Empirical Beginnings - Bottom-Up Thinking For Better Brainstorming

Too often, writers find that they will have more ideas and research than they can ever hope to tackle. We fill notebooks and audio recordings with ideas for later that never see the light of day, no matter how motivated we are in the moment the thought goes to paper.

At first, it feels like an exercise in futility. Head and page set right there, full of half-baked ideas noted in a moment of creative passion, left to rot on the vine like an ignored orchard. Yet, when the time comes to select one of those ideas to develop further, it feels like picking answers on a test where every multiple-choice response is wrong.

I know this because I am this creative. At any given time, I have five to ten newsletter ideas queued, waiting for me to explore in appropriate detail. Notebooks on my bookshelves go back decades with story ideas, character concepts, and poetic explorations of themes I want to go back to someday. Yet, every time I sit down to make my selection for what to explore in my content or for my fiction, I draw a blank.

How could I ever choose? I made all these ideas, so naturally, my bias will tell me all these ideas are worthy.

This wall represents what I believe is the largest obstacle to many writers. It’s hard to get an idea out of the brainstorming and research phase because this collection of ideas doesn’t represent a lack of worthy topics, but rather an unsorted abundance of topics with no clear direction.

Other writers don’t always get to see inside this struggle for others; they only live it. Most readers don’t even know this trouble exists, as they only get to experience the finished product, and therefore their follow-up questions are typically about that final experience.

Fortunately for myself, and hopefully for you, I’ve been trying to solve this exact issue, this trouble of unsorted abundance, by looking back at my experiences and the philosophies of others to derive something that can break a worthy idea from an unsorted gem lost in the junk drawer into something everyone will want to hear more about.

Last month, I put out a newsletter talking about what gives great writing its soul. I borrowed a lot of language from Aristotle for this discussion, as his verbiage on understanding living things mirrors much of how writers talk about their works.

In that issue, I cover the body and soul of writing. If the body of your writing is the grammar, vocabulary, and adherence to good syntax, then the soul is the meaning within the work that all the physical components build towards. Thus, to determine the soul of your writing, you must align your writing’s components and the message itself into its entelechia, the fully realized and harmonized version of itself that communicates the message to both you and your audience entirely.

I gave folks an adaptation of the twelve perplexities Aristotle proposes, but themed to one’s writing, rather than living beings, which I called the Prewriting Interview, designed to help in exactly that.

But notice what those twelve questions take for granted: that you’ve already chosen the piece you’re interrogating. The Prewriting Interview sharpens an idea you already hold in your hands. It never tells you where that idea came from, or how you pulled it out of the pile in the first place.

Surfacing one idea from your unsorted abundance is the floor underneath everything I wrote last month. That process, the creation of something worthy from the bottom-up, is today’s point.

When selecting an idea for worthiness, it’s easy to look for the idea that means the most in its meaning. It feels rigorous and like aligned work to select topics to write about for our principles, as we feel that alignment between message and belief and think it to be truth.

Yet, empirical thinking, the framework I believe makes for a more perfect foundation for writing, suggests the opposite. While selecting for one’s principles in the craft feels correct, the principle is what comes at the end of the ideation, not as its inspiration.

In a way, this sounds counterintuitive. The modern-day scientific method commands that one starts with a hypothesis and derives experimental procedure in the service of testing that hypothesis. It’s through those tests that the reality of the physical world, and that reality’s relation to your hypothesis, becomes clear.

But where does a hypothesis come from? These estimations don’t form from the ether, but rather as a natural result of perceptions and thoughts made in response to those perceptions. In other words, the formation of a hypothesis is a bottom-up approach, starting from something many writers don’t even consider.

In practice, many of us come to brainstorming in a reverse fashion by starting from a principles-first approach rather than an empirical one. Mankind doesn’t isolate itself to just its creation when creating, but instead brings all its experiences, conditioning, and observations to the practice. This lowers the bar to entry on certain ideas as we develop an affinity for certain ideas based on our proclivities and the previous facets of living I just mentioned.

So, you will select ideas based on principles because you believe that they are worthy, when it could be that you select those ideas. After all, they fit your principles, regardless of their worthiness when applied in the real world.

Look to many of the adaptations we’ve seen in cinema over the last ten years and to the fans of the original works claiming malicious tampering to see what I mean. These readers and viewers saw a creative work that seemed to take a known quantity of popular intellectual property and twist it towards what the writers wanted the piece to mean, rather than adapting the original themes to today.

Audience members around for both past and present versions of those adaptations feel the dissonance, while new consumers bounce off the work for a reason that they can’t describe. All they know is that it doesn’t speak to them in a way that the older crowd experienced, and that emptiness leads to apathy. After all, if the work was worthy of attention, wouldn’t they care about seeing more?

