As any creative person will tell you, one of the most common questions you get asked (besides ‘when are you going to get a proper job?’) is ‘where do you get all your ideas’?
Confronted with this question often enough, you could fall into the trap of believing you are blessed with a special power. A unique way of looking at the world that allows these ideas to come to you (and only you). An inalienable ability that can’t be earned, improved, or taken away. It’s a very seductive idea – it requires very little work and it makes you feel special.
But like most seductive ideas, it’s a load of bollocks.
Creativity is a process. It’s something anyone can do, not some magical gift bestowed upon a special few. The only thing that separates ‘creatives’ against the masses is they are the ones who actually bother to create. Everyone can be creative, but not everyone is creative. It’s sort of like saying ‘anyone can run a marathon’ or ‘anyone can sing’ – it’s true (barring any physical limitations), but in practice it is only those who train, flex, and strengthen the necessary muscles who are any good at it.
Training creativity isn’t easy though. Because creative endeavors tend to exist in a world of subjectivity and opinions (instead of objectivity and ‘personal bests’), it is nigh-on impossible to empirically measure progress. And without measurements, it’s very easy to fake it. It’s why there are so many bad writers and bad singers in the world, but very few bad sprinters (it’s very hard to kid yourself into believing that you are faster than you really are).
So, hard to measure = hard to train. You can practice the craft of putting words on a page all you like, and that’s a great skill, but what about the art behind the craft? What about coming up with original concepts about which to write? You can’t sit down and squeeze out 20 reps of good ideas for practice (you can try, but in my experience they tend to lean towards derivative) so how do you grow?
Instead of deliberate, focussed training, the approach I employ looks more like a philosophy than an activity. Like a low-level meditation, a state of mind you must encourage over the years to welcome and cultivate new ideas. It works like this:
Your senses are being bombarded, day in, day out, with external influences. Your heart and your mind are constantly reacting to these things in some way or another. There is no shortage of external seeds of inspiration flooding into your head each day, the thing most people lack is not inspiration, but rather a fertile soil in which these seeds can land and begin to grow.
In short, you need to have a head full of horse-shit. Good, stinky, fertile horse-shit (from what people tell me I’ve been highly successful at this part).
As writers, our job is to awaken something in the reader, to light a fire in them, terrify them, make their heart swell, or to speak directly to their inner child. Deep down, we humans are all the same, and so – trusting in this fact – the writer must turn themselves into an antenna, an ultra-sensitive seismometer that notices every tremor in their own emotional landscape, and records what caused it.
An idea might sit in the fertile soil of your mind for years without sprouting, or it might sprout right away. Most often, I find that ideas like to pair up through a process of free-association. It’s almost like some long-dormant idea has decomposed, and has enriched the soil with its raw elements – then some new seed lands in the soil and finds exactly the nutrient it needs to start growing right away, combined with some element of the former.
Some seeds might stir you deeply, but try as you might you don’t know why, or sometimes even what the reaction was. With these things, I tend to place a marker in the soil – a little reminder to revisit it often and see if there is anything more to be learned.
Sometimes it can be like a great chain reaction. You might spend months burying things in the soil, enriching it with fragments of ideas or feelings but nothing concrete. You might feel that you have nothing tangible to show for all your careful gardening. Then one day something lands in the soil – it might be a painting on someone’s wall, a lyric from a song on the radio, it might be a game your kids are playing – and BAM, it lays down roots deep into your rich soil and before you know it you have a beanstalk bursting out of your ears, and you’re unable to sleep until you write it down.
Some thoughts and observations if you are interested in adopting this way of walking through the world:
- Notes are critical. I’ve tried a pocket notebook but had to eventually face the reality that it is no match for the notes app on my iPhone. As soon as something ‘pings’ my antenna, it goes straight into my ‘soil’ note – immediately – however inconvenient (warning: this will take some getting used to for friends and family…). Re-reading these fragments is like aerating the soil, and is a great way to keep things fresh.
- If you’re doing things right, you should actually feel yourself becoming more sensitive and attuned to the world around you. It can take you by surprise, but embrace it. I find myself regularly moved to tears by things that my younger self would have scoffed at (I’m looking at you Paddington 2). Don’t let old fashioned notions of masculinity prevent you from seeing the beauty in things. If you are scared of what people will think of your feelings, you probably shouldn’t be a writer.
- Just because you are constantly being bombarded with sensory input doesn’t make all input equal. Busting out of routine, saying yes to things you’re scared of, and putting yourself in new situations will increase the richness of your soil and diversity of your seeds. I often drag my feet attending an event I’m not enthusiastic about, only to find my antenna light up like a christmas tree when I get there.
- Likewise with hobbies – learn new skills, become a more interesting, rounded person, and you will find plenty of nutrients for your brain-dung. Your job is to be interesting and have interesting thoughts.
- Habits matter. Everyone has their go-to app for those snippets of time in the cracks between life happening. If you add all this up (thanks, ‘screen time’) the numbers can be staggering. Does your app expose you to new content and ideas? News apps can be great, or even Reddit. Best of all is falling down a rabbit hole on Wiki Roulette.
Do you have another approach? Or perhaps more tips and thoughts to add to the above? Feel free to jump in the comments.
PS: Only upon having a friend review this blog entry has it become cringingly clear that even this metaphor is an example of one’s environment fuelling one’s ideas. “Only a writer from rural Devon could cultivate (heh) a creativity metaphor based entirely around manure”. Sorry not sorry.
