Being creative is alchemic. Keep your eyes open – scan the horizon. It's that ability to look at everything with an open and curious mind and not get bored with that.
You have to get seriously good at curating. Beach combing.
That means collecting all those bits of mundane rubbish and in real-time spotting what others aren't spotting. Put your thought processor on stand by and just marinade in what you see. Don't think about it too hard.
For me the challenge goes like this. I read this the other day.
"The power of equations lies in the philosophically difficult correspondence between mathematics, a collective creation of human minds, and an external physical reality. Equations model deep patterns in the outside world. By learning to value equations, and to read the stories they tell, we can uncover vital features of the world around us." - Ian Stewart
In my head pops a visual.
That's how it works for me.
I can't explain it but that's what happens and it causes connections that I start to wire other things into. From this new words are generated and the process goes on a few hundred times a minute or until I decide to stop and do something different.
The things on the surface are of only superficial value. You know, rather like an iceberg the best bits are usually hidden. That's as far as I should take the analogy I guess.
Ian Gilbert suggests that nature abhors a vacuum and the same applies in your head. The trouble is, if there’s nothing to replace the gap left behind when you clear out all your old rubbish then some new rubbish will come along to fill it.
Therefore make sure that you are pretty eclectic with your own archive of stuff. Stuff you have squirrelled away - that you like – and like a real alchemist be ready to drag great things in.
Stay awake to all the fragments of the mundane and ordinary and watch for the things that aren't. They will look like the mundane too so it takes practice.
Being creative means to be open to all the stuff about to hit you, at all times and having your thought processor on stun. Working too hard at it isn't going to deliver anything worth 'jack' so let it marinade.
"The mind, at its best, is a pattern-making machine, engaged in a perpetual attempt to impose order on to chaos; making links between disparate entities or ideas in order to better understand either or both. It is the ability to spot the potential in the product of connecting things that don’t ordinarily go together that marks out the person (or teacher) who is truly creative." - Phil Beadle
"We create the new not generally through some mad moment of inspiration in fictionalized accounts of ancient Greeks in baths (though the conditions for this can be forced into existence), but by putting things together that do not normally go together; from taking disciplines (or curriculum areas) and seeing what happens when they are forced into unanticipated collision. - Phil Beadle
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