If you can ImageStream (and 99.999% of everyone can after learning the simple procedure), you can always start any inspired creative project at will without waiting for inspiration. You can always spill forward with what comes next, and never have to pause or stall out until you've finished. At the finish, you can always discover what you've left out and whether you prefer to include or leave it out.

• When you ask your ImageStreaming faculties a question, they ALWAYS respond with an image.

• You can always ask your ImageStreaming faculties such questions as the following, and get an image —
  
  
  • What do I really want to say here?
  • What's the main point I REALLY want to make here?
  • How best do I start this?
  • What comes next here?
  • What's the most important thing I've left out here?
  
  and ALWAYS get an image as answer.

• Write or sketch a few sentences of description of that image, and what that image means in answer to that question will HIT you and you're on your merry way!

Who, amongst our colleagues and participants here, has written and published one or more books? Will not every one of you who has done so agree that the creating of that first book or so did more than has almost anything else to focus and develop your thoughts, your perceptions, your awarenesses—not only on the topic you wrote on but generally?

Every one of you has seen things which no one else has seen, and thought thoughts which no one else has thought. Some of these are valuable, even invaluable.

Whoever here that's interested in personal development and in building personal competencies: if you have not yet created such a book, then please, time is slipping away. Create such a book!

Many of us here have remarked transformative experiences, those experiences stemming from a lot of very different causes. I respectfully submit that one of the most powerfully transformative experiences is to create a book, especially on something that is important to you. Especially the first book or so—but I've found even after fifty-some published books that each new book is STILL a further transformative experience, powerfully further focusing my thoughts, my perceptions and awarenesses. That process can do as well for you.

It's not me that's anything special. I'm a very ordinary person who has gotten into some very extraordinary things. Some of those things are directly transformative in their own right, but one of the very strongest for me has been the creating of books which I've known to the depths of my being were meaningful.

Worlds await you.

Here are a few suggested ways to get yourself started on your own wonderful journey of transformation:

1. Never stall out. Since you ImageStream and now can always, every time, get an answer in sensory images and impressions, whether understood or not,
   • You can always ask your faculties, "How do I get started in this?" and start describing what comes in response to that question. Within a few sentences you have full inspiration underway. (Forgive this redundandundandundancy, but this simple point cannot be emphasized enough!)

   • You can always ask your faculties, "What comes next?" and start describing what comes in response to that question. Never let yourself be stalled for more than 30 seconds, at any point.

   • You can always ask your faculties, "What's the most key thing I've left out or underplayed?" and start describing what comes in response to that question. Within a few sentences you will have a clear picture, clear enough also to know whether you want to include the issue in question or to leave the current draft intact.

   Practice of ImageStreaming also brings up your vocabulary, language comprehension and expressive skills, all very useful to your own writing.

2. Don't worry about getting your writing right until after you've gotten the first draft down on paper or into your computer. Not only is "most writing re-writing":  Freenoting and Windtunneling are pretty good formats for flowing forward in and for digesting any event, any development, any issue. Much of the resulting content you can pull into your main draft afterward.

3. Borrowing a page from Peter Elbow and his excellent book and program, Writing Without Teachers:  draft an essay and write it out to its conclusion. Take that conclusion as a starting point for a new essay, write IT out to its conclusion. Take THAT conclusion as a starting point for a new essay, write THAT out to its conclusion... Within very few iterations, you will be really saying what you mean, saying some truly essential things. Be astonished at the powerful stuff you have it within you to say.

4. Personal, first-hand observation and experience is worth 27 times as much as an equal volume of other people's reported wisdom and information.

5. Experiment with DEAM (Double Entry A-Ha! Method):  On one sheet of paper begin the writing out of a one-line description of your topic or sub-topic, but give precedence to recording, on a second sheet of paper, all the associations and stray thoughts that occur to you. By the time you are halfway through writing that one-line description of topic or subtopic, you may have two or three pages of ideas recorded on the other paper. These secondary associations and ideas always occur to you anyhow, but pass through invisibly and are gone unless you use something like the piecemeal writing of that one-line description on one sheet to "hold open the windows of your perception" so you can notice the associated thoughts and perceptions passing through them. Your determination to capture notice of these and write them down plays an important part in your success with the DEAM process.

6. Write in sustained all-out bursts, for hours, if possible days at a time, to capture as much as possible of your associated thoughts. Your re-writing can be on some sort of regular schedule if you like—with more of the contents already anchored on paper, less is likely to be lost—but make your creative writing like a spouting firehose and get into record as much as possible of that whole pattern of inspiration and associated ideas that have just come to you.

7. I find I do my own best work in the hour or so before waking, each morning. How to activate that? Whether or not you remember anything from before you woke, have notepad or audio recorder right where you can make that the focus of your first conscious act in the mornings. Speak or scribble a few sentences on anything that occurs to you to say, or anything even if nothing has occurred to you to say—and suddenly your whole gestalt of inspiration and actualization clicks into place. Get that down on paper or into the computer immediately, defer that first cup of coffee until afterward.

8. In sustained bursts of creatively writing, get on a roll. Stay on that roll as long as you can. When you fall off that roll, get back on it as immediately as possible, until that whole inspired gestalt is safely on paper or in your computer.

Another example:  Check out the more conventional but invaluable suggestions contained in Writer's Market, available from the reference room of any public library.

There is also all the information contained in my CoreBook with Mark Bossert, End Writer's Block Forever!, which has become an entire self-contained course of creativity methods for writers.

This wee little bit here, however, should be enough to get you started; and from there, if you sustain your writing-related activities, feedback can teach you the rest of what you need to know. Please let me know from time to time how you are doing with this. Live long and prosper, in an increasingly richly interesting world!

Main suggested readings:

• The creativity-methods course for writers, End Writer's Block Forever!
• The main collection of articles on ImageStreaming comprises an entire curriculum on this phenomenon and basic tool.
• Here is an additional collection of highly useful articles and instructions on ImageStreaming.