Do you remember lateral thinking? Edward de Bono's ideas about it date from about 1967. I was aware of him and I think I have a paperback book somewhere about LT. I leaned on the idea heavily in 1975 when I was in trouble trying to "write" a play for a non-literate acting company. Theatre Passe Muraille, headed then by Paul Thomson, was a collective group, an ensemble of actors who went out and "researched" the components of a story and then came back and acted them out, putting the loose parts together to form a play.

We hooked up because I wanted to write a play about Reverend Horsburgh, the United Chuarch minister who was arrested, tried and convicted on 4 or 5 out of 27 counts of contributing to juvenile delinquency in his church (in Sarnia). He actually served about 27 days in a federal prison (Kingston) before being acquitted by the Supreme Court of Canada because he had been convicted on the uncorroborated testimony of minors. As I began doing my research before being committed to Passe Muraille, I found that my subject changed like a chameleon according to who was describing him. To some witnesses he was an angel; to others he was the devil incarnate. That's why I asked Passe Muraille to take him on. I needed a collection of minds to approach the character. And that's how I came to lateral thinking.

Once into rehearsal I wasn't allowed to write. The actors went out daily or nightly exploring various aspects they hoped to cover in their production and came back the next day to report physically and audibly on what they had discovered. Nothing in writing, though. It was highly entertaining and I laughed a lot. But we had no script. I started reading and working through lateral thinking, trying to find a handle. I tried de Bono's recommended methods: free association with words, wishful thinking, exaggeration, distortion, reversal and so on. I sent up (yes, sent not set) different circumstances and movements. I asked 'why?' a lot. I tried to fin multiple, parallel answers. Finally, I put paper in my typewriter (this was long before computers) and wrote a scene-by-scene breakdown of a play that didn't exist.

Act One, Scene One, in which the Reverend Horsburgh meets his new congregation and startles some of his listeners.

Like that.

I handed the pages to Paul Thomson with a book of matches so he could burn them if he wished. he read them through two or three times and said, "This makes me feel a whole lot better." He pinned the pages to a wall and the company began to rehearse, improvising dialogue to fit the demands of the scene and also remembering words from their play-time.

At the end of the day, Eric Peterson, one of the lead actors in the company, said, "We actually have a play to rehears and we have three whole days to get it ready for an audience. This has never happened before." They were all ecstatic. I was relieved.

The play went on tour before it came into Toronto to run for a few weeks. After it was over I wrote it down and it was published along with my reporter's notes and the collective experience, titled "The Horsburgh Scandal."

I couldn't have done it without lateral thinking. I thought of it this morning as I swam because I need some of that thinking for the chapter I am working on about epiphanies. Funnily, enough, lateral thinking is one of the suggested synonyms for LT. I didn't know that.

Have I mentioned Julia Cameron yet? She defines her book, The Artist's Way in a sub-title: "A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity". Because it's a project in twelve stages, people have mistaken it for the 12-step program of Alcoholics Anonymous. It's not. And I think it is intended for civilians, that is, for people who are not necessarily writers or artists. But the people I know who have read it are not lay-people. McLuhan predicted that some day everyone would be an artist. That's happening, has happened, and the problem as he also predicted is, who will there be left to read and admire the artist when everyone is an artist? Case in point, the blog.

Everyone writes blogs now. Who wants to read them? Except I guess celebrity blogs - but they limit themselves to tweets, don't they? Or maybe a blog with a narrow focus, like a cooking blog, several of those, none, I suspect, as wildly successful as Julie Powell's riding on Julia Child's apron strings. The best-selling Book of Awesome began as a blog when Canadian writer Neil Pasricha was at a very low point in his life and set himself an assignment to think of something good that happened each day.

I'm no sure about my blog yet. It's a pump-primer, that I know. It's good discipline and useful preparation for my big trip. And I think it's beginning to serve as footnotes to the book I'm working on, about age. I mean, what else could my blog be? I am old and I am writing about what happens to me and what I'm thinking in my twilight years. I've actually quoted from one of my blogs - once - in my book, though I'm not sure whether it will stick.

Back to Julia Cameron. I read it and worked on it when I was still living up north (in Muskoka). There are some exercises she assigns that I don't think I could do now, living in a city as I do, with too many calls on me and too many distractions. But if it appeals to you, check out her assignment for Week 4. "Reading Deprivation" is a doozy. I actually did it twice, about a year apart. Giving up reading is harder than giving up booze, I think. I mean, books are an addiction. Readers used to share what was called a Gutenberg Complex. I'm not sure what you'd call it now since print is going the way of the dodo bird.

Think about it.