ways to accomplish its goals, and it sticks with those ways. That’s literally how habits form. It’s an automation your brain is running. (We could go into why your brain finds it so useful to form these automations and how you accidentally tell it that bad habits are a good thing… but we don’t have the time this morning, and I’m distinctly unqualified to perform bio-psychology deep dives.)

Unfortunately, this can be detrimental to creative thinking. Creative thinking requires us to break outside our normal lanes and consider alternatives. Maybe this is a better way of unloading the dishwasher, or maybe it is how to bring your winding period piece drama to a satisfying conclusion. In either of those endeavors, your brain is looking for the most succinct way to accomplish its task. And it does this based on linking together ideas that it knows have worked in the past.

Idea linking is vertical thinking. It is a chain of inputs that lead one into another, progressing towards a predetermined goal. Horizontal thinking is exactly the opposite.

When you practice horizontal thinking, what you want to do is short circuit your brain’s need to push an idea forward to its next step for the sake of efficiency. Rather, what you are going to do is just keep coming up with new ideas that are tangentially related, but hopefully have nothing to do with one another.

Here is how it works. First, write down the absolute first thing that pops into your head. Maybe it’s an orange wheelbarrow. Vertical thinking would be, ‘what do I do with this orange wheelbarrow? Where is it taking me? What do I put in it?’ But we are going to think horizontally, so instead consider what else it reminds you of. For me, it’s landscaping, so the next thing I think of are purple azaleas. Which make me think of summer afternoons, which make me think of sprinklers, which make think of water. Now I’m thinking about the sea, and what lives beneath the water. Now I’m thinking about sea monsters. We refer to space as the great dark gulfs, what if space were like the sea? What if there were giant serpents in space?

Wait, how did we get here from the orange wheelbarrow?

Exactly.

By refusing to trail each individual idea down its expected tangent, I forced my brain to keep coming up with new ideas. Eventually I arrive at an idea that is truly compelling and represents something I want to actually write about.

Try this the next time you are stuck on your manuscript. Take whatever scene you find is aggravating your writers’ block, and read the last few sentences of it. Then begin to think horizontally about what could happen next.

You’ll probably arrive at a pretty fantastical place. And that’s okay! You’re not generating ideas with the expectation that one will be the absolute next step in your work. You’re doing it to force your brain out of its thinking habits and start churning up new ideas. This creative churn starts the engine back up for your brain to come up with an actual solution to your writers’ block.

You see, your mind works best when it is being worked. That’s why writing starts to come easier once you’ve made a consistent habit of it. Okay, well, to speak to the earlier part of this article, part of that reason is because you’ve made a habit out of it, and your brain is automating itself into writer mode.

…But also! This means you can make a habit out of creativity! You can teach your brain to begin to think laterally, rather than strictly vertically. The more you try to come up with novel solutions to problems, the more you find you are coming up with strange, intriguing new ideas! Your mind will start finding interesting relationships between seemingly unrelated things, and bring you to new spaces of creativity.

So, in a way, Horizontal Thinking is partially about forming a new habit. It is also about breaking outside an existing habit that might be stopping up your idea faucet.

Here’s the key takeaway. If you are suffering from writers’ block, your brain may be trying to arrive at a conclusion it expects to be there because of thinking habits you have formed. Whether it is through horizontal thinking, or through other alternative idea generation methods, you need to break your brain out of the space it is in, and force it to consider alternatives. What if an earthquake opens up beneath your characters’ feet and swallows them all into the depths of a long lost city? Is that a good idea for your Victorian historical fiction? Probably not. But at least now you’re thinking!

Horizontal thinking is, in my opinion, the purest act of idea generation. None of the ideas you create should lead anywhere. They should just generate more ideas. And any entrepreneur worth their salt will tell you that for every 50 ideas you have for a business, 49 of them are bad. The same may not be completely true for writing, but the metaphor still works. Sometimes coming up with ideas just for the sake of coming up with ideas, even some bad ones, helps your mind forge new pathways.

This is my challenge to you. Practice horizontal thinking for seven minutes today. Sit down with a piece of paper, write the first FIRST thing that comes to mind. Then write down the first thing that reminds you of. Do NOT try and advance any particular idea- don’t go racing down the ‘what next’ trail! Instead of thinking ‘what next’, instead think ‘what else’. The ‘else’ is your alternative idea. And it might lead you to your next big creative breakthrough.