Mommy, Where Do Babies "Ideas" Come From?
by Randy Ingermanson
I used to think I wasn't very creative. I used to even say it out loud. I have since learned that saying things like that qualifies as a Crime Against Humanity. There's probaby a Geneva Convention against it.
The reason is that this is the quintessential self-fulfilling prophecy. Do you want to be uncreative, dull, and boring? Then tell everyone you're uncreative, dull, and boring. (Or tell everyone you're creative, entertaining, and fascinating. You get the same great reaction either way.)
Frankly, if you have a pulse, you've got some level of creativity. And if you're a novelist (or imagine you're a novelist) then you probably have a lot of creativity.
Bottom line: Stop worrying about whether you ARE creative. Start focusing on how to beef up what you've got.
I recently gave a talk on "Exercising Your Creativity" at a writer's conference. I based the talk on one of my favorite books on the subject, A Whack On The Side Of The Head, by Roger von Oech. Here are three of the things I learned about being creative from this book:
A) Sometimes there is more than one right answer.
I tried to convince my calculus teacher of this once, and didn't get very far. But real life doesn't have much to do with calculus. In real life, there may very well be six or two hundred or a zillion right answers.
Example: What is the "right" way to write this article?
There are plenty of right ways, and my way isn't necessarily the rightest. It's just my way. So when you come up with a clever idea to solve a problem, don't stop! Ask yourself if you can come up with ten clever ways. Or ten stupid ways. But oops! I'm infringing on the second principle I learned . . .
B) Sometimes being "stupid" is smart.
People are so afraid of doing something stupid, they'll go along with the crowd. Even if that means getting caught up in Groupthink and doing something . . . stupid.
Guess what? The crowd isn't always right, and sometimes what seems smart to everyone isn't smart at all. There are any number of garage inventors who've built things that the experts said couldn't be done. Am I right or am I right?
Kings used to have "court fools" whose job was to mock the group, including the king. The purpose was to always have at least one voice that wasn't going with the crowd. Do you have a devil's advocate who will argue with you about your ideas? Maybe you should! Even if they're not very bright. There's nothing like trying to explain physics to a barmaid to force you to use clear thinking. And sometimes, the barmaid is right.
C) What rule can you break?
Rules are good--usually. But sometimes you can do something cool by breaking the rules. Ogden Nash used to do this with his poems by violating the rules of spelling to get something to rhyme. As an example, look at the last two lines of his poem "The Panther":
Better yet, if called by a panther . . . Don't anther!
It's a little silly, but that's the point. As another example, look at this limerick that violates the "rules of limericks":
There was a young poet named Dan Whose poetry never would scan.
He said, "I try hard,
But I guess I'm no bard,
Because I always have to cram as many words into the last line as I possibly can."
Whoever wrote this limerick succeeded by breaking the rules in a beautiful self-referential way.
There's more, but I'd hate to steal all the thunder
from Roger von Oechs. I'll close by giving you a link to his book on Amazon. It's a classic, and every time I read the thing, I somehow have a ton of creative ideas in the weeks that follow:
"A Whack on the Side of the Head: How You Can Be More Creative"
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