Archive for July, 2007
Don’t fill and structure your mind too much
Posted on July 31, 2007, by dazzer67, under quotes.
“Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality.”
Beatrix Potter
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Meditate to create
Posted on July 26, 2007, by dazzer67, under creative exercises, inspiration, quick tips.
Stuck? Need some inspiration? Here’s a quick tip to release the creative juices.
Silence, space, solitude.
At times we can crave these things, our minds need time to relax, to settle and then move forward. The same process is helpful for creativity. One way to achieve this is through meditation, so here’s a little guided meditation that you could use.
- Turn everything off, so there are no distractions, no radio, no TV, no net.
- Find a comfortable place to sit down and close your eyes.
- Place your hands on your lap.
- Imagine a bright, white room. You are there sitting in it. The room has no furniture, no windows and no distinguishing features, it is pure white. Even with open eyes it contains no distractions.
- Focus on one wall of the room. It is featureless, there is nothing there.
- Let yourself ‘fall’ into the wall and become part of it.
- Imagine that you are the white wall, a blank canvas.
- Imagine that the ends of your fingers are the end of the canvas, they begin to tingle. You notice your toes are tingling too.
- The tingling spreads up your arms and legs toward your centre.
- Your whole body is now tingling, the whole canvas is tingling.
- The canvas explodes into colour, images pour from it and sound fills the room
- Capture the colours, images and sounds.
- Open your eyes and create
You can use lots of similar ideas, but the process is the same:
- Empty your mind
- Capture what comes out
Have fun
In the next couple of weeks I’ll try and pull together some audio files that you can use to help your imagination run free.
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How to source digital images for your creativity
Posted on July 23, 2007, by dazzer67, under creativity basics, links, preparation.
There is a great find over at graphicdesignblog to help with sourcing digital images for your creative work. You can find all about Yotophoto by following the link.
Graphic Design Blog » Find Free Photos on Yotophoto, the Free Images Search Engine
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Creativity, an individual or group activity?
Posted on July 20, 2007, by dazzer67, under quotes.
“The good ideas are all hammered out in agony by individuals, not spewed out by groups.”
Charles Brower
Now I’m not quite sure I agree with this. I have had success both working on my own and with groups.
I think the bottom line is what sort of group you have. If you have a group of people who regularly exercise their creative muscles the ideas will come thick and fast, of course you’ll need to filter the ones that are so leftfield they aren’t practical, but that is one of the joys of being with this sort of group; ideas grow exponetially. On the other hand, if you have a group of grey suits whose primary concern is the bottom line, then creativity by committee may well be a lost cause.
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Questioning creativity
Posted on July 17, 2007, by dazzer67, under creativity basics, links.
There is a great post, with some very interesting questions at the end over at Inspiration Bit. I’ve been mulling over them since reading the post so I thought you should have the chance too.
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Five simple tips on how to get published
Posted on July 17, 2007, by dazzer67, under perspiration, preparation, writing.
So you have lots of ideas, your creativity has gone into overdrive and you believe you can be a successful writer, and why not. The next stage, unless you are going to publish yourself (and that is not a bad idea, check out www.lulu.com), is to get your ‘book’ into the wide world. With this in mind I thought I’d share a few tips with you.
- Research your publisher. It is no good sending your ideas off to any and every publisher on the list. Find a publisher who has published similar books and also, if possible, ask them what their publishing policy is. What books do they publish, just in case you’ve got the wrong end of the stick.
- Grab the publisher’s attention. A plain brown envelope, with a neat resume and outline is very fucntional, but believe me, you need to do a little more in order to get noticed. But remember subtlety works very well too.
- Send in a synopsis and two chapters. A publisher needs to know how you write, what you write and a little about you (only because they are nosey). Send in a couple of chapters but they don’t need to be the first two, perhaps the best chapters are hidden away within your tome.
- If you haven’t finished the book, estimate the time it will take and double it. It is highly likely that you’ll miss your estimated deadline and so build in some time. Then when you send it in ahead you’ll be loved and the you’ll know how long it really takes you to write without any added pressure.
- Write about what you know. It is no good writing about the history of voles if you know nothing about them. So research what you write. There is nothing more annoying to an editor than someone writing about something and getting it all wrong.
And remember, all these tips come from me, a publisher, so get going.
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Sometimes it really does feel this way
Posted on July 13, 2007, by dazzer67, under quotes, writing.
“A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people”
Thomas Mann
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Five things to do when appreciating creativity
Posted on July 12, 2007, by dazzer67, under creative exercises, inspiration.
How often do you take the time to really look at, listen to, or understand a good piece of creative work? We can find so much inspiration from other people but it is rare that we actually delve into why the ‘piece’ is creative and how that can help us in our creative journey. Well here are a couple of things to bear in mind to aid us when we do decide to look a little deeper.
- What makes this piece original? Has the piece mixed two different genres, has it pushed the boundaries further than the traditional medium? Try and ask yourself these and similar questions and discover why and how creativity was used.
- What has the creative put in? Moving on from the first question you need to look for what has been added to the piece that makes it different. These are the constituent parts of the piece. You’ve looked at the whole, now look at the pieces.
- What has the creative left out? Space is equally important, less is more, so they say, and it is the same in art, in all its forms. The pieces that the creative has left out are as important as what the creative put in.
- How would you have expressed the idea? This isn’t about how you would improve what has been done, but it could easily end up that way. What you need to do here is take the end result (what the ‘piece’ says to you) and think about how you would have expressed that.
- What would this look like in another medium? The book is always different from the film. The play is always different from the film. The live performance is always different from the recorded version. What if you were to think about what you were analyzing in a different medium. What would that image look like as a piece of prose? What would that story sound like as a song?
Give your creative energy a boost by taking note of what other creative pieces there are surrounding us everyday.
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Creative Lesson from Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert
Posted on July 6, 2007, by dazzer67, under creativity basics, links.
Not content with simply being a creative genius in the genre of the Dilbert Comic Strip, Scott Adams is now handing out advice for us all. Follow the link to see a great post from Scott on how to be creative.
The Dilbert Blog: How to Be Creative
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Lose your inhibitions and create
Posted on July 6, 2007, by dazzer67, under creativity basics, inspiration, quick tips.
I spoke recently about letting your emotions free in order to be aid your creativity. It isn’t always easy for us to do that. Years of programming has deadened our emotions and hidden them from us… the joys of adulthood - just look at the release that comes when you actually break down and let things go with a good cry.
But I digress, yes sometimes I do, don’t look so surprised. Whilst not condoning excessive amounts of drinking one quick and simple way to let your emotions out is a drop of alcohol. The reason this works is that alcohol loosens our minds and our inhibitions. If you are finding it difficult to release your emotions and inner child then a glass of wine could be just the thing. More than that though and your judgment is impaired and you may be creative but not in any direction you wanted to go, but hey.
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