Storyworthy Summary (C4): Crash and Burn

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Crash and Burn is an exercise you can use to remember storyworthy moments from your life.

It’s essentially stream-of-consciousness writing.

The most basic form of stream-of-consciousness writing is to just write down whatever comes into your mind.

With Crash and Burn we apply several rules to adapt stream-of-consciousness writing for generating story ideas.

While doing Crash and Burn, let unexpected ideas flood in. They will intersect and overlap, and that is good.

It doesn’t matter how curious you are to explore the current idea, you must let it go as soon as a new one comes ‘crashing’ in - no matter how boring the new idea is.

This is the way that old memories and new ideas come to light.

Write down every idea that enters your mind, no matter how humiliating or crazy you think it is.

Also, don’t worry about grammar, spelling, punctuation, and similar things. None of that matters and stopping to fix these things will only hinder your progress.

There is no preparation or self-monitoring. Just write down everything as it comes in.

While you’re doing Crash and Burn, never stop writing. Even when your mind is drawing a blank, you must keep going.

How?

When you have no other thoughts in your mind, start writing out a list of things.

It doesn’t matter what the list is: colors, numbers (in word form), animals, countries, etc.

Think of what you will use before you start writing so if your mind goes blank you won’t have to think about what list to start writing - you’ll just start writing it out.

As you list items on the page, eventually (and usually quite quickly) something will trigger a thought or memory which you can continue writing about.

Sam’s Note: The author states that although he uses a keyboard most of the time, some people find that using a pen and paper triggers greater creativity.

I personally find that my writing is too messy and I often can’t keep up with my thoughts, so I use a keyboard.

Try them both out and choose what you prefer.

Set a timer for ten minutes and start writing.

Do it every day on top of your Homework for Life.

Now you are dedicating 15-minutes of your life every day to generating story ideas. But you are doing much more than that.

You are the sum of your experiences. The more you uncover about your past, the better you will know yourself, and the more full your life will become.

Trust me. It’s worth it.

Read the next chapter here.

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