A technique for producing ideas!

This Book was published in 1965 and since then it has helped not only thousands of advertising copywriters  but poets, painters and other professionals unleash their creativity to concise a powerful book of exciting ideas on demand.

This technique seems at a first glance quite simple but it takes into consideration quite an effort. This is a rather short summary and comprises only the main idea. For a further understanding of if you are interested on learning more about this instrument i recommend that you read the book. Unfortunately it is sold out in  several libraries and even in some websites. But summarizing brutally the book into the main ideas you can see that Young smashes down the creative process into the following steps:

1. Recollecting materials. This is a mixture of specific materials and general knowledge, which have to be continuously updated.
2. As a second step he mentions to manipulate these recollected information. Trying to fit the pieces into one big puzzle, contemplating how these pieces match in different combinations.
3. Third, the incubation period. You have to process this information further than the conscious synthetization of the mind. 
4. The Birth of the idea!
5. The constellation and configuration of the idea and the development of shaping the idea into a practical instrument.

Personally I find it very interesting that this process seems quite easy and some people already do it naturally but it help or makes it easier to understand how an idea is build in our minds.  Recently I was reading a study that demonstrated how the different parts of our brain work. And it said that we use two parts of our brain to solve problems and that this part of the brain communicated the best when people were asleep or distracted. That is where the famous expression “sleep on it” comes from. So linking this to Young’s idea it shows that if you have sufficient understanding on subject, you sometimes need to step one step back and relax, sleep or go to the theater (where Sherlock Holmes Ideas mostly came, when he was in the middle of analyzing a problem) to gain an insightful idea.

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James Webb Young is in the tradition of some of our greatest thinkers when he describes the workings of the creative process. The results of many years in advertising have proved to him that the key element in communications success is the production of relevant and dramatic ideas.