Creative Creativity: Inspiration and Tools for Creativity

Becoming Creative: 6 Easy Steps Toward Becoming Creative

First, I’ll state the obvious. Everyone is creative. There is no person on this Earth that is incapable of coming up with a new idea. However, our entire educational system and most of our culture is set up to squash the creativity out of you. Instead of trying to learn how to be creative, you really just have to remember how to be creative.

If you have a nagging voice in the back of your head telling you to be more creative, here are 6 simple tips that will push you toward becoming a passionate, creative person.

1. Lower your anxiety level. Fear, insecurity and stress are all creativity killers. Do you have some issue or worry in your life that you could easily solve? It doesn't have to be a big issue, take care of little things. Make sure your car never gets below a quarter tank of gas so the empty light never comes on. Avoid caffeine or other stimulants. Breathe deeply. Meditate. Take care of little problems before they become big problems. The less anxiety you have, the more you'll be able to focus on being creative.

2. Ask more and better questions. Asking questions is the keystone of creative thought. The only way to get something new is to question the old. Every time you ask a question you force yourself to consider other perspectives and to question your preconceptions. Don’t rely on other people’s answers, really figure it out for yourself. Here are some questions to get you started: How can I make this better? Why do we do it this way? Why am I the greatest human being ever to exist?

3. Try new things. Do something that you have never done before. This can be as extreme as finding a new job or as simple as trying Indonesian food. Read a book on a topic you know nothing about. Strike up a conversation with a stranger and ask him/her about his/her past. Trying new things will expand your references and perspective. Finding new ways of looking at the world increases the value of what you already know by letting you find new uses for it.

4. Figure out what you love doing and what makes you happy. This should be an easy task, but some people can’t list more than two or three things. Shouldn’t you be able to fill up a full sheet of paper, both sides, with things that make you happy? If you can only come up with a few, focus on finding more. Your creativity follows your passion and happiness. Artistic expression is its own benefit. It’s the rare artist that makes a living from his art, so passion and happiness are the only two real reasons to create.

5. Forget about your lame excuses. Really, stop with the excuses. They are all lame. There are many people that have it worse than you do that manage to do incredible things.

6. Actually do something. This is the step that actually turns you into a creative person. Thinking about doing something doesn’t make you creative. Talking about doing something won’t do it. The only way to become a creative person is to actually create something. This is the only step that matters. Pick up that pencil and draw! Write! Dance! Carve a robot from a bar of soap! It doesn’t matter! DO IT NOW!

Omnipelagos: Mapping the Connection Between Ideas

 

Omnipelagos is an unusual search engine that lets you find "six degrees of separation" type connections between any two terms you enter. It's a great way to find out all kinds of random trivia.

  For writers, it could be used either for brainstorming or finding a way to work together seemingly unrelated topics. For comedians, it's a source of instant material.

Here's an example of the output, how is creativity related to squirrels?

Creativity

[Creativity in psychology & cognitive science / Neurobiology of creativity] frontal lobe, and they are able to modulate neurotransmitters such as norepinephrine in their frontal lobe.

Neurotransmitter

chemicals that are used to relay, amplify and modulate electrical signals between a neuron and another cell.

Electricity

[Diet and feeding behavior] Squirrels are often the cause of electricity outages. The animals will enter transformers or capacitors looking for food

Squirrel

David Sedaris Inteview

There's a great interview with David Sedaris in The Missouri Review about his life and how he works. Also, some great discussion on fiction versus non-fiction. One interesting exchange was about the need to wait before your write about something. I think this is one of the big problems with blogs and blog culture. People feel like they need to fill the space in a blog, so they often rush to post about something without letting it percolate.  Here's what Sedaris had to say:

Interviewer: Do you ever feel you need to wait before you can write about certain events, or about things in your own life?

