Many people have the same assumptions in their head about creative people. They think you’re either born with it or you’re not. They think creative people are just “better” at coming up with ideas for some reason. They believe musicians just have “better hearing” and that’s what allows them to learn instruments faster and write more creative songs.
These assumptions aren’t necessarily wrong, but they’re pretty superficial symptoms. I’ve found that the root cause of almost all creative expression (or “creative successes”) is non-linear thinking. Creative people are usually hyperactive people, and their whole deal is non-linear thinking.
What does that mean?
What is “non-linear thinking”?
I write this article because I just experienced a perfect example of this (again). It reminded me of this realization and that many people don’t understand what I mean when I talk about this.
So, I was creating a puzzle book. I’ve been making educational puzzles for a while now (for my educational online store), but those are shorter experiences aimed at teaching young kids some very specific topic. I saw the success of things like Murdoku and decided to try my hand at a proper puzzle book for adults (too).
This idea eventually became Murderooms. I thought the puzzle idea was very strong, easily the best one I had at the moment. It’s basically a tiny murder mystery that you solve by finding words and finding the connections between them, in a very spatial and satisfying way. I decided to create 50 unique puzzles for it (by hand) and sell that for 15–20 bucks.
In true Tiamo fashion, though, I invented a type of puzzle that requires quite some (creative) steps to create. No part of it can really be generated by computer or automated too. This is by design. This makes the puzzles much more interesting and flexible and unique. (More interesting and valuable, I believe, than just letting a computer generate 100 Word Searches that are vaguely cozy-crime themed and selling that.)
But it also means each puzzle has a pretty long list of different elements I need to make …
- Pick a location/story for the “cozy crime” that happened.
- Write a short bit for that. (“Last night an unusual body was found in the library. Bla bla bla …”)
- Figure out the “rooms” of the puzzle. (That is, I cut a letter grid—like a Word Search—into a few regions by drawing lines.)
- Figure out the secret theme of each room.
- Pick a few secret themes that are clear and obvious once you get them (e.g. “Animals” or “Furniture”)
- Find common words within those themes (e.g. “Monkey” and “Sheep”)
- Fill every room with the right words.
- Figure out the suspects.
- Write the Suspect/Witness statements that hint at which words you have to find. (“I was Backstage tuning my guitar!” “A murder!? In my peaceful home!?”)
- Pick (or create) the illustrations for the suspects.
- Place them next to their statement + in the puzzle.
- Add “Evidence” that tells you who is the killer and who is the victim.
- Copy-paste this whole thing to the Solutions (at the back).
- Delete everything the player should not see from the original puzzle (themes, rooms, killer/victim, etc).
- (At higher difficulties, rules change a bit or I introduce a one-off twist once in a while, which adds one or two extra steps.)
That’s a nice list, isn’t it? A nice sensible order in which to do things.
A “linear” person would just go down this list step by step. Every time they create a new puzzle, they check off all these boxes one by one, and then they’re done. Ordered, structured, step-by-step, you never forget anything.
But that’s not me. For the life of me, my brain can’t think like that. I can clearly make a list like this, I can create amazing plans and structures, but my brain just does not work like that.
Instead, when I create a puzzle, I’m hopping around between tasks.
- Some puzzles started with some funny suspect statements, and I just worked back from that.
- Some puzzles started with one “secret theme” I definitely wanted to include, but no idea what the location should be.
- Some puzzles started with a pretty floor plan and so that’s what I made first. (Example: the rooms you create look like tents at a camping.)
- Some puzzles started with a silly story with a joke I thought was fun … but then I still had to invent everything else around it.
- Some puzzles started with a shape for the entire letter grid. (Example: the entire puzzle looks like a spaceship.)
- And so forth, and so forth …
I can’t choose where my brain starts. If you open your mind, inspiration and connections can fly in from anywhere. If you’re naturally born with a messy associative mind, then this is how it functions at its core. Sometimes you’ll do things in a nice order, but often things just don’t arrive that way and your brain refuses. To my brain, it’s completely idiotic to not do the thing it wants to do right now, and instead choose to force its focus on something else, just because some external logic demands it.
I don’t believe there is a single puzzle in that book that was actually made in the linear way (“as the list dictates”). I don’t even think there are two puzzles in the entire book that were made in the same order.
