A normal person can tell you lots of factual information about his life, his work, his neighborhood, and his hobbies but very little about the FDA clinical trial process or the moon landing. But do you know who knows a ton about the moon landing? Crazy people who think it’s fake. They don’t have crank opinions because they are misinformed, they have tons and tons of moon-related factual information because they’re cranks. 

Creative ideas are not confined to an exclusive group of talented people. We are all born with innate creative ability; you have only to observe a three-year-old at play to know that.

In many ways, creativity is a muscle with which we’re born. As with any muscle with which we’re born, it can be exercised, built, and made stronger.

Like exercising with a good training partner, the combination of competition and cooperative effort inherent in group brainstorming can inspire us to push our thinking harder and farther.

After years of chasing and yearning,

Of  striving, becoming and attaining,

It gets to a point you take a pause,

And question all you have been made to believe.

• If it doesn’t induce the reader to proceed to the second sentence, your work is dead. Of such a progression of sentences, each tugging the reader forward until he is hooked, a writer constructs that fateful unit, the “lead.”


• Do not count on the reader to stick around. Readers want to know very soon what’s in it for them.