“You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.”
Maya Angelou
As writers, or creatives of any kind, an obvious key to success is creativity. What is this funny feature of the human imagination? Where does it come from? Is Maya Angelou right, the more you use, the more you have?
What is Creativity?
Mirriam Webster defines “creativity” as “the ability to make new things of think of new ideas.” So, this is not simply confined to those of us who craft works of fiction and imagination. Creativity is needed, required for very practical parts of human life and society. Everything around us that isn’t raw nature is the result of human creativity. Pretty incredible. Without creativity, we not only lack great literature… we lack indoor plumbing. Creativity, is, very simply, one of the things that makes us human. It allows us to make over the world to suit us better, to imagine worlds that never existed, and to take ideas apart and put them back together in novel ways.
Where Does Creativity Come From?
This is a massive question… it’s beyond me to tackle it from a technical neuroscientific perspective. But I think we can pick at it from a practical and experiential perspective.
The first ingredient for creativity is experience. The imagination needs material to work with, grist for the mill. You can see this fact at work in the way that a change in perspective can lead to a creative breakthrough. There are countless examples of authors who find that they do their best work in environments that give them material to create from or take time to include those environments in their process. Writing in a coffee shop can provide snippets of dialog. Hiking or walks in the park can form the bases of worldbuilding. Charles Dickens famously “collected” names for his works from the world around him, names that live on in some of the most recognizable and beloved characters of English literature.
Many writers draw creative inspiration from their life experiences; for example, J.R.R. Tolkien’s experiences in WW1 and in the English countryside, as well as his religious convictions, all come through in his works.
How Do We Improve Our Creativity?
So, how do we go about improving creative capacity? Maybe you’re feeling blocked, or creatively tapped-out. Or maybe you think you aren’t a creative person?
First, I’ll disavow you of the latter sentiment. For all my love of all things fantasy and science fiction, all of my geekery, back in the shadowy past I dug deep into the dismal science of economics and human action. Trust me, it was more interesting than it sounds just reading the tin.
Purposeful human action, quite simply, requires a measure of creativity. Technically defined, human action is applying means according to ideas to achieve ends. The “ideas” part of that definition is what brings us back around to creative endeavors; we are working with the seeds of creativity with every purposeful action we take in our everyday lives.
Novelty and Embracing the Ugly
But an idea isn’t necessarily creative on its own… it needs to be new. It needs to be novel, something hitherto unconsidered. But here’s the great news for us as we’re practicing… it doesn’t have to be good. An idea is allowed to be both creative and bad at the same time. Consider the wild array of pre-Wright Brothers attempts at aircraft design! Even the flaming failures of design, the ideas that crumbled under their own weight… they led to the breakthrough that made so much of modern life possible.
Your creative dead-ends are the same. They may not become the next smash hit, the next NYT Bestseller, the next Great American Novel. But they exercise the creative muscle, and they help grow it and ultimately create more creativity.
How to Get Started
There are as many ways to get creative juices flowing as there are writers. No strategy is one-size fits all. But, there are a few ways that have worked for me, and some other tried-and-true imagination-sparkers that other writers and artists use to great effect.
- Writing Prompts: The Internet is filled with posts and lists of writing prompts to get you thinking and kick-start your next project, short or long. All you need is an idea which genre you’d like to explore… or, see where your imagination takes you!
- Ask “What If:” This is the basis of my newest novel WIP (yeah… I started another one…). Without going into too much detail, I’m taking a story that the entire world knows, and expanding a tiny, intriguing and mysterious snippet of it into its own fully realized quest saga. Or, at least that’s what I hope comes of the project! Try asking yourself “what if” throughout your day. What if that school bus on your commute was taking students to a shadowy government institution for training psychics? What if that guy in the bread aisle asked the girl in by the ice cream freezers on a date? Or what if the scanner in the office sent documents directly to a recipient’s brain? The possibilities are, literally, endless.
- Free Writing: This one works best with old-fashioned pen and paper, but I’ve seen it done with a word processor. Just start writing, whatever comes into your mind, as it comes. Explore what your own thoughts and imagination conjures up. You’re allowed to burn the pages at the end… or use them as a springboard.
- Change your Scenery: Get outside and take a walk. Or maybe a drive. Or a shower. Don’t plug into music or a podcast when you do – listen to the sound of nature around you, or the drone of the engine, the patter of the water. The gentle movement, the activity that you complete automatically distracts the mind from its hangups, and the relaxation of the activity increases dopamine, which, fascinatingly, facilitates creativity!
How Does It Work For You?
What do you find in your own writing or other art? Do you feel as though you use up creativity and need to refill your bucket? Or do you feel like creativity is more like a muscle to be strengthened, that gets better with use and grows tight and rusty with time off? Do you agree with Maya Angelou, in the quote that inspired this post? What are your favorite ways to spark your creative fire? Share your thoughts in the comments! I’d love to learn more about your experiences – no two creators are alike, and we all can learn from each other!
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Until next time, I hope that your creative juices are flowing, and that the Muse is helping you sort the chaff ideas from the valuable wheat! Write on!
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