How do you come up with your ideas? Where does your inspiration come? How many times have you promised to find some quiet time for creativity and inspiration only to discover an afternoon of frustration staring at a silent keyboard and an empty screen? Consider for a moment that you may have set the stage for exactly what happened.
Over the last couple years, I have reached out to many other writers through discussions, blogs, writing workshops and many different types of internet forums. I have found one topic that seems to always dominate all others — Inspiration and creativity. Where to find it, how to get it and ways to foster it to improve the depth and uniqueness of our writing. Let’s face it, most of us live pretty ordinary and boring lives so the old saying that you should write what you know and what you have experienced, isn’t very comforting. Inspiration is my only real hope to break free of the mundane and compete with the adventurous and well-traveled great authors of the past such as Ernest Hemingway, Jack Kerouac or Jack London. I’m not saying I can write like any of them, but I hope I can at least start with an equally good and intriguing idea.
Before I get too far down the path, I need to explain my definition of inspiration and creativity. Yes, I understand that there is a difference and just asking the question will start plenty of opinionated discussions. They are different, but in my experience, they seem to travel together with inspiration making much less frequent appearances. To keep things simple, I define creativity as an extension of something known and inspiration as something entirely new or different. I do believe if you push creativity far enough it can become inspiration. The important thing is what creativity and inspiration have in common in that they both depend less on what we know and more on what we can imagine.
One of the first things I needed to recognize is that inspiration and creativity are significantly different then the mental efforts I use in my daily life. These efforts depend on processing information that I already have or have immediate access to, in other words, a logically doable process given enough effort. Yet when I ask myself to inspire or create something new out of nothing, or at the best, what I already know, it usually ends in disappointment. Given all that I have read and all of the suggested tricks out there, I now see how easily I was deceived into thinking a quiet environment and a quite mind could somehow bridge the unknown and magically create that seed of inspiration. I found it all too easy to blame my environment or assumed that I was too stressed to cultivate the fragile seeds of inspiration and creativity. For quite some time inspiration either totally eluded me or made very seldom visits.
I don’t know if I was just lucky, or if it was the result of my engineering approach to the problem. From the beginning I kept track of what worked and what didn’t. I accumulated a long list of things that didn’t work, such as enforcing a schedule or dedicate time to be creative, clearing my mind or having a quiet and isolated workspace. Every time I tried to force creativity and inspiration, I was met with emptiness, frustration and disappointment. No matter what I tried, I could not command, train or encourage inspiration. Slowly over several years, I did start to notice and record a pattern of when and how new ideas and slivers of inspiration started peeking into my writing. The notes didn’t make any sense until I started recording not just when it came, but all of the events and circumstances leading up to the moment. When I read back through my notes, every genesis of creativity pointed to something very counterintuitive — stress and distraction. The most exciting part came when I was able to successfully and reliably duplicate the results by recreating the same stress and distraction. I have since included this process into my writing routine and have discovered more ideas that I can possibly write to in my lifetime. I understand that everyone’s circumstances and creative triggers may be different, but I want to explain what has worked so wonderfully for me in the hope that maybe some parts may work for you.
Even though I knew how to get to my creative place, I had no clue as to why it worked. I thought my approach was so unique to me that I hardly even mentioned it to anyone until I saw a documentary on how the brain manages creativity. The optimal word here is “manages”. Now there is a great deal of science behind the following concepts and I am certainly not the person to debate the details and workings of the human brain. I am however, uniquely qualified to give my perspective in the context of my own personal success. Please bear with the overly simplistic analysis, I’m trying to focus on the process that brought me my results, not necessarily the science as to why.
In the documentary they described several scientifically proven processes that improve inspiration and creativity. One such process involves doing exercises in divergent thinking, which is finding alternative ways of thinking about everyday objects. Exercises such as “name as many uses for a shoe as you can in 60 seconds”, supposedly allow us to expand our creativity by finding new and unique ways of accomplishing things. After your brain exhausts the obvious uses, any additional uses for the shoe supposedly stretches our creativity and our ability to think beyond our normal ways. The documentary claims that stretching of our divergent thinking permits previously unthinkable ways of doing something to become part of our normal thinking and therefore acceptable to that logical part of our brain that governs what we are allowed to perceive in our conscious mind.
In the documentary, the expert required you to suspend the analysis or suitability of an idea because it is the quantity of ideas that matter, not the quality. I think we have all heard about the two sides of the brain where the left side controls logic and the right side creativity. Albeit an oversimplification, it does describe the cooperation that exists between these clearly different functions of our brain. The left side is governed by the logical, sequential and the rational whereas the right side is tuned to the random, intuitive and the holistic. It is in the right side where the elusive inspiration and creativity live.
Just for the sake of drawing a distinction, I’ll call forced divergent thinking the “Push Approach”. In the Push Approach, success hinges on our ability to suppress the analysis or suitability of an idea, a typically automatic response. This means holding back the logical part of our brain from rejecting all of those strange, implausible and out of the box ideas because this is where inspiration comes and where the unicorns and the elves live. The documentary didn’t really describe how to accomplish this significant feat. I certainly do not know how to suppress my logical side. I’ve spent my life wanting and encouraging my logical side to become more involved in my daily activities, especially thinking before I speak. You really should try a few of these divergent thinking exercises to find out how difficult it is to withhold this analysis. Our ability to apply a suitability filter is mostly automatic. In its daily applied form it is called “common sense”. So to be most effective in the Push Approach, I have to suppress common sense; a process that I depend on for almost every aspect of daily human existence.
