This isn’t a perfect list. It’s not “how to become a creative genius overnight,” this is just ways I have personally seen that have helped me to become a more creative person with more creative ideas. The advice I have here is to help you by developing thought processes and mindsets to put yourself in the right head-space to make new ideas. I’ll also preface this by saying that it’ll enhance the opportunities you have and the tools you have as you learn to recognize the tools you find along the way.
Table of Contents
- Expansion: Learn
- Always Write It
- Boredom Isn’t Your Enemy but It Can Be
- Originality Isn’t The End All Be All of Story Telling
- Make your stories with the ideas you build up, but trim the fat.
Expansion: Learn!!!
If you have questions about a topic, if you have pieces you’ve never filled in about topics in your life, if you have expanding questions about a topic, follow it. See where that curiosity and question leads and you’ll be grateful that you did. We live in an age of what I’d call The Great Funnel. You only see things that you’ve seen before or things that have loose connections to the things you’ve already seen due to the algorithms and recommendations . In the same way some creatures steal and consume the poison of other beasts they hunt for their defense, all of the information and everything you consume intellectually becomes an instrument in your hands while you’re writing.
ALWAYS Write It
No matter how creative you are, you usually don’t just come up with every concept, all of the principles and the entire plot all at once. J.K. Rowling had a box of ideas over the course of years that finally manifested itself as a book series and that series is one of the best selling books across the world. I guarantee you, what is inside that box is 90% crap, as we’ve seen in recent years where she treats everything she put in that box like it’s gold. Probably around 65% of what’s in that box isn’t in the books in the same way it’s written and that’s because ideas evolve, but they need to survive today for that evolution to take place. Every form the idea has, even when you want to smack yourself for making it today, has the potential that makes it genius when it’s refined. One of my most frequent sayings in life is that ideas are like Legos. Everything is made of pieces, and there’s a way to use every single one. Along the same vein, don’t feel obligated to make full use out of everything,
Boredom isn’t your enemy, but it can be
More than anything, boredom is the best friend of writing, because imagination comes usually when you’ve got nothing else going on. The best way to do this is by practicing meditation. According to an article on Headspace entitled “Meditation for Creativity,” “By using meditation for creativity, we can calm the mind to create the stillness and clarity that then allows us to access our creative inspiration, giving it the space it needs to float to the top.” Creativity is the brain’s attempt at entertainment when no other entertainment is happening. If your brain is constantly taking in information it’ll be too busy processing to create. I’ve taken to having some periods of meditation or just trying to clear my head as the day goes and that’s helped me tremendously as I pursue my own writing. That being said, if you’re in the middle of making your story and your story is getting extremely boring at times, maybe step away and mark where the last point was where you felt it was going alright and rewrite segments so it isn’t steeped in the writer’s (your) burnout. At the point when you feel bored writing your own stories, perhaps it’s time to see what led to this and even take a step back to find the reasons you loved it to begin with. Boredom is an amazing motivator for creativity, but if your direction is leading you to boredom, your audience will probably share the feeling.
Originality isn’t the end all be all of story telling
The number of times in general media that the concept of a fireball has been used is so ridiculously frequent that it sounds like nothing is ever created. “A thing that shoots fire” is such a commonly used idea that you’d be hard pressed to find a single comic book or story with magic that doesn’t use this in some fashion. As I said in one of the previous points, everything is made out of legos. Even with the same pieces, you can create something unique and different. Originality doesn’t mean you’ve made everything from the ground up. Part of storytelling is making ideas that paint a picture in the reader’s head or in comics, to make something the person is able to understand, so it necessitates a lack of true originality. The difference between originality and creativity is that originality is a new use of the materials which you’ve obtained over your life, so while you can say “this is a lot like ___” that doesn’t mean the idea is bad or that it’s not original. Much like most burgers, you can make endless varieties even if it’s all the same dish. The question as a writer is what you do with these ingredients.
Make your stories with the ideas you build up, but trim the fat.
Most writers have dozens of ideas that never see use. That’s alright, and even if you want to use an idea and it’s not right to use it, it may turn up later that there is a use for it, just not at that moment. What’s the point of framing this in the ideation stage? Because some people think that every idea needs to be suited to what the immediate project demands when it’s possible you’ll just make hundreds of unrelated ideas instead. The ideas influence the story, and making a story means picking, processing, and then utilizing ideas from the bank you’ve filled up over time. Don’t disqualify good ideas from your mind or from prompts you’ve been given just because you think they don’t have what it takes to be used for the story. Most of the time those same ideas become masterpieces in projects down the line.
Summary
Creativity is the consistent addition of tools and instruments to an arsenal and discovering ways to use the materials you get. Much like campers learning to use the materials in the forest around them, you often have ideas you can use and inspiration around you to be utilized but it’s difficult to recognize the opportunities and ways these materials can take shape. Developing your own sense of creativity and ways to develop new ideas is a worthy task to undertake no matter what projects you’re engaged with.