This is what we mean with “non-linear thinking”. Our brains prioritize what most excites or interests us now. Our brains “think ahead” to look for trouble down the road and to solve problems that are yet to come. Our brains decide what they focus on, and it’s often not the thing we should be focusing on, logically speaking.
And so you get a workflow that’s dynamic. You do everything in the wrong order all the time. You know there’s a more sensible order to tasks, but you ignore it by default. And yet … everything gets done!
The downside of this kind of thinking is obviously that it’s hard to track for others. They call it illogical. They want you to do things in the agreed-upon order. If I am making something for myself, then it always gets done. But I’ve had situations in which I work for a boss or project manager, and then the way my brain works keeps clashing with what they want or expect.
It’s as simple as that. When I was still a boy and worked at the grocery story, this was already a problem. They’d tell me to stock product X now, and my brain would be like “but product Y is much closer to me, I’ll just work on that instead” I would almost have a brain freeze or an argument with my manager about it. They would say that I just have to listen to them. Sometimes they were even right and I was wrong: product X might have been milk that needed to stay refrigerated, or something closer to its expiry date. Logically speaking, if you had to place tasks in a linear order, they were right. But my brain simply doesn’t prioritize in that way.
Not so long ago, I was editing a book that has since been traditionally published. I had a professional editor help me out. They went over each chapter first, then sent it to me for checks and adjustments. As expected, they went in the order of the manuscript. Every week they’d do the next few chapters in order, for a few months. Sometimes they barely had anything to say. Sometimes they had mountains of comments and required changes. A logical linear order, right?
Well, no, not to my brain. It thinks more “holistically”. It defaults to taking a step back and looking at the book as a whole, and wants to make the biggest changes across the whole thing first. I want to work a few hours to “improve a character across the entire book”, not waste an hour reading a chapter again that has no real issues. If the ending is the worst part of the book, then let me rewrite that first, and work back to improve what comes before. My brain cannot edit a text in a linear way, from first chapter to last. If you were to record my screen, you would see me jumping around in a way that makes no sense to anybody else.
Needless to say, I had a terrible terrible time trying to conform myself to this way of editing a manuscript. It requires so much discipline and work and energy to force your brain to do something that is the opposite of its default state.
The upside of this kind of thinking is the massive increase in creativity and variety. Because I started each puzzle from a different place, they are all pretty different. Because nothing is rigid or linear, the puzzles end up rich and diverse by default. The first time I accidentally created a puzzle in reverse, I realized … hey, that’s actually a cool way to solve the puzzle too, let’s explore that. It’s what made me discover slight improvements or rule changes regularly.
Whenever a problem is presented, my brain immediately comes up with a thousand different solutions. In fact, this is why most things are not even a problem at all. My brain knows that anything can go wrong and anything is flexible, so it simply adjusts and does things in a different way.
People wonder how creatives come up with hundreds of new ideas a week. How they can see the same thing as anyone else, but walk away with five new Eureka moments. How creatives just … will something new and unique into existence with their bare hands.
Well, here’s your answer! Non-linear thinking is required for that.
Because if you always think in exactly the same steps, in the same order, then you’ll obviously always arrive at the exact same “idea”.
As I said at the start, creative people are usually hyperactive people, and their default state is non-linear thinking. It doesn’t mesh well with many parts of our current society, that’s the downside. But the upside is creativity, it’s problem solving, it’s much more excitement and fresh ideas and variety added to life.
I also hope that, one day, people understand that you can’t just “change” something so fundamental about your brain. If your entire brain thinks non-linearly all the time, then no, it’s not possible to “turn it off” or “suppress” that for hours each day working for a boss. That’s not laziness or lack of discipline/effort. It’s like asking someone who just broke their leg to run a marathon. They could technically do it if they have amazing willpower and strength, but is it a reasonable ask? Would it not be smarter and more practical to just ask them to do different exercises that don’t involve the legs that much? :p
I’m not saying all creative people should lead their own business or have no full-time jobs, of course not. I’m just recommending companies, when hiring such employees, to understand how they think and use that for good, instead of forcing them into linear thinking. The most successful project/company is the one that has a balance of non-linear and linear thinkers. The first category gives you endless ideas and solutions, the second category gets shit done on time and in order if needed ;)
Those were my thoughts for today,
Tiamo