Cultivating Your Creativity

Advancing creativity in an orderly and predictable process is available to everyone.

Whether you are an artist who has reached an impasse, a writer with writer’s block,

or just see yourself as an ordinary person who wants to be more expressive,

you can become a creative by following this simple method.

To begin with, we need to recognize that creative self-expression belongs to us all. Whether taking the form of music, poetry, painting, or a host of other outlets, creativity is not a gift that has been bestowed on a privileged few. So often, when we are exposed to accomplished people, we hear them described as special, as exceptional- as talented. The prevailing cultural meme for talent routinely disheartens those of us who aspire to bring our own expression into wider acceptance. This notion of talent understates the achievement of the performer, because they are, in fact, an ordinary person who has harnessed the creative potential that we all share. Such a notion also deflates the inspiration that their accomplishment potentially imparts to us, because we don’t make the connection between their performance and our potential. Rather than a brilliant work motivating us to excel, we are likely to be discouraged, presumably because we do not share this ‘extra’ ability. It is not uncommon for people to become boxed in by this social climate that contributes to a poor creative health. To break out of this box, we must recognize that talent is acknowledged in people after the fact of their achievement. Achievement, on the other hand, is available for most of us who are willing to prioritize to make it happen.

Like any skill, we can cultivate our self-expression, if we are orderly in our approach. To do so, we will need to look beyond the project in front of us, and take hold of the overall development of our personal expression. When we work from this basis, deliberately expanding and strengthening the foundation of creativity in our lives, we stop depending on the errant lightning strike of inspiration, and become a constant source of innovation. We become a creative. To cultivate such a creative climate, we will need to include at least some of each of the five elements outlined in the chart below. Each element makes a unique contribution to the creative’s life of expression. And, of course, none are indispensable. Yet on the other hand, none alone can be expected to foster the support we seek.

Casting is learning how to stimulate and draw on a flood of new ideas. In this element, we harness the results of daydreaming and brainstorming to generate a host of ‘ideas for an idea’. Casting is a systematic exploration that seeks to uncover a host of tentative approaches. We want to avoid early second-guessing, because it turns into self-editing and limits the scope of this element. So, seemingly silly and unworkable ideas should stay in the process. Since nothing that comes to mind is to be discounted, the result is large. Creatives are very prodigious. They constantly produce, but typically, without cultivating organizational skills that make these fruits practical, much winds up being discarded. Take lots of notes! Don’t prioritize just yet. To promote an unobstructed flow, you have to be willing to have ideas that skirt the edge, ideas that can seem superfluous, at least in the casting element. Creatives are like rain. They bring vital energy to everything, but growth only appears in those places where unforeseen opportunity arises to meet your efforts. So rain on!

To get the full benefit of casting, we need a place where we can stockpile an avalanche of ideas. Develop a database that you can throw everything into. The difference here is that you don’t limit yourself to researching individual projects. You constantly update a single catch basin of ideas and interests, which includes your own comments, projections, and proposals. If you are a writer, that is pretty straightforward, using a word processor that allows you to search through the text. If you are a visual artist, an image database will greatly expand your casting. Learning to use image search in Google is an essential skill for photographers, print makers, collage artists, to name just a few. This tool can then supplement your personal image database that contains the notes and references from your history of ideas. By maintaining the future viability of today’s ideas in your storehouse, you will greatly extend the reliability and flexibility of your creative experience. If you are an actor, a database of video performances will be priceless to your process. Working with such a resource, the actor can consider a wide range of approaches to the scene they are studying, or to mannerisms that aide a certain character development. Whatever forms your casting database takes, you will need to add keywords and tags that pinpoint each entry, to aid you in targeting your future searches.

Framing is the winnowing element where we pull from our database of ideas to evaluate specific proposals. Here we form a preliminary plan, which includes our fresh approach and current methods, and compare it with our present limits- finances, opportunity, and proposed audience. This is where tactical choices eliminate the fringe and we can zero in on the doable. This does not necessarily mean the easiest choice, though. When done right, the tactical decision process frames a project that will both test, and expand your creative limits, within a realistic evaluation of what can be accomplished.

It should be noted that the framing element we are describing here is not just a stage in the development of the creative’s individual projects. Framing here is a ‘standalone’ element for all projects, a repository of projects, in various stages of formation, as the winnowing process unfolds for different efforts, different opportunities. Of all the elements discussed here, framing is the most important, and yet the one most universally ignored. Framing is the one element that has the most influence on the completion of a project. When done right, framing is predictive, and it includes contingency plans, based on alternative allocation of resources, greater time constraints, or shifting priorities.

To strengthen the framing element, the creative will need to plow through a list of mundane tasks that are typically put off. Good bookkeeping is essential. You can’t predict your success with a project, even if you accurately forecast the project expenses, without accurately assessing the time and overhead involved. Projecting the time, and therefore the expense of using certain skills depends on having accurate records of past efforts. If you are going to use an arc-welder, rather than contracting out the work, have you kept records of your past welding projects? Do you have figures that will help you to forecast what it will take to reach completion?

