How to Be a Writer Part 2

The subject of creativity is surrounded by so much mystery and there is so much advice out there about how to be creative that it is easy to get overwhelmed by the whole question. Too often people fall into the following traps:

a) They conclude that their favourite rock star, painter, author or other artist has unlocked the way to creativity and so decide that they must be like that person in order to be truly creative.

b) They imagine that there is some connection between insanity or depravity and creativity and so go off the rails in life in an effort to be more creative.

c) They conclude that they are not creative and that the secret of creativity belongs to some kind of mysterious elite but can never be theirs.

All of these are mistaken deductions. Creativity is native to all and can be tapped into quite easily. As a matter of fact, you can tap into your own personal creativity in minutes.

1. Recognise Creativity as Natural and Important

Almost everyone is naturally creative. Children see the entire world differently, as they learn with every glance, every sound, every touch. Growing up means that children slowly sub-divide their experience into what works and doesn’t work in this world. Some continue to live in the sub-world of what doesn’t necessarily work but which is fun to think about, while others close that particular avenue of thinking down entirely and label it as ‘useless’.

As we grow up, then, some of us lose this natural creativity and withdraw into a more solid existence. We begin rejecting the imagination as ‘just fantasy’ and regard the hard and fixed world around us as superior, senior, more logical, more real.

Imagination and fantasy are, by some, relegated to the nursery. In fact, J. R. R. Tolkien, world famous author of The Lord of the Rings, fought a life-long battle to get fantasy as a literary genre back out of the world of children and into adult acceptance.

Creativity, though, is about much more than fantasy. It’s about being able to think along lines which are not necessarily ‘workable’ in the world in which we live. If we can’t be creative, then how can we claim to be anything other than robots, electronic brains who take on board what they are shown or told and regurgitate it on command? If we can’t think ‘outside the box’, then we might as well just settle down into being part of the box and give up thinking at all.

The main block to creativity is that we have forgotten how to generate power in that part of the world of thought which is not necessarily ‘useful’.

2. Exercise Your Creative Thinking

Very quickly and very easily, let’s try to open the floodgates a little.

i) Think of some object somewhere. Any object, anywhere.

ii) Now think of something entirely unrelated and very distant from the object you first thought of.

For example, I might think of a piranha fish, deep in the Amazonian waterways. Then, for my second thing, a banana sandwich in a council flat in Leeds.

Two disconnected and apparently unrelated things.

iii) Now try to connect them.

They could be connected in any number of ways: perhaps along the subject of food; perhaps as subjects that would fascinate a child; perhaps by colour (the piranha may have been yellow!) or by the fact that they are both silent. It would be possible to construct a narrative to link them - a boy adventurer, growing up in Leeds, fantasises about encountering the wild creatures of the Amazon.

Already the creative juices are flowing, as they say.

iv) Try the same exercise again.

Let’s say someone came up with an old chewed slipper in the mouth of a dog in Chicago, and the feather of a wild albatross circling the coasts of Antarctica. Two vastly different objects. Connecting them makes the imagination work overtime because they are so different. What it comes up with is bound to be creative.

So prompting the mind to think of wild opposites or things seen as 'far apart' logically also urges creativity to kick into gear.

3. Stir Up Your Mind

In truth there are probably as many ways of boosting creativity as there are people. The way suggested above will get you creatively ‘flowing’ in minutes. It’s based on the idea that you have probably stopped thinking about ‘useless’ things. By connecting up two apparently useless or unconnected things, you can stir into life that part of the mind which you have shut down — the part that can think with things which don’t necessarily have any connection to each other or to reality as we experience it on a daily basis.

You could stop reading this right there and you would have enough to become more creative. But to make creativity work successfully another principle needs to be grasped.

Stay tuned.