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That’s one thing about being creative. Don’t be too set in your own ways. Be suggestible from time to time. Allow unexpected influences (like Torr) to shift your ideas. You can always come back to your own convictions if they’re real. But be a tourist in other perspectives.
still have to learn how to locate their ideas, how to execute them, how to feel about them once they’re released into the world, and how to cope with the reactions of others.
Don’t be worried if an idea or a scene or a song comes to you in its most simplistic form first.
We’re back to botanical metaphors here. Big ideas grow from those little things. Writers tend to be people who are sensitive to words. Artists are sensitive to color and line. If you want to encourage your own creativity, try to pay attention to the creative acts of others.
“Why Weird People Are Often More Creative.”
They permit themselves a wider range of ideas, even ones that might not apply to the situation at hand.
thoughts to fit in with what’s acceptable, or correct, or accurate, we’re not going to have ideas that leap away from the ideas that are already there.
but try to always be inspired by something surprising—or to surprise yourself by always being inspired.
Creativity is not about letting everything in—it’s about refusing to keep things out.
If you need to get up at five in the morning so you can answer all your correspondence without a foggy brain, that’s what you should do. If you need to stay late in the office so you can transcribe your notes from the meeting, that’s what you should do.
There are secondary processes that matter much more, like refining an idea, perfecting execution, connecting an idea with the right audience, accepting critical assessment of it. But run out? No chance of that.
The trick is learning how to capture them without being captured by them, how to display them without exposing too much of yourself, how to move forward while remaining unafraid to also move sideways or backwards.
Don’t imagine what you will become—imagine what you won’t become.
If you know you are about to paint a portrait, make a list of all the things you don’t want it to be: overly realistic, say, or brightly colored. It’s sometimes hard to see the heart of an idea, so chip away at all the things that aren’t the heart.
It helps to reinforce which parts of your creative identity you can’t live without, and which might be there only because you’ve been told by someone else that they should be there. Imagining what you won’t become is a necessary refining process. It’s also
so rarely feel that it’s fully understood.
Being creative is the proof that we can leave an imprint on our surroundings, that we can make a mark on time.
The people who already exist as artists know something about their own creativity.
the skids, get blocked up, become overwhelmed by criticism, self-sabotage, give in to temptations of praise.
Studies have shown that creative people tend to be more sensitive to the feelings of others and to fluctuations in the social fabric around them. At the same time, they are often less equipped to deal with those things. The result can be withdrawal from the world. Defense mechanisms, depression. Creative production is not only a way to avoid
Creativity creates connectedness.
Creative things happen to creative people, especially when they let themselves go to the Zen of the moment, when they don’t allow themselves to be paralyzed either by overthinking or by laziness. They have to be in the sweet spot between the two.
Deciding what you’re not before you decide what you are lets you stand strong in your own category.
You have to be both entirely consumed by the moment and also a million miles away.
Micro-meditations take many forms and pop up in many different situations. But they are a skeleton key for everything creative that you might need. If you’re a writer, and you’re in a coffee shop, typing away while you listen to Miles Davis’s Big Fun, and you find that the right words aren’t there, just let yourself disappear for ten seconds inside “Ife.” You won’t know you’re gone, but you’ll also go around the world, and somewhere on that trip you’ll find the words you need.
stepping back from what you’re doing and let your mind settle.
it: how to have conviction and still experiment, how to use available materials and still introduce new ingredients, how to move with surprising speed from theoretical conception to actual execution.
But what I mean is that the artist at the beginning of his or her artistic career, in the first flowering of his or her creativity, can’t worry about the mentorship aspect. You have to think about the side you’re on. Much later, with hindsight and perspective, you can see around to the other side and wonder about the approach of a mentor, the successes and failures.
Apprenticeship is what gets you from point zero to point whatever. And even a creative person who wants to move forward in a creative life without becoming a full-fledged creative professional has to reckon with these questions.
But the one thing no one can dispute is that artists are influenced by each other. We take our ideas where we find them, and largely we find them in the works of other artists.
The painter you think you’re imitating may turn out to be a small influence. The songwriter you want to be exactly like may fade until she’s a footnote. The writer you think you’re rejecting entirely may turn out to be the closest thing you have to a direct inspiration. Creative growth resizes all these things over time.
You’ll have to track those influences as you travel your own creative path.
By then, we were considered equals, or something close to it. They had their sound and we had ours, and the ways one group may have influenced the other had started to blur. This is a second fundamental point: once you are making things of your own, you’re no longer completely in anyone’s shadow. You can be derivative, or you can be trying too hard to distinguish yourself, or you can hope in your heart that the older artist recognizes the way you’re paying homage,
We take our ideas where we find them, and largely we find
them in the works of other artists.
I needed to absorb, process, repeat process until satisfied.
Influence isn’t primarily about comfort food. It’s about challenging your expectations of yourself.
It’s a hard thing to do, to be sloppy rather than flashy, and to do it just as well. But it’s the way that you can let your art also show your humanity.
Be sure to summarize
what you’re learning. Isolate your insight and turn it into a short thesis statement. Dilla taught me to preserve humanity at any cost. Aba Shanti-I taught me how to isolate individual elements to obtain maximum power.
If you have pulled all your influences inside, and you output them appropriately at the right moments or in interesting new permutations, maybe you are engaging in a highly creative act. If a writer knows to really punch an image at the end of a paragraph, and he knows that another writer did that before him, is he just imitating the earlier writer, or is he bringing that writer’s creative choice, studied until understood, across into a new context?
Where creativity is concerned, pure originality is at least partially a myth.
Time changes artists, the art they make, and the way they look at the forces that shape that art.
Attach yourself to people who are doing things you don’t quite understand.
You weren’t supposed to banish the idea. You were supposed to embrace it.
He took an existing piece of writing, something that had already been printed, like a book or
a magazine article or even a few paragraphs that you have written yourself, and you cut it up and rearrange the words, and you force yourself to see meaning in the arbitrary jumble.
It’s a death match that will never be fully resolved, and which gives so much creative work its life.
Much of building your own creative identity is understanding yourself as part of a collaborative environment. You need counselors, foils, and competitors. You need high-level models for inspiration and flatfoots to tell you the truth.
That’s one model of collaboration; put everyone in one place and see what happens.