Sedaris: Definitely. I generally have to wait until I can laugh about something or put it into some kind of perspective. There are stories that I try to write every summer. I turn back to these stories and I wind up thinking, "Nope, not time yet." There's this woman named Helen who lived across the hall from us in New York, and I wrote about her for Esquire seven years ago. I worked on it really hard, but it just wasn't right. It's not time to write about Helen yet. The first magazine thing I ever did at Esquire was to spend a week at the morgue in Phoenix. I'm not a reporter, and I felt this pressure to flatter the people who worked there. They were very kind to me. Every summer I think, okay, maybe now I can write that story, but it's not time yet. Sometimes I'll try to force it. Then other times, wham, all of a sudden I'm able and the time is right. I tried to write about going to the Anne Frank House right after I went, but it took me two years. Was it Flannery O'Connor who said that a writer's job is not to have an experience but to contemplate experiences? That seems right to me—trying to make sense of it all. Then, too, it's all about finding the first line.

One of the great things about waiting to write about something is that you get to find out the actual end of a story. Blogs encourage you to record what happens to you, but without the luxury of knowing the impact it will actually have on you. How you are is often not as interesting as what made you that way.

The next time you sit down to write and it's just not coming, maybe it's still too soon. Set it aside and try again later. It's not writer's block, it's just not ready yet.

The Missouri Review

More Free Movie and Television Scripts

Daily Script features a different movie or television script every day. I found some scripts here that I haven't found on other sites and I like the format of a featured script of the day.

The television script section features a lot of pilots. It also has two episodes of the American version of The Office which I found extremely interesting reading. Just from a plotting standpoint, the subtle intertwining of stories is amazing when you dissect it. If you like a script, download it, it might not be there the next time you visit.

Daily Script

Clever Decorating for Small Apartments

Apartment Therapy is having a Smallest, Coolest Apartment Contest. They are trying to find the most beautifully and creatively decorated apartments that are smaller than 650 sq feet (60 sq meters).  They go from classy to eclectic and all of them use those tiny spaces amazingly well. Don't forget to scroll down, each entry ends with a floor plan for the space.

Even if you aren't interested in decorating, it's always fun to be nosey and poke around in other people's stuff.

View Contest Entries
(link via Awesome!)

Learning to Draw

People often say wistfully that they wish they could draw, as if the ability to draw were some kind of inherited trait that you're either born with or you're not. On the contrary, drawing is a skill that you can learn, like learning to read or learning a new language.

Assuming you want to teach yourself to draw, where should you start? Some books on creativity make the mistake of assuming that the reader's main problem is being creatively blocked or unmotivated. These kinds of books give out advice to do things like make an "artist's date" with yourself to visit a favorite gallery or treat yourself to new art supplies in order to get inspired.

I think a more common problem for most people is frustration with one's skill level. If you buy a brand new sketchbook, and you hate the drawings you produce, you're going to lose the motivation to keep drawing.

So, if you're looking for a good art instruction book, I suggest finding one that offers concrete advice and drawing exercises, not just encouragement.

Here are the three best books on learning to draw that I've come across:

1. Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards

This book is considered a classic, and is used in many introductory art classes. Edwards emphasizes drawing what you see, not the symbols for various objects that you learn as a child.

sample exercise: Develop your awareness of negative space by drawing a face vase.

2. Keys to Drawing with Imagination by Bert Dodson

Let's say you can draw things in front of you; you can draw your friends, a chair, your shoes...

But what if you want to draw something out of your imagination? Dodson's book shows you how to take your doodles and old sketches and transform them into imaginative scenes. His book emphasizes drawing as a process of transforming things.

sample exercise: Variations on a theme. Redo a drawing several times playing around with the point of view, scale, and framing, or use role reversals. For example, Dodson started out with a sketch of a man being attacked by birds. In one version, he switched the perspective to a giant bird being attacked by miniature flying men. In another version, the man is pursued by bird shaped clouds rather than real birds.
(read more exercises here)

3. Experimental Drawing by Robert Kaupelis

The vast majority of art instruction books assume you want to draw like an old master, but what if you'd rather draw like Matisse or Modigliani?

By providing exercises for learning both traditional and experimental approaches to drawing, this book encourages you to develop your own style of drawing.

Write A Manifesto: Creativity Tip

Sometimes a lack of limitations on your art is stifling. Faced with an infinite number of possibilities, your brain refuses to make any decisions. Define down what you're doing with a manifesto!

