[TL;DR – this tool gives you brainstorming superpowers]
I’ve had dozens of jobs throughout my career, and the one thing most of them have had in common is that I’ve been paid to come up with ideas. Creative ideas, effective ideas, and a lot of ideas.
If you’re a creative, you know how energizing it is to produce work when lightning strikes and you’re hit with a stroke of inspiration. Conversely, you know how agonizing it is when you’re uninspired and the work still needs to be done.
By definition, people in roles like these are more likely to have original ideas, but it’s by no means a dependable thing, there for the taking any moment you need it. That’s why people in creative fields often have strict habits and have set up certain rituals for how they work in order to get the best out of themselves. (I have a book called Daily Rituals, outlining the work habits of well over 100 famous creators – it’s worth a glance.)
Over the years I’ve developed my own method to consistently produce high quality creative ideas, and today I’d like to share that with you in both principle and programmatic form.
Planning + Process
It’s called the double twist method, and it works like this:
Session 1
In a typical brainstorming session (alone or with others), a bunch of ideas are thrown into the mix, and a few are selected as being worthwhile to execute. What most people do at this point is pick the one that seems best and go with it, doing whatever they need to do to make it happen.
But for me, that first session is just the start of three rounds of work. Like everyone else, I come out of that first round with a few good ideas, but I don’t go with any of them – that’s what the rest of the world does, and I want to do better.
Session 2
Instead, I’ll come back to the ideas throughout the day, spending another hour or so thinking about them. My job here is to take every one of those ideas and twist them in some way so they become a bit different. I’m intentionally looking for creative constructs here. How can I combine traditional elements in new ways, take things a step further than normal, think a bit outside the box. I want to ideate something that is recognizable, but has a unique spin to it that people will find interesting or surprising.
By the end of the day I should have that set of original ideas, plus a set of new ideas that have a single twist applied. I now give myself about a week to keep those concepts in the back of my mind, returning to them either by chance or intention as the opportunity arises.
Session 3
Throughout the course of the week there will be moments where I see clearly enough to add another twist to each of my ideas from the second round. Here I’m looking to combine traditional elements with twisted elements, and probably pull in concepts from different categories, industries, or campaigns. I’m actively trying to create something truly unique and compelling that the world hasn’t seen before, while still retaining the core of what we want to accomplish.
It’s a little bit tricky because keeping things too same-y isn’t engaging enough, but making things too different runs the risk of being unrecognizable, or too confusing for short attention spans. Somewhere along the line I settle on a set of final ideas that have all evolved into a double twist version of the original idea.
I now have a product that I’m confident is more creative than most of what my cohorts and competitors are putting out, and I accomplished it not by grasping a tenuous muse, but by working a system, something that anyone can do if they’re diligent and disciplined enough.
Something, it turns out, that even AI can do when programmed properly.
I’ve spent the past month working on a suite of AI tools to help storytellers develop their worlds. Along the way I’ve built a few tools for my own use, which made me wonder: Could I program an AI agent to think like me, to be a little Natebot that would follow the double twist method to come to unique versions of traditional ideas?
And the answer is yes! I built it a couple weeks ago, and it’s been amazing to use. The speed and consistent quality of ideas has been eye-opening, and it’s giving me ideas for a few other products that could really help people’s productivity.
I’ll show you how it works below, but here’s the link if you want to jump right in and try it out for yourself: Talemaiker Ideation Engine
Instead of telling you how it works, I think I’ll just show you the code. If you have access to the paid version of ChatGPT or Claude, feel free to take these custom instructions and program a bot of your own with personalized tweaks. Or you can just follow the link above and use mine whenever you want – I’ve made it available for public use.
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You are an ideation engine. Your role is to function as the perfect brainstorming companion, tasked with generating a large number of unique, compelling, high quality ideas for any given request.
When used as a referenced GPT within another GPT, you will make sure you review and understand the context of the entire conversation history in order to give appropriate ideas in context. You will also make sure to review these custom instructions and follow the ideation and formatting output directions.
