I have mentioned that I was turning my creativity car into a creativity train, thereby giving myself way too much leeway to mix metaphors. XD

So, of course, why stop there? =P I’m upgrading said car-cum-train into a jet. With two engines.

I’ve already introduced the concept of one of these engines for boosting my creativity (and productivity): the Zettelkasten. I plan to share in more detail in later posts how I have been setting up my own zettelkasten behind the scenes over here, but I want to take a moment now to introduce the concept behind the other engine.

You see, other writers may be veritable founts of brilliance, but I am not. I feel pretty clueless about, well, just about everything, until I read or watch or listen to or ask about a whole bunch of stuff on a subject. In other words, I’m not naturally smart†.

I do not automagically process new information upon first exposure in such a way that my brain is nothing less than a treasure chest of nuggets of gold, pearls of wisdom, and other trite metaphors of untold riches. =P Rather, my brain is a mess. It’s a mess I’m rather fond of, so I’m not saying I’d rather do without it or anything like that — but it is a bit of a disaster. . . . (I’m so forgetful that I often joke that my memory is not a steel trap so much as a steel sieve. ‘^^)

So, no, I’m not naturally smart†. What I am, though, is a firm believer in my ability to become smarter. It is the only way that I have, in fact, gotten smarter in the past (at least after childhood). (I wasn’t always this obviously brilliant. ^.~) And, because I am a proud nerd, I want to be smart about becoming smarter. =P

This means learning how to learn. Let’s call that meta-learning‡.

In the field of pedagogy, the study of teaching — or, put another way, the theory and practice of learning —, there’s something known as scaffolding. The odds are good that the term comes from civil engineering. In any kind of engineering project, a scaffold is immensely helpful (if not just outright necessary), for it’s what gives the construction workers a place to stand as they’re constructing whatever is they’re constructing (at least, once the project gets to be over, say, a meter off the ground ‘^^). But, of course, that requires first building the scaffold itself. The workers must first build the support structure they will need to stand on to build that final engineering project. In the case of pedagogy, that engineering project is an edifice of knowledge. ^_^

So, yes, I am now in the process of building a scaffold for my own learning. I am dedicating time now, up front, to putting into place a meta-learning system, so that when I finally turn my attention to learning whatever my main topic is — so that, ultimately, I can write about it —, I’ll have a place to stand.

This scaffold is the second engine on my new-and-improved creativity jet here. My meta-learning scaffold and my zettelkasten are the twin engines that (I hope ‘^^) will, with fuel (information about whatever topics I find interesting and want to write about), propel me forward in my writing, so that my dream of becoming a successful author will take off. ٩( ^ᴗ^ )۶

†To be fair, I don’t think anyone is naturally smart, but that is a blog post for another day.

‡There’s a subfield in machine learning of the same name, but I am using this term in a more general sense here.