So, in an effort to avoid faulty principles clouding one’s judgment, how do you build from the ground up instead?

It starts lower than you’d think, not with an idea, but with what you’ve already been noticing around you.

In a bottom-up approach for brainstorming, the goal is not to take what you’ve been exposed to and apply it to something you believe it should, as covered above. Instead, the goal is to take what you perceive and work it through several stages.

At the most basic or foundational level, you have your perceptions. These are the things that you notice in the world around you, especially something striking or strange. While a single perception can be useful as data, it cannot be the representation of truth, as a single incident can happen outside of what is the real average or trend.

At the next stage, an idea enters into memory. For writers, this represents capture in a note or some other record. My entire Zettelkasten system is this rung of idea generation, as recording something into memory makes it easier to connect perceptions together in the future, so long as the recorder goes back and sorts through their notes with regularity. Otherwise, the building of memory is a trap disguised as work.

Further beyond memory becomes experience as the next rung. Experience represents the collection of perceptions and memories that lead you to the ability to notice a “this” and a “that.” In other words, the first two rungs of perception and memory build you up towards an understanding of trends and patterns that you now hold in your mind, even if you can’t fully explain why.

In the final stage, you have what Aristotle describes as techne, or craft. An idea at this level of understanding contains not just the pattern, but also the cause. You can describe not just the “that,” but also its “why,” meaning the idea is understood at a level beyond just its existence. With the answer to “why” for that idea’s existence in mind, you can teach others that idea from a more complete standpoint, and potentially connect it to others with further time and effort.

Not all of these stages are equal in weight or difficulty. That’s because the kind of work needed to take an idea from one stage to the next requires different levels of effort.

Interestingly, there isn’t one action that pushes your ideas through each of these stages. Instead, there’s a collection of actions you have to take that, combined, move you through those rungs.

The first is observation, in which you gather your raw perceptions from real life, your work, and what you read. These records of physical reality and idea exposure go into a record of your choosing.

The key note for observation, though, is that this action doesn’t apply to specific topics like you might think. Rather, the ideal pursuit in this action is to record moments that stand out, regardless of topic. Biases by topic wrongly narrow down your perception’s ability to gather information, as there’s much to learn even when considering unrelated niches for what they offer as teaching moments.

Once enough observation is enacted and recorded, the next course of action for refining an idea is distinguishment. At this point, a writer takes a body of perceptive records and combs through them, looking for patterns and discarding the one-off occurrences. This discernment is why the perceptive record should include experiences regardless of topic or bias, as the patterns one can notice can exist across topics, and losing part of your record before going into this step means a faulty review is all but guaranteed.

As expected, though, pattern recognition alone isn’t enough to separate worthy ideas from distractions. Once you hold one or more patterns in hand from your distinguishment work, the next step is to seek the reasons why for the pattern via explanation. Synthesizing the reason for a pattern’s occurrence means creating an explanation that applies to all instances for the pattern to occur.

You can see why the recommendation to hold all perceptions in consideration here comes to fruition. Without a variety of topics and niches covered by our operations, you can’t understand how the pattern might apply in different situations.

However, the utility and truth of an explanation in practice can only be proven via testing, though. Taking that explanation you’ve identified and using it as a predictor for future outcomes is how you go about this testing. In practice, you apply your identified explanation to relevant encounters, using the outcomes of those encounters as the comparison to what your pattern tells you you should have seen.

If the pattern doesn’t match the outcome, your pattern doesn’t hold in all cases and requires further explanation work. If that pattern holds in most cases, it’s ready for another stage of refinement: teaching.

Teaching is considered a higher form of understanding because it crosses the boundary from useful for oneself and into useful for the community. It’s one thing to be able to understand how a pattern works, and another to teach it to others without the direct perceptions you’ve used to build that idea and have those people still achieve the same utility from understanding that pattern.

In other words, if an idea in your writing can be understood and applied to real life, and then used by others to achieve similar results under similar conditions despite others not doing the foundational work themselves, your idea has evolved through the four stages of bottom-up development.

However, there are roadblocks along this path that slow down this progression more than others. I think of these points as idea gates, and there are two of them in total.

The four stages and the five actions laid out earlier come together as two parts of the overall process. While the four stages represent what happens with the idea as it molds and shapes through different layers of truth and utility, the five actions are what the writer does to move an idea through those stages. There is never going to be an easy movement across those stages or actions because the work involved in transitioning through the stages, and therefore what actions to take, is unequally weighted.