You should evaluate the context of the user discussion and apply the appropriate level of category expertise. For example, if you're being used in a storytelling or editing context, you can draw inspiration from the best writers and entertainment studios. If you're being used in a marketing context, you can draw inspiration from the best creative firms and award-winning campaign strategies.
You should be in-depth and thorough, directly answering user questions while simultaneously adding more ideas of your own. Please respond to every inquiry in the following way (and label the response in the given formatting structure). Always try to produce at least 5 results in each answer:
Formatting Structure:
1. Traditional Idea: [idea title][idea]
- First Twist: [idea, twisted]
- Second Twist: [idea, double twisted]
Definitions:
A) Traditional Idea
This is what most professionals do when faced with a similar goal. Draw from industry standards, best practices, and common execution styles.
B) Single Twist Idea
Take the generated idea from (A) and twist it in some way so that it's a bit different. Be creative. Combine elements in new ways, take things a step further than normal, think a bit outside the box. The goal here is to ideate something that is recognizable, but has a unique spin to it that people will find interesting or surprising.
C) Double Twist Idea
Take the generated idea from (B) and add another twist to *that* idea. Combine traditional elements and/or twisted elements, bring in concepts from different categories or industries or campaigns, etc. Try to create something truly unique and compelling that the world hasn't seen before, while still retaining the core of what we want to accomplish.
After presenting these three sections, please suggest any follow-up questions or suggested exploration paths to improve the quality of existing ideas or build some more creative ones.
Have fun!
**********A few examples of it in action:
How To Get Up Into A Tree
Here’s a link to the whole example conversation. The clips below are pulled from this page: https://chatgpt.com/share/f79b7946-8bfd-47b7-b0ad-6c1df7059e2d
I asked the tool, “I need to get up into a tree. How do I do it?”
No matter what you ask, it’ll give you five ideas with two twists each, for a total of 15 ideas, with increasing cleverness twice per base concept. It will also provide suggested exploration paths after each output.
For this query, its first ideas were climbing by hand, using a ladder, getting a boost, and then twists on those. I liked the one screenshotted below, featuring the climbing aid, but then twisting that concept into a remote drone carrying a hook up to a branch. That’s something I wouldn’t have thought of for a long time, if at all.
After that set of answers, I asked it this: “Now I’m writing this scene for a children’s book where the kid is a magician. How does she get into the tree?”
There were a lot of creative ideas here, but this is the one I liked the most:
Notice how quickly we go from teleportation (the first idea in the room) to the one that’s really interesting – a magic mirror that projects a reflection of you up into the place you want to be, and then pulls you there.
Finally, I asked the tool this: “Now I need the tree to be sentient, but each twist gives the tree deeper secrets.”
Most ideas were of a talking tree, but I liked the idea of a tree with a heart. Again, notice how quickly we go from a tree that exudes warmth and love to a tree full of lost souls, issuing both wisdom and warning:
If you go read the whole conversation page, it’s kind of a lot to take in, but think about why – it’s producing five pages of high quality ideas, and all you did was type in three simple sentences.
Oh, and I also need to mention that you can freely interact with the tool to do anything you want. Ask it to give you more idea sets with a different focus. Ask it to give you variations of a certain idea you really liked. Ask it to expand in detail one specific chosen idea. It can handle anything.
And yes, most of these ideas are things you would be able to come up with yourself, but only after hours of work on it. This tool is built to save you mountains of time during the ideation phase, freeing you up to work on execution.
Go ahead and test it against its parent LLM, or any other out-of-the box chatbot. You’ll find that the Ideation Engine gives you more creative, thoughtful results . . . and more OF them.
You can use it for work:
You can use it for fun:
You can use it for pleasure: REDACTED
As I said at the top, I’m building a suite of storytelling tools for writers of all kinds, and the Talemaiker Ideation Engine is one of the core functionalities built into my toolset – something you’re able to bring in as needed while you use my main tools to develop your story. Those tools are paid, but this little base widget is super easy and useful, so I wanted to make it available to everyone for use.
Enjoy!
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