Creative Creativity: A Daily Guide To Creativity And New Ideas

Reintroduction

I wanted to take a moment to reintroduce myself. My name is David Wahl and I work for amazing stuff maker and seller Archie McPhee. I have recently been focussing my attention on establishing a new literary magazine/blog Monkey Goggles. I have written lots of articles for it. The most popular was my experience with Mick Jagger when I worked at a toy store.

I have a Tumblr blog I use to track interesting images, ideas and links. If you don't know Tumblr, it's a great micro-blogging service that is very simple to use.

I'd love for you to introduce yourself in comments and if you have any web presence, please link to it!

Addition Inspiration

Here's a great method for coming up with new ideas. First, make a list of at least 10 things that you think are awesome. If you can't do that, I feel sorry for you and you might as well not read the rest of this. Seriously, if you can't make a list of 10 things that you love, you should be out looking for things to love.

Now, take your list of 10 and start combining things on the list together. For instance, you might have robots and werewolves on your list, I do, so jumble them up in your head and see what comes out.

Let's say you decide to use those two. The most obvious would be an animatronic robot werewolf that someone might build for a haunted house or for some kind of Scooby Doo-esque trap for a van full of nosy teenagers. But, we can go deeper than that. Werewolves are based on magic, not science. So, when a werewolf bites something it becomes a werewolf not through some biological process but magic connected with the moon.

What if a werewolf bit a robot and that robot became a robo-wolf on nights of the full moon? What if it was all machines? What if it was a toaster or waffle iron with added wolfiness? What if it was only machines shaped like a human? It's magic, so it doesn't have to make sense.

See, all interesting thoughts. 

Now take the items on your list and start combining them and see how they fit together. They are all things you love, so I'm going to assume you know something about them. If nothing works, try a set of three.

Remember, if you don't like the first thought you have, try fitting them together in a different way.

I'm off to write a story about half-toaster, half-wolves combing the countryside looking for human flesh to eat and bread to toast. 

Creativity in Bad Times - Think Like Water

Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way round or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves.

Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water my friend.

- Bruce Lee

In good times, people have the illusion that coming up with a single good idea is enough. A single good idea will make you rich for life or solve a problem permanently. People think of problems as walls and ideas as battering rams to break through them. It's not true, but it's easy to believe it.

Problems do not stand still. They grow and shrink, sometimes they fade away on their own and new problems appear where there were none before.

In bad times, people get frustrated because what worked before is no longer possible. The shifting landscape of the world puts up barrier after barrier and things that have worked for years become impossible, illegal or just plain stop working.

This is when it's easy to fail, because to succeed means having to constantly change and, even more painfully, having to admit that you were wrong.

That's why I think it's important to think about your creativity as if it were water. Instead of charging forward and battering things down, although it is capable of that, water can slowly wear down mountains and is constantly searching for a way to flow forward. It can break through a problem, but can also go under, around or through it. 

Water is patient and seemingly undemanding. It fits perfectly into any situation it's put in. Water changes with the landscape as it changes everything it touches. It isn't upset to have to change its path. 

Creativity is survival. Water survives difficult situations by setting its own conditions for victory. 

If you feel like you're beating your head against a wall, try being water for a while. You might find a crack in the wall and get through, but even if you don't, at least your head won't hurt while you work your way through.