In my personal experience, the Push Approach can be very difficult to master. I tried and never saw any real results. Then I went through my notes of when inspiration and creativity came on their own. I believe I found a way to get similar results, but without all of the mental gymnastics. Suppose I keep the “analysis part” of my brain so busy, it doesn’t have time to shoot down my ideas? Wouldn’t that be just as effective as suppressing analysis or suitability? Let’s say we call this the “Pull Approach”. The Pull Approach depends on keeping the analysis part of my brain so busy, it cannot weigh in on every idea. I do this by creating enough diversions that there isn’t enough mental resources available to guard that “sanity gate” between my left brain and my right brain, so whatever creative ideas, unicorns and elves I come up with are free to come and go as they please.
Think for a moment on how I might have set myself up for failure. I find a time and place where I can work quietly and undisturbed. I decide that I want to focus on a particular plot element of a story and am aware of all of the constraints of my prior work including the state of development of various protagonists. I simply and innocently establish a goal of finishing a chapter where someone does something that neatly fits into what has come before. Seems pretty simple, but in reality, I have constructed a very tight filter that any and every emerging idea must pass. I am demanding facts I already know, constrained by existing relationships and structure, to somehow morph into something completely new. This was at best optimistic, and now in retrospect, extremely naive. I established too many rules to obey and have too much analysis enforcement power available in my quiet mind to squelch any creative ideas long before they can reach my conscious mind. In the end, I experienced no inspiration, no creativity, no unicorns or elves in sight, even though I intentionally and specifically invited them.
So how do I create the diversions large enough to stress my analysis and suitability filters? My approach is to saturate the visual, emotional and audio processing centers of my brain. Then while under this stress, require my mind to imagine creative solutions to specific ideas. Does it work? Yes, I found it certainly diminishes the ability of my subconscious logical mind to reject creative solutions. The result I see is an increase in my ability to see a much broader and creative set of solutions. I have used this approach many times to develop new story ideas, link plot arcs between unrelated protagonists and, most importantly, create that gem discovered at the end of a story worth reading. I don’t understand why this works for me, but I have uncovered a bit of science that may help to explain.
No other sensory input requires more effort from the brain than processing what we see. Most experts claim that our visual processing alone accounts for 30% of our brain by supporting things like detecting color, light angle, detail, depth, movement, shape or recognizing faces. If that wasn’t taxing enough, other studies indicate that motion, direction and edge detection are processed separately from form and color and that our brain appears to support multiple color reference systems that are processed across many parts of our brain. With our brains so busy with vision, I can now understand why taking a simple walk can get your mind off of something.
In order to saturate my visual processing, I start by going for a drive; preferably, to a new area or using a different route. I tried doing this as a passenger but didn’t get the results that I did as a driver. I believe it had to do with the added responsibility of protecting life and limb and keeping the car on the road. I found I needed to drive for longer than 15 minutes with my best results occurring after 30 minutes. Interstate travel was far less productive than taking secondary roads probably due to the lack of unique and visual elements and the level of interaction with the road and traffic required on secondary roads. Additionally, if I allowed myself to change the route at any time, stop or pull over to take in a sight, I found it forced me to concentrate much more on my surroundings.
I stimulate my audio and emotional processing by listening to music. You know, the kind of songs that bring back a strong emotion and memory of a past event. I find the tie between music and emotion is indisputable and if that music is tied to a strong memory, I cannot help but bring those memories forward when the music plays.
At this point, my brain is pretty busy dealing with all of the new sights, establishing new memories of the scenes unfolding, evaluating changes to my route and reliving past memories with strong emotional roots. I could easily drift into a trance where time and miles seem to vanish, but instead I force myself to focus on the purpose of this effort.
The final step required me to understand the difference between cognition and volition. According to dictionary.com, cognition is the act or process of knowing, or perceiving something know and volition is the act of willing, choosing or resolving. When I retreated to my quiet environment to finish that chapter, I depended almost entirely on cognition, a perception of what I already knew. In my sensory overloaded drive with music pulling at past memories, I focus on volition or a will to answer a question knowingly absent of vital information. It’s important that I focus on something I cannot possibly know and let the creative side of my mind fill in the pieces. It can be what happens in the last part of that chapter I want to finish or to be most effective, I tie it to the visual cues unfolding before me. I don’t have much time to think about what I see because it will soon pass me, but as I go by an old house, in my mind I demand to know what type of person lives there or what circumstance keeps them there. My brain becomes so busy with the real work at hand, it seems to open the gates and all kinds of unicorns, elves and impossibilities step forward to answer my volition. I keep a voice recorder handy to catch my inspiration and creative ideas, and occasionally, I stop and take pictures.
Once again, I can’t guarantee any of this will work for you, but it has and continues to bring me plenty of creative and innovative ideas. I hope by relating my experience, I can help you discover your hidden talent for inspiration and creativity. I truly believe we all have the ability for discovery and miracles within us if we are lucky enough to set the stage properly. We are all genuinely unique and creative creatures and with a bit of notation and awareness, we can tweak and tune our abilities to accomplish not only our goals, but our dreams.
-Mark
Please use comments to offer your methods for inspiration and creativity.