Nothing is more boring to the creative than recordkeeping, and yet those records are the key to forecasting the resources needed to complete a project. The alternative is guesswork, and the results of guesswork are not encouraging. Framing takes discipline, but it may make the difference in whether the creative is able to develop the habit of completing their projects, or even continuing their efforts.

Supporting by a host of other creatives is another essential element to cultivating your expression. Don’t work in a vacuum! Develop human resources that immerse you in a constellation of interests, articulated by diverse proponents. Participate in a variety of discussion groups online. Seek out and visit related projects. Reading and researching the literature of your chosen field is not enough. As creatives, we seek the support of others for more than just the information they bring us. We seek to interact with individuals for their input, their knowledge, but also for their insight. Fellow creatives speak in terms of their achievement. They frame their words with a positive regard for the challenges they face. Exposure to such enthusiasm can be infectious, giving us the opportunity to adopt their ebullience in our own expression, and pass it along to others in our field. In this way, we discover how our support of other creatives impacts their work, and inspires them. Support works both ways. One feeds the other, while experiences of giving and taking together fuel the supporting element of our own creative expression.

A stimulating environment is another important element of the creative climate. To understand how vital stimulation is to our process, it is important to know the difference between distraction and stimulation. Stimulation, in general, can become most effective when we are aware of our present internal state. Knowing when you are ‘up for more’ is the key to making choices that guide the levels of stimulation that are right for you. Constant exposure to a variety of events can be exhausting, as well as time-consuming. For appropriate stimulation to occur, we must insist on our personal space, on regular quiet time. Then when we achieve this balance, we can actively choose enlivening new experiences. Learning how to gracefully withdraw, the creative develops the choices they use to separate out distraction and maximize the positive effects of stimulation. The degree of stimulation one chooses is, of course, highly individualized. Some creatives flourish in a rural setting, while others must be in the city, for instance. Those choices, of course, do not dictate creativity itself, but when properly chosen, they do contribute to the effective increasing of personal expression.

The other vital part of this element is the degree of stimulation in your personal workspace. It is, of course, vital that you be able to concentrate on the project before you. Needing to pick the parts you are working with out of a busy and cluttered background can drain your resources, and lead to distraction. The tolerance you have for extraneous stimulation in your workspace is certainly a matter of individual taste. It will, however, prove invaluable to periodically reassess your work experience, by revisiting the accumulation of designs and tools that compose your chosen space. Does your studio encourage you to focus on the problem before you? On the other hand, are you feeling trapped in a featureless room that fails to stimulate your creative process? Engaging in a penetrating inner-dialog that reflects on your studio experience will allow you to fine-tune this creative element.

Expanding is our final element of creative enrichment. The old adage in the academic world still holds true: Publish or perish! The creative’s version is equally true: Expand or collapse! A climate that continues to foster inspiration comes from completed projects overtime. But the maximum benefit is realized when key projects along the way were executed at the edge of their present capability. Accepting challenges outside of the comfort zone has defined the creative, and fostered the inspiration to keep pushing their boundaries. Those past projects remain meaningful because they were challenging enough to expand one’s skills at the time, to tax the existing limits of expression, which, in turn, gives the creative further permission to commit to the frontier of their enterprise. Expansion, however, goes against success. It takes courage and tenacity to continue challenging yourself with each new opportunity. With some initial success, there is a tendency to keep one’s attention riveted on their niche, while the world goes by. Such discipline is important to finish a project, but in the long run, depending on prior successes to define new projects thwarts the greater process.

Expansion means to accept new projects that push the boundaries of present experience. The perspective needed to expand requires the creative to develop a studied distance from recent efforts. Look at other projects, in other fields. Explore methods that are unrelated to your own skill set, and then push the envelope! Only by challenging yourself to execute new methods will you continue to deliver inspired works. Don’t stand on your accomplishments. Bring your project to a completion that expresses the next level of your creative expression. One of the universal signs of creative health is curiosity. Let yours loose on the world, and you will find that your energy for exploration greatly increases. As your interests expand, fresh ideas from your chosen field increase accordingly.

As creatives, we will work through a lifetime of individual projects that draw on these elements for our success. Therefore, if we engage the project at hand, and also work to strengthen these elements, we will advance the kind of support that can foster an inspired life of self-expression. Your ongoing creative enrichment should include some degree of these five elements. Not only does each element offer an enhancement that cannot be substituted for, they also tend to reinforce each other. So when you strengthen one element; the entire breadth of support becomes more enlivened. In this way, we come to find that creativity is not simply exercised when we work on a project. If we are to seriously improve, we must look beyond the work at hand, and plan for the overall development of our personal expression. We must go outside the bounds of individual works, and construct a full complement of supporting methods. In this way, a fount of enrichment can be routinely harnessed, and then relied on to deliver a support that fosters our inspiration. To this end, the creative employs these elements in order to stay open, and in doing so, they are able to regularly bring their endeavors to completion, which continues to cultivate the climate of their creativity.