The default mode network (DMN) is the Clown who shows up barefoot, eagerly blurting out hypotheses about what a frog might wear if invited to dinner (not unlike those early emails I lobbed at Stephen). The DMN is your brain’s internal daydream factory: It recruits cortical midline structures, like the medial prefrontal cortex and posterior cingulate, to let thoughts drift.

The executive control network (ECN) is the pragmatic adult in the room, the Editor that marshals frontoparietal systems in pursuit of internal goals and strategic planning.

Source: Why your best ideas come after your worst - Big Think

The full post is worth reading if you care about how the brain channels creativity and shapes ideas. More than that, it gave me a cleaner framework for how my own brain seems to work. I find original posts much harder to write than link posts, and I think a lot of that comes from letting the Editor into the room too soon.

In the last few attempts, I have tried to delay the Editor on purpose. I let the Clown run longer. I let the obvious connections burn off first. Combined with the fact that original thought only seems to appear after those first easy moves, it has been a fruitful experiment.

I think my writing has improved now that I can see this pattern more clearly. I also think I move between these two modes pretty fluidly, and that is an asset. The trick seems to be giving the original thought enough room to arrive before I start the back-and-forth.