Recently a younger friend asked me how they could be more creative.
With permission, I'm posting here an edited form of my answer. I imagine none of what I have to say here is new. But I would've liked to know these things when I was twenty, and I suspect we benefit from returning to them.
Emailing back and forth with my friend brought out two senses of the question:
- 'How can I have livelier ideas?'
- 'How can I get more done?'
I try to address both here.
1.
I think you should focus on craft and work over art and thought.
Craft involves skills that we can learn and pass on. You can take an act like turning a nice table leg on a lathe, and break that act down into small concrete steps. You can take drawing, sculpting, composing, writing et cetera apart into learnable stages. Doing this doesn't guarantee that your work'll show taste or wisdom, but you won't ever turn a tasteful table leg if you can't turn any in the first place.
Much craft passes on in mimicry. Parody and pastiche teach you fast: they make you attend to the details. If you write, add translation to that list. Historically, training in most fields involved much imitation of work by more experienced hands, not because the imitation's results would delight, and not with the hope that the apprentice would exactly replicate the master, but because mimicry is one of our best teachers.
Mimicking something in a different medium can also teach you fast. Among other things, you'll learn what specificities your working medium doesn't share with others. That is, you'll learn more about a medium's quiddity, and the more you know about that, the finer your work will become.
Work is satisfying. Work is also much easier than thinking. Sometimes we need to think, usually to set the direction for the next block of work. Once the direction's set, though, work lets us break a task down into doable bits, and tick those steps off. It is a mountainous task to write a book. You can write a sentence, though! Or sketch an arm.
The concept of work also helpfully fits the repetition and iteration that drive creative work in most (not all?) mediums.
Art, in the word's modern sense, is an empty category. Thought is real, though. Risks probably arise if you focus too much on craft and work over thought. I believe present-day culture stresses art and thought so much that these risks mean little in practice.
From what I understand, much creative education (creative writing degrees, fine arts &c) structures craft, work, and iteration so that the student doesn't have to. That structuring is one of creative education's selling points. (That, plus experience receiving critique, and access to networks--if you attend a well-connected institution.)
2.
I think original-seeming ideas spring from influences. Outside of mimicry in training, I suggest you try to avoid having just one influence. But you avoid this not by avoiding influence--impossible--but by taking in many influences.
You should take in human craft in ways both broad and deep.
Spread broad across mediums and times. If you sit in just one time or medium or movement you will fester.
Dig deep down veins in one medium, one time, even in one worker's corpus, because you must learn as much as possible about your medium's particular tools.
Store the parts that strike you. If you read, commonplace. If you watch, take screenshots (or videos!).
Return later to the material you've stored. For several reasons, I find it helpful to post one image from my files when I sign off the internet for the night. One reason is that this makes me forage through my stores every day.
3.
Do not, though, obsess about cultivating the self. The verified longest human lifespan at present is roughly 120 years. In that time you won't scratch the surface of what humans have made. You will not scratch the surface of the surface.
My doctorate made me the world expert in one very niche topic, and later became a well-received first book. When I finished it, however, I felt that all I'd done was to map more precisely our ignorance in my subfield. I don't think anyone ever truly masters a subject. Anyone claiming to have done so has stopped seeing how we might learn yet more.
I say this not to discourage exploration but to try to offer some kind of peace: keep striving, but accept also that the task is infinite. This truth might set you free.
4.
You've probably heard this one before even if some of the other sections feel new: as much as possible, avoid wanting to be a creative or be creative, and focus on wanting to make stuff.
When I wake up in the morning I don't want to be a writer, I want to write. I don't care for the glittering prizes; I care about having written. Well, on a good day. On a bad day, I wake up wanting the sweet release of death, but if all of us were measured by our bad days, none of us would stand.
Point being! Focus on process, not outcome. Describing it as wanting to make stuff might sound infantilising. It isn't: 'maker' is what 'poet' means.
5.
I think that to get stuff done you must balance an ideal and your reality.
Scholars have studied what makes someone creatively productive. I'm sorry to report that the answer is regular work, ideally at the same designated, protected time each day, without interruptions.
That's a cruel prescription, since life will stop most of us from ever achieving it.
My advice, therefore, is that you should aim for whatever you can achieve of the ideal--regular, consistent work sessions--and supplement that by fitting creative work into the real crannies of life as it is lived.
I have written in hospitals, in transport termini, and on many, many buses. I once found myself trapped in a fifteenth-century building at 11 PM by an illegal bicycle race. (Long story, and also a hyperlocal one.) I wrote. Not all making travels so easily--another sign that mediums have essences--but if any aspect of yours does, you can make use of such times.
In this, you will benefit from a practical, hard-nosed view of your work. Readers speak highly of lines I wrote in haste on the bus and of lines I wrote at leisure in an armchair at home. If I thought of writing as something more transcendant, rather than as the placing of particular objects in particular structures, I'd write less.
I take some small consolation from the thought that those with all the world's wealth rarely make anything worthwhile. The rich more often resemble Elon Musk than Lord Dunsany.
6.
Making stuff is hard, even when it's fun. I can say nothing to soften that. But there may be comfort in knowing that making stuff remains hard for everyone. The people I know who make the most and the most impressive things find it hard too.
I think our crap days and our average days define our output. The good days are the cream on top; if I've ever done anything worthwhile, it's in part because I'm willing to grind out some tiny bit of progress on the bad days.
I write all this as though I have it all figured out. I have almost none of it figured out. But if I hold a sliver more of it in my grasp than you, this's my attempt to pass that sliver on.