(2021-11-01) Johnson How Do You Capture Your Hunches

Steven Johnson: How Do You Capture Your Hunches? One of the opening chapters of my book Where Good Ideas Come From was called “The Slow Hunch,” which was my attempt to question the centrality of “eureka” moments in the way we think about creativity.

big ideas tended to come into the world as hunches — hints of something larger, not fully-realized. And they tended to stay in that state for months, years even

The problem with hunches is that they are inevitably the first thing you forget — precisely because they’re not fully-fledged.

you need to have some kind of system for revisiting those ideas, letting them evolve and collide with other hunches.

I’ll give you one example from my own work. About seven or eight years ago I came up with the idea for the structure of a narrative history book. I thought of it as a kind of hourglass, where at the center of the story there would be a single event

there was nothing I could do with it, because the book didn’t have anything resembling a subject matter; it was just a vague sense of how the architecture could work. But I wrote it down in my “spark file”.

A few years later, it occurred to me that one way the structure might work is if the event at the center of the story was a crime of some sort: most crimes tend to be brief in duration

And so in my spare time, I started dabbling around the archives, looking for a crime that could fit the bill.

And one day, years and years after I’d written down the original hunch, I stumbled across the story of the pirate Henry Every and his attack on an Indian treasure ship in 1696.

Three years later, that became Enemy Of All Mankind, which may well be my favorite of all the books I’ve written.

when you sit down to do a creative inventory—to figure out if you’re using the right tools, and adopting the right routines and work habits to manage the flow of ideas through your life—the first place to start is with how you are capturing and storing your own hunches.

Suggested tools:

Devonthink. I used this wonderful software for many years

Roam. Maybe the most interesting and ambitious attempts at building a “tool for thought” in recent years

Obsidian. I haven’t played with this yet, but it’s come up a lot in conversations

Bear. Another Markdown-based app that I’ve heard great things about

I tinkered with Evernote a bit before trying to build my own version of it, a web app called Findings that ultimately merged with Instapaper.

Now I generally use the Notes app as my primary “spark file” just because it’s ubiquitous on all my devices and very easy to capture both my own ideas and clips from around the web or social media

graduating up to Scrivener for longer projects.

VoiceMemos. My musician friends always have some kind of VoiceMemo app on call to capture their musical version of a slow hunch: a fragment of a melody, an idea for a string part.