There was a point in time about a year ago when creativity had to be motivated inside me. The act of motivating my own creativity not only proved exhasting at times, it also made the experience of coming up with ideas slightly demoralizing. The following are my words of advise based on my experiences over the last few months.
Ask yourself why you are struggling with idea generation. What’s holding you back? What’s making you hit a wall? For me, it was when I became aware of the fact that I was struggling to come up with refined ideas or coming up with ways to expand on ideas I finally settled on. I’m willing to bet that this is a common occurrence amongst many creative people (not just writers).
The answer may be that we’re trying to establish “refined ideas” and not allowing our thoughts and creativity the freedom to just come up with something much simpler: Ideas. Nothing refined, nothing that needs to matter in a greater scheme of things. Just ideas.
Here’s what I suggest: Start a “Brainstorm Master Document” of something like Google Docs (that’s where mine is) and take a moment each day to record an idea. If you don’t have time in your busy schedule try to scrape 5 minutes–only five minutes, everyone has five minutes!–right after you wake up and write one or two sentences of a spontaneous idea down. Dream something interesting even if it made now sense: Write it down. Wake up singing a song and not know how it got there: Write it down. You get the drill.
The first time I finally set up this routine I just sat there and thought of ideas. I sat there for hours. It wasn’t flowing, it was trickling in. But I was determined to breakdown whatever barriers where holding me back. I started reading a lot of Golden Age comics and taking notes at first to spark something–anything. I did this for two weeks. At first some ideas made no sense or were completely ridiculous. Everyday, I’d at least open the brainstorm document and see if I had anything to add. Soon enough, no matter what I was reading, newspaper, novel, comic, internet or watching on tv, dvd, etc, ideas just started sprouting from something my brain latched onto. One sequence of dialog, a name, a symbol, an action panel, a character design, a theory… it went on and on! Eventually all these different inputs mixed together in my brainstorm documents and a wondrous thing happened. The document of ideas started generating its own ideas.
The idea is to create a brainstorm document that matches you and your creative instincts. I suggest sometimes breaking those instincts and adding something completely opposite to your comfort zone. Mix it up with another one of you “idea lines”, gather ideas into thematic groups, break them apart and reshuffle them. See what happens. You could be presently surprised when a vibrant sequence of fireworks start to explode and you can no long keep up with the ideas!
Before you know it, you’ll have graduated yourself up to pro idea-maker in no time! It’s an important step for us creative types to learn though: To make creativity come easily, its sometimes necessary to take it back to a more simplified concept–training the mind to come up with ideas without self-induced hindrances.
The balance (that I am currently trying to get through) is to find time to refine some of the more stable ideas into something more. I’ve become addicted to ideas! The important thing is to just enjoy the process in the end. When an idea gets taken to a serious level when there are partners involved, or money invested, then a balance must be found.
At least until that idea has flourished to completion or on a self-propelling course. Then it’s back to the exciting Brainstorm Master Document to do it all over again!
