NewView Is the TRIZ for Creativity in Writing
The creative NewView method of writing essays is not confined just to writing essays but applies equally to all writing. And it all goes back to the Greeks, as many things do—–
For instance, Robert Pirsig, in his international bestseller, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, said that Aristotle’s book Rhetoric “killed the creative spirit of… students with this dumb ritual of analysis, this blind, rote, eternal naming of things”—and that applies to writing essays, too, of course.
But there’s more to the Greeks than just Aristotle.
Did you realize that the ancient Greek view of the universe was that nature is perfect, made by the Gods, and that mankind could not improve on it? It’s true, that’s how they saw things. So all their art and culture revolved around searching for the rules of nature and simply imitating them.
Early Christians thought much the same way, believing it was sacrilegious of man to claim to have the Godly ability of creativity.
In the Renaissance, a shift occurred toward accepting the idea of man’s creativity, but real acceptance of the idea didn’t occur until much later. In 1950, J. P. Guilford addressed the American Psychological Association on psychological studies of creativity, and the rest, as the saying goes, is history.
The idea of brainstorming—a group form of generating new ideas—was introduced in 1953 by Alex Osborn, and in 1967 Edward de Bono published his book on lateral thinking.
Perhaps the most significant advancement in creative thinking was made in 1946 by Genrikh Altshuller, a Russian patent clerk, when he published his work on TRIZ, a system for creatively solving engineering problems.
Now, TRIZ has been shortened from the original 1500 principles to a mere 40 major principles—–each of which can be identified as some combination of one or more of my 5 NewView Options. And those Options are so simple you’ll hardly believe that no one else has ever before identified them and organized them as a group of creative processes. But that is the case.
Here they are:
- Reverse
- Add
- Subtract
- Substitute
- Rearrange
Can you believe that’s it? That’s all there are——-really!
But that’s only half the story. The other half includes the 5 OldView Categories. You see, for something to be new, we must be able to compare it to a former version or type that is accepted as old. You know the saying, ‘You can’t explain color to a blind man.’ That is, if there’s nothing shared to compare something to, you can’t talk about it to someone who hasn’t seen or experienced anything that is like it.
And these are the 5 OldView Categories that the 5 NewView Options can’t do without:
- Values
- Expectations
- Experiences
- Reasoning
- Language
These NewViews and OldViews work in short stories, novels, magazine articles, marketing literature, emails, everyday conversations – you name it!
You flat out, simply can’t communicate without doing a NewView Option on an OldView Category! The NewView Options provide a new model for communications, information theory, and general linguistics, as well as for writing and reading. That’s why the NewView Analysis method works so well on short stories, novels, plays, and poetry, as you can see from my book, The Secret DNA of Analyzing Short Stories.