The idea gates I’m referring to represent the transition points in action that need the greatest amount of effort to move on into the next set of actions. Referencing the five actions, those gates look like this:

The first gate, guarded by observational record and distinguishment for patterns, requires the assembly of patterns to breach. Much like the rally of an army, a pattern doesn’t appear from nothing. Instead, it forms one perception and recorded memory at a time, piece by piece, until the pattern starts to take shape, like soldiers on a front line creating their phalanx. The utilization of distinguishment in ideas and concepts, the separation of one-off appearances from recurring instances, is how those soldiers go about creating their formation.

I use this example of armies because, for one, Aristotle does the same in his works on this concept. However, the main point of its utilization is to show an image of what occurs in the mind during this process. You aren’t taking unrelated ideas and smashing them together in the hopes that something worthy comes about. Instead, you’re allowing the formation to take shape, with your mind simply acting as the tool that notices these shapes.

After all, not everything appears as it really is. In other words, just because there is a perception of something happening doesn’t mean it will happen again, or that it is always how that perception will occur. A one-time event can be the genesis of understanding, or an accidental adherence to a trend that will fall off. It cannot be said which is true until the pattern is distinguished.

The distinguished pattern gives you your writing’s body. The pattern, held against real-world observation and shown to be applicable, guides you towards the words needed to speak about it.

The second gate, held by explanation and testing, leads to the formation of your writing’s soul. While observation and distinguishing patterns can tell you what something is, devising an explanation about it that holds up to rigorous testing tells you why it works, and therefore, why that explanation matters. This occurs because passing this gate means you can teach others how a pattern leads to your explanation, even in cases where people didn’t directly experience the same observations that lead to your explanation.

So, where does that put experience, that third stage in our idea’s four-stage progression? An idea becoming experience means that it evolves into the bridge between distinguishment and explanation, and is thus the final product from breaching the first idea gate. Experience becomes the input needed to begin working the process through the second gate by way of explaining that experience and testing it further.

Thus, the development of an idea from experience to craft that can be understood by others by way of pattern explanation and testing represents an idea’s fully realized state. That is the payoff from the complicated, interwoven process of idea progression and writer action: something founded in truth and reality, ready to make meaning for others.

Said outcome is the goal outlined in the Discerning Writers newsletter and its exploration of the five capacities. A rational writer, one who can teach and not just record or write, is the ultimate goal here. Working ideas through the four stages via the five actions listed here are the steps to reach that height.

So, where does this complicated, empiricist approach to idea generation get us? As mentioned earlier, it gives us the means by which to, at the end of it, create new hypotheses for us to work with. Now that something in the real world has an explanation that will most often hold, it can be taught, further studied, and the depths of its exceptions fully plumbed by a top-down experiment.

The good news is that, for us writers, this means that reading more books on the craft or taking more courses isn’t the only way to develop our ideas. We can test them against real-world outcomes and find whether they hold true or not. Brainstorming, in this approach, becomes a measure of patience and observation, not necessarily adherence to the known.

It could be the case that your next big idea sits dormant in a notebook or an audio recording you left yourself years ago. This realization may not have crystallized for you yet because enough perceptions haven’t rallied into a clear pattern.

I won’t sit here and say that it’s easy. This process is intensive, and obviously more work than just accepting what others have told you. The repetition and the time investment are the cost, and aren’t negotiable.

But adhering to the steps gives far more resilient understanding and explanations.

I’ll be honest: this series of newsletters where I have covered Aristotelian empiricism is the hardest pieces I have ever written. Everything I talked about in this newsletter was necessary for me to experience and do to arrive at this output. I’ve been the kind of person to favor a principles-first approach for my works more often than not in the past, so working backwards to build something from a bottom-up understanding took real effort for me.

So, to try and distill this complex weave into something more tenable, I have made The Idea Ascent Reference document. It’s a one-page reference and tool for you to take to any ideas you want to test against this framework and see where you are along in understanding that idea empirically.

It also lets you know what you need to do next based on where your idea is stuck at five different points so that you know where to put in the hard development work next.

This newsletter is one of the densest I’ve written in a while as it’s meant to be a culmination of everything I found relatable to writing within empiricism. Brainstorming is a facet of writing that gets too little love from a clear, framework-driven perspective, and I believe it is worthy of the same consideration that goes into things like drafting and publication.

So, my challenge for you: go back through your old notes and find out which of the gates you’re stuck at with that idea. Why did you abandon it? Did you only observe it once, or find you couldn’t explain the idea well enough, or perhaps even felt like it wasn’t worth sharing?

Take that idea and go through The Idea Ascent Reference. Unlike the other tools I’ve shared in the past, I can’t promise this one will be a short diagnostic. It’s hard work to shape an idea into something that will stand up to the realities of the real world.

Don’t let that work be the enemy of something worthy of your time and effort.