Accidental Genius

Using Writing to Generate Your Best Ideas, Insight and Content

By: Mark Levy

Narrated by: Bronson Pinchot

Length: 4 hrs and 27 mins

Publisher's summary

When it comes to creating ideas, we hold ourselves back. That's because inside each of us is an internal editor whose job is to forever polish our thoughts, so we sound smart and in control, and so that we fit into society. But what happens when we encounter problems for which such conventional thinking fails us? How can we get unstuck?

For Mark Levy, the answer is freewriting, a technique he's used for years to solve all types of business problems and generate ideas for books, articles, and blog posts.

Freewriting is deceptively simple: Start writing as fast as you can, for as long as you can, about a subject you care deeply about, while ignoring the standard rules of grammar and spelling. Your internal editor won't be able to keep up with your output, and will be temporarily shunted into the background. You'll now be able to think more honestly and resourcefully than before, and will generate breakthrough ideas and solutions that you couldn't have created any other way.

Levy shares six freewriting secrets designed to knock out your editor and let your genius run free. He also includes 15 problem-solving and creativity-stimulating principles you can use if you need more firepower - seven of which are new to this edition - and stories of problems he and others have solved through freewriting.

Also new to this edition: an extensive section on how to refine your freewriting into something you can share with the world. Although Levy originally taught freewriting as a private brainstorming technique, over the years he and his clients have found that, with some tweaking, it's a great way to generate content for books, articles, and other thought-leadership pieces.

©2010 Mark Andrew Levy (P)2010 Audible, Inc

Critic reviews

"I’ve been a fanboy of Accidental Genius and the genius of Mark Levy for five years now, and I couldn’t work without these ideas." (David Meerman Scott, author of The New Rules of Marketing and PR)

Useful for recording concepts

This book can be summarized in a lot more shorter and useful book. I felt like it was unnecessarily stretched just to accomplish a full book.

Too much filler

What could Mark Levy have done to make this a more enjoyable book for you?

Condensed the 'secrets' and got on with the rest of it.

What reaction did this book spark in you? Anger, sadness, disappointment?

Irritation. Mr Levy casually criticises the author from which he discovered the notion of freewriting, Peter Elbow (Writing With Power), for his longwindedness but doesn't seem to do much better himself.

In all fairness to the author, I'm familiar with the concept of freewriting, so listeners who aren't might have a better experience. (I was hoping for some new uses or exercises; probably there are some but I'm ready to bail.) I'm going to have to echo the reviews that said this would have worked better as a blog post or an article. The first six chapters, each based on a 'secret', were more or less summed up by Natalie Goldberg in Writing Down the Bones in less than a page as her 'Rules of Writing Practice'. Again, in the interest of fairness, they aren't exactly the same -- but I really don't think each 'secret' required an entire chapter.

At the very least, I would recommend this as a book rather than in audio. It wasn't that I disliked the narration, but there are several lists that seem useless if you can't easily refer back to them (and there's always the option of skimming with text).

Any additional comments?

These comments only apply to the first 9 chapters, as that's as far as I could manage.