Being a creative person, I get asked a lot, “How do you have such great ideas?”
There’s a few ways. I keep my eyes peeled. Not just at other people’s creativity, but at nature, patterns, colour combinations that please the eye, those that don’t—I observe people, places, things. And I listen too.
Yes it helps to have a natural bent towards creativity, but like anything, it can lay dormant, or be developed.
One thing I have found true in both creative arts and creative writing, that ideas develop by doing. Again as with anything—practice-practice-practice.
Most projects I tackle, whether it’s sewing, or woodworking, or writing, start with a single idea, a vision, a spark. By the time I’m done, it has usually become quite different. Why?
In the doing, as I go along, I get more ideas because maybe a technical glitch has changed the vision, or I’ve come across something I hadn’t anticipated until I got right down to the details, and so I’ve adjusted the original plan to improve things, or as I fiddle with materials or words, I discover that if I use this instead of that then I can add the thingy to the whatsit and really make the project pop.
Ideas occasionally fall from trees, but they need to be fed to grow. One must toss them around, chew them up, spit them out, and rearrange. The perfect sewing project rarely exists. Often one must take in a pattern here and there to make it fit.
An architect can have a great idea for a house, but perhaps the property is too narrow. He has to shuffle it around, change the layout to get it to work.
When moving into a new home, we have to fit all our old furnishings into a completely different space and organize it sensibly. That also requires a type of creativity and some rethinking before we get it right.
So with writing. I have found that the best points and connections and subtleties in my stories come from being immersed in the writing, completely unplanned. somewhere deep inside, the subconscious mind takes all your knowledge and observations and feeds them where they’re needed if we give it the chance. If I never take that original idea and start brainstorming and working it like a baker kneads dough, I would never progress.
The world progresses on ideas that were just tiny sparks. Take your favorite ideas and be bold enough to give them wings..
Ink & Attic 