At its most base level, a manifesto is a written declaration of your principles and intentions. However, they can be a blast! Not only do you get to set forth what you believe, without justifying it, but you can also denounce everything you don't like! You can use it focus your passion and fill yourself with a sense of purpose.

While you are writing it use the strongest possible language. Take a look at this bit from Manifesto of the Futurist Painters:

We will fight with all our might the fanatical, senseless and snobbish religion of the past, a religion encouraged by the vicious existence of museums. We rebel against that spineless worshipping of old canvases, old statues and old bric-a-brac, against everything which is filthy and worm-ridden and corroded by time. We consider the habitual contempt for everything which is young, new and burning with life to be unjust and even criminal.

We are sickened by the foul laziness of artists, who, ever since the sixteenth century, have endlessly exploited the glories of the ancient Romans.

It doesn't mean you have to start your own artistic movement, you can use that kind of strong language whether you are knitting, styling hair or tracing your hand on a paper plate to make Thanksgiving turkeys.

Something like:

We violently reject the mass-produced Thanksgiving turkey tchotskies available at Hallmark stores. They exist as stagnant nothings without souls. At a time when thankfulness is supposed to be at the forefront of our very beings, instead we find ourselves faced with a tiny feathered tryptophan drenched disappointments. The answer is the power and cosmic beauty of a hand traced turkey! Is not the hand an avenue into the self? Is not coloring in that hand an expression of all the is good? Making a hand turkey is a celebration of thankfulness that will resound across the universe.

And so on...

Here are a couple more examples:

The Surrealist Manifesto

DADA Manifesto

If you need any help, just comment and I'll be happy to contribute to your manifesto.

Art From The Office

Art From The Workplace is an online gallery for art created while you are on the clock, bored at your job. Most of them are made using supplies that any office would have.  If nothing else, this art proves that boredom and limited time can be motivations for creativity. As they say, "May these images serve as a chant to the triumph of the human spirit against adversity!"

If you, or someone you know, creates office art that deserves to be featured, email it to artworkfromtheworkplace@googlemail.com. Let me know if you get featured.

Another quote from the site:

This blog is a celebration of the individual’s endeavor to make a right out of a wrong. An expression of respect and admiration towards those individuals who manage to “be there” while at the same time being completely absent; retreated into their own minds. Creating beauty. To all of you: thank you for showing the rest of us that there is hope.

Art From the Workplace

Stephen Jay Gould on Creativity

From the book Uncommon Genius by Denise Shekerjian, Stephen Jay Gould discusses creativity.

Look, he explained, there is so much nonsense circulating about the creative process. People are all caught up in the Strum and Drang of it, the so-called magic of inspiration, this utterly ridiculous fantasy of a muse:
"Twaddle. Absolute twaddle and one of the worst heritages of Romanticism."

If I have any insight at all to contribute, he continued, it is this: find out what you're really good at and stick to it.
---

Gould elaborated: "Any human being is really good at certain things. The problem is that the things you're good at come naturally. And since most people are pretty modest and not an arrogant s.o.b. like me, what comes naturally you don't see as a special skill. It's just you. It's what you've always done."

He goes on to talk about how instead of people celebrating what they can do they get jealous and angry about what they can't do. Don't waste time trying to do something that you are never going to be able to do well, focus on developing the skills that come naturally.

In other words, find out what you're really good at and stick to it.

Build Your Own Stonehenge Kit

This amazing Build Your Own Stonehenge Kit is only $6.95 and you get the opportunity to construct a smaller and crappier version of everyone's favorite Neolithic monument right on the coffee table in your living room. You get a booklet explaining the history and science of Stonehenge, a green mat and all the tiny tiny stones you need to build your own pagan worship center for tiny tiny druids.

You could even reenact the best scene from Spinal Tap if you were so inclined.

Of course, if you want something that will impress the neighbors you could just follow the directions in Family Education's article on how to build your own Stonehenge. They leave the scale to you, choosing to focus on placement.

Build Your Own Tiny TIny Stonehenge Kit