Archive for June, 2007
I think, therefore I don’t create
Posted on June 28, 2007, by dazzer67, under inspiration, quick tips.
Do you remember the first time you fell for someone? Or when you got really upset about something? Most probably your mind went into overdrive. If you were suddenly in love you may have been able to describe those feelings in words and phrases that weren’t normally in your vocabulary style. If you were particularly angry you will have been able to use no end of colourful phrase. The point is, when you get emotionally charged you can often access your creative power with more ease.
Creativity is about exploring new landscapes, new horizons; things that sometimes defy logic. By trying to ‘think’ through your creative process you are following well worn pathways. Letting your emotion take hold enables you to run off the path into the forest. Your ‘thinking’ brain would never let you take a detour from the path as you might get lost. Your ‘emotive’ brain won’t worry where you end up, it wants to explore it wants to ‘feel’.
So when the muse had gone on vacation stop thinking and let your emotions take hold. If you’re not in the position to have a mid-life crisis and flirt with all and sundry, imagine yourself in that ‘forbidden’ relationship. If no one has got on your wrong side, sit down and watch the news or reality TV, something or someone will get you going soon enough. Release your emotions and let the creativity flow.
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Don’t grow old gracefully
Posted on June 25, 2007, by dazzer67, under inspiration, quotes.
“No matter how old you get, if you can keep the desire to be creative, you’re keeping the man-child alive.”
John Cassavetes
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Creative lessons from a fatal windows error
Posted on June 19, 2007, by dazzer67, under creativity basics, perspiration, software.
It happens to the best of us (me) and it can strike at any time. We don’t know what causes it to happen (well perhaps someone, somewhere, knows the reason but they are not telling the rest of us) and the resolution is often drastic. I am, of course, talking about a windows fatal error. Windows won’t load, it crashes, it gets stuck in endless loops. You follow all the rescue tutorials, (printed out from work as you now have no access to t’internet at home) use all the rescue disks, (even the installation disk that claims it will either rescue the OS or overwrite any corrupt files) but still no joy. When this happens there is only one thing to do… reinstall. Well this, as you may have guessed, has just happened to me. XP went AWOL and so I had to bite the bullet and say goodbye to a hard drive crammed with… actually a lot of rubbish, which leads to this post.
Having started the process of getting the family PC back in working order there were one or two things that I had to do, or think about, which could help us all in our creative journeys. So hold on tight and let’s take a look.
- Rip it up and start again. Sometime what you have isn’t working, we shouldn’t be afraid to simply let it go and say ‘bye, bye’, however long we have been working on it. If it isn’t working, sometimes it needs to be thrown out.
- Reassess what you have. My PC was full of many programs that I really didn’t use. They had been loaded with the intention of using them ’someday’. Although diversity is needed within creativity it can sometimes hinder. Too much choice is as damaging as too little. So, do you really need to ‘waste’ time deciding the medium for your creativity?
- Do you really need it. Similar to above but more of a ‘clear your head’ attitude here. I had backed up certain files and folders but not everything. A reinstall would mean that I would lose anything that wasn’t backed up. There were one or two things that I would need to work on again but… there was a lot of junk and clutter that was simply sitting there, gathering dust and clogging the creative cogs.
- If you need it, keep it safe. We all know we should back-up the important pieces of work we do, but how often and how well do we do it? If you are a writer do you have your work in hard and soft copy and in several locations should one be destroyed? If you are a painter where are your canvases kept, are they safe from fire, flood and theft? Of course, we are limited by our resources but we should be as careful as we can be, or afford to be.
Well, I am going back to reinstalling the software that I do need, speak soon.
PS Yes I know I could also do the following:
- Use a different OS
- Not change the file system from FAT 32 to NTFS without reading all the small print
- Stick to pencil and paper
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It is time to live
Posted on June 15, 2007, by dazzer67, under quotes.
Life is “trying things to see if they work”.
Ray Bradbury
Go and live a little, have an idea and be creative with it.
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5 simple ideas to provoke your creative imagination
Posted on June 11, 2007, by dazzer67, under creative exercises, creativity basics, inspiration, quick tips.
We’re all naturally creative, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t get stuck at times as we try to express ourselves. Here are five simple ways to kick-start your creative imagination; very simple yet very effective.
- take a different route - routine is one of the worst enemies of creativity, get stuck in a rut and you’ll stay there. Think differently and you’ll be creative, take a different approach than you normally do and you’ll solve the issue.
- lie down - this is basically making you relax, putting out of your mind all the worries and cares of the day and letting your creative thoughts run free. I often lie down, forget about everything and then focus on one creative task, within minutes my mind is being creative, the only danger is drifting off to sleep but that is my problem.
- stand up - ‘eh? You just said lie down.’ Well, if you are hunched over a blank piece of paper, trying to be creative, concentrating and worrying, it can be deadly. If you focus too much on an issue or problem you may miss the simple solution. So stand up, walk around and change the environment, stretch, rub your neck, anything… just get away from the blank paper.
- change the genre - still stuck? If you were a musician how would you solve the issue if you were a writer? Or vice-verse. If you’re stuck think how someone else would think, it can be a revelation.
- phone a friend - and remember you are not alone, two creative minds are better than one. Working on the same problem two minds can solve a seemingly insurmountable problem.
Go on, have some creative fun.
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Muse missing? Try a different metaphor
Posted on June 7, 2007, by dazzer67, under inspiration, quotes.
“When you come to a roadblock, take a detour.”
Mary Kay Ash
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Create like twitter? Instant creativity
Posted on June 6, 2007, by dazzer67, under perspiration.
Here’s the sob story. As can be seen from my previous post I haven’t been too well, in fact, all-in-all, I have been under the weather for about three weeks. Even when I posted the apology I wasn’t fully over the virus. Also, you can see by the lack of posts that I haven’t really been in the ‘zone’, or have I?
I currently have a document with ideas for posts that contains a good thirty or so embryonic concepts. This document is where I turn to in my process, it forms part of my preparation to create content for imaginality. This process has worked fine since the site started, and is, in fact, the underlying thesis of creativity that I propose here. However, that is not to say that you must stick rigidly to a process. The issue I was having was not with the thesis but with how I was applying the process. I was leaving all my creativity, with regard to imaginality, to one process. When I turned to the ideas document I loved them all but was not well enough to sit down and work them up as complete posts. The amount of perspiration I could expend on creativity was very little.
I was still having ideas, and the preparation had, and was, being done, so what could, or should, I have done?
One option would have been to store up the ideas and keep them safe and bubbling away until I was able to give them the effort they deserved. However, some ideas could have been expressed simply and quickly.
Recently I have got involved in Twitter, where you can post up to 160 characters via instant messaging, mobile phone or the web. The creative aspect of Twitter is wonderful, especially with regard to ‘less perspiration’. You are limited in what you can say; you can prepare it, have an inspirational idea but you can’t go beyond the limit of the expression. I have seen similar ideas on both facebook and the new Zooomr iteration, and the net buzz around Twitter is considerable.
So next time you have an idea, think about how it needs to be expressed. Does it need to take ages and a lot of effort, using the best materials and top software, or can it be handed over to the rest of the world in a short, simple and less strenuous manner. Sometimes it may be a good idea to think like Twitter.
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