For any professional, sitting down and magically producing your best work is very hard to do. Humans, by their very nature, don’t do well with creating original, high quality content. There always has to be some iterative process. Unfortunately, the American portrayal of “original ideas” is often wildly ignorant of the history that directly contradicts the simplified American Dream success story. To break down these preconceptions and find out how “great minds” actually work, let’s look back at what famous inventors actually did.

The American Light Bulb

Back in high school I can remember doing research surrounding electricity and magnetism. This project brought to light (no pun intended) a much different history than I had learned in elementary school. The history of electricity and magnetism is not a history of one person discovering electricity. It involves inventors constantly improving other’s small discoveries.

For example, the classic American inventor Thomas Edison was less of an inventor and more of a genius in improving existing devices. Schools in America often cite this inventor as the person who made the light bulb. The attribution is a huge misrepresentation of what actually happened. Thomas Edison didn’t create the first light bulb, and he most certainly didn’t just invent the concept. In Paris, light bulbs were already being used to illuminate certain parts of the city when Edison took on the task to make a light bulb. What earned Edison a mark in history books was his drastic improvement of the already existing schematics.

When Edison started making light bulbs, his hope was to make something that didn’t burn out within a couple of hours. Edison’s plan was very specific, causing him and his team to collect different materials from around the world to use as a filament. Edison used the process of elimination to come up with his “original” idea. (Technically he did more than this. From what I remember, he also made other improvements such as creating a better vacuum in the light bulb to lower the chances of the filament burning out, but the point still stands.)

If Thomas Edison was not able to just “think through” his problem there is no reason a professional today should be expected to one up history’s greatest minds. So what should the workflow look like for a professional today?

Initial Project Planning

One important component to tackling any large project is organizing it into small pieces to complete one step at a time. As I showed in my first post, I split my book into multiple different sections. From each of those sections, it was easy to divide the task into even smaller sections that could be completed in one day. Take the current task I just completed of writing different characters and their respective backgrounds. Creating all the characters I could ever need for this novel would be an impossible task, so I set out to make ten characters. From that task, I further divided the work to happen over three weeks which translated to roughly three and a half-ish characters a week. These bit sized tasks were much easier to approach.

Creative Infrastructure

Unfortunately, project planning can only push a professional so far. Inevitably every big project will hit a point where creativity ends and infrastructure is needed to create something successful. For writing, infrastructure means the author isn’t furthering the plot, but going back and doing their homework. Rather than writing the main content, an author is building the context for the book they will eventually write. Building infrastructure isn’t particularly exciting, but it is necessary.

For me, the official start of my Unintentional Calamity Project was the official start of building infrastructure. I had already a first draft of the first half of the story and I had rewritten the first chapter multiple times. I also already outlined many things I wanted to see in my story, but the structure was not cohesive. I realized that if I continued forward without infrastructure, I would eventually fall apart.

Despite all the project planning and outlines I had created, I was missing the founding blocks that will make this novel good. Even though I realize the importance of building infrastructure, I still find it hard to just make a character without any context of who they are or why they will be useful. It’s hard to place a brick for the foundation of a house if you don’t know what that house will look like. This is where a natural workflow is necessary.

The Natural Workflow

There are two broad categories I would use to classify workflows: forced and natural. A forced workflow is one that demands action without explanation. This workflow is most commonly seen at low wage jobs for large companies. Employees are often told to perform a task with little to no explanation of why they need to perform that task. A forced workflow can be very effective at optimizing small, simple tasks, but is very ineffective at managing anything complex. Additionally, a forced workflow is often disheartening. Examples of jobs with a forced workflows would be cashiers, sales consultants, or shelf stockers.

A natural workflow is often seen at higher level positions. The work itself does not exist in isolation of all context surrounding it. While a shelf stocker might be directed every week where they should be restocking shelves, a manager will be looking at how restocking might be re-imagined to be more efficient cutting costs of labor and increasing profit margin. There is context and meaning behind decisions, therefore making it much easier to be motivated to do a task that has bigger consequences than just the lack of that job being done.

Changing Forced Workflows to Natural Ones

Regarding the Unintentional Calamity Project, I have found that I accidentally created forced workflows for myself. A couple of weeks ago, I set out to make ten characters without knowing what I would need them for. I realized this was a mistake. Sitting at a computer trying to make a character for some unforeseen reason is near impossible. Instead of continuing this brute force strategy, I changed my line of thinking.

Rather than creating random characters, I decided to create characters branching off the ones I had already established (such as the protagonist). By extending family trees and building a character based off the environment, it was much easier to brainstorm. When I was just building a character just because I should, I was using a forced workflow. Now that I am building characters around pre-existing characters and environments, I switched to a natural workflow. This line of thinking made it very clear what the proper next steps were.

Stop Using Forced Workflows

At the end of the day, natural workflows will produce better results than forced workflows. When I create characters I find they are much more natural if I stem off of prior knowledge rather than trying to create new, random knowledge. Time and time again, scientists and entrepreneurs alike have shown that the assembly line type thinking is inefficient and ineffective compared to modern workflows. Sure, a human can become very efficient at a simple task repeated over and over again, but the work is soul draining and the number of errors a human makes compared to a machine is incomparable.

Schools need to start teaching this difference so professionals such as myself don’t get trapped in a mentality to stunts creative work and encourages inefficient behaviors.