Creative Quest

by Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson

Some ideas are one-person ideas.

Being a collaborator is a constant learning experience. You quickly learn your strengths and your weaknesses.

—Be open and curious, and expect the same in return. We have talked about creative disinhibition, and how creativity depends on not filtering your ideas so much that strange or unexpected ideas disappear.

Every successful

collaboration is also a fight for your own creative life.

If a question comes into perfect focus, answering it isn’t a creative act anymore.

The Connect Effect Think of two artists you know, who you consider to be very different, and imagine what project they would make if they collaborated.

another best thing, which is to make something that is already made.

like. If you’re a writer and you feel like you’re not capable of writing something new, find a poem you like and type it out again.

Making your own version of existing works keeps you on your toes. It keeps your machinery humming

Copying, or covering, is always a valuable creative exercise. It gets you going. It restarts your brain and encourages you to look for the way things are built. Go and retype those last three sentences.

If you thought of something first, does that mean the same thought

can’t occur in someone else’s mind with as much power and as much authenticity? If someone else thinks of something first, does that mean the same thought can’t occur in your mind? And is it even the same idea if it grows in a different mind?

But part of what creative people do is keep reopening them. Parody is new but never new. It’s funny but also tries to identify some serious issues.

Who should you copy?

I urge everyone to revisit earlier work.

But I think that you have to go back and look at your own work with a clear eye. And, hopefully, with pleasure.

Revisit earlier work. Go back and look at your own work with a clear eye.

There’s no such thing as garbage.

When you are recycling parts

of past works, be smart about it.

They were able to take existing materials and make something bracing and new from them. You might think that a definition of pure creativity includes the idea of creating something from nothing, but that’s also a little bit of a dodge. Nothing is nothing, really.

change your materials. I know writers who mostly write on their laptops—maybe that’s every writer now—and when they switch to longhand, or an old typewriter, or a tablet with some weird Bluetooth keyboard, they enter a new creative phase. It’s not just that they get a new perspective on their own work. They actually have to adjust their creative habits.

Wikipedia—are connected to other tools that rob you of efficiency and focus. They don’t destroy your will to live, but they do destroy your ability to live in the moment.

We think, or tend to think, that creativity is the enemy of distraction.

the human need for organized sound.

They reinvested what they heard in a new artwork.

That’s another thing that creativity is—taking the existing world and making something new from it.

We have just discussed how creativity can come from distraction, how it can be an outgrowth of the process of recognizing which things are taking your eye off the ball.

They can be a matter of seeing the whole world around you, then using this power—this energy—to identify a new particle, a new spark.

taking the existing world and making something new from it.

creativity] is the ability to see something else.

But creativity has to do with how you arrange and construct what you pull out of those familiars.” I would add to that that it has to do with how you pull yourself out of those familiars, which Eames gets to in the second part of his definition:

the role of the observer was to confound the theorist. I think creativity in a sense is confounding yourself in both roles as if in an endless chase—when you are satisfied with what you have imagined, you confound it with new patterns

you see, and then when you are pleased with that, you conjure up an impossibility, which in turn will be challenged by your new perceptions—always surrendering to the journey.” You lock in to what is there, you see things that others do not, you create, you distract and disrupt yourself with what is not there, and you start the process over again. It’s a cycle: specifically, it’s a life cycle.

Boredom seems like the least creative feeling. It seems like a numbness. But it’s actually a way of clearing space for a new idea to spring back up.

When hit by boredom, go for it. Let yourself be crushed by it; submerge, hit bottom.

In general, with things unpleasant, the rule is, the sooner you hit bottom, the faster you surface. The idea here, to paraphrase another great poet of the English language, is to exact full look at the worst. The reason boredom deserves such scrutiny is that it represents pure, undiluted time in all its repetitive, redundant, monotonous splendor.

(you know the feeling—stalled, lost, paralyzed, a little desperate, can’t keep food down, long walks at night), make a point of hanging out with people from different disciplines.

But after a little while, the part of my brain that subjects everything to analysis kicked in, and I started to notice that they were acting their way through a different set of creative stimuli and responses.

Unblock Party When you’re having trouble thinking of new ideas, go to one of your old ideas and rework it.