To Be More Creative, Cheer Up
nautil.us
To Be More Creative, Cheer Up
1–10 of 46 posts
Re: To Be More Creative, Cheer Up
#2>Bilder offers up one last bit of practical advice: Just get your ideas out there—on paper, on canvas, out of your head.
This is why a lot of creative keep a "brainjuice" file full of half-cooked ideas they can later dip into. When you have some creative energy, its easy to just dump it out and then, later, when you're in a more sober and productive mood, start implementing those ideas in an effective manner. Or as writers say: write drunk, edit sober.
Re: To Be More Creative, Cheer Up
#3A lot of nice information in the article. I think people can be more creative than they realize if they (1) legitimize associative thinking (this is what I translate "being uninhibited" to mean) and (2) insist that they have a basic capacity for being creative. Creativity often does not come immediately when you want it, so (IMO) when it does not, you have to insist you still have the capacity rather than treat that as a failure and give up.
Re: To Be More Creative, Cheer Up
#4>Bilder offers up one last bit of practical advice: Just get your ideas out there—on paper, on canvas, out of your head. This is why a lot of creative keep a "brainjuice" file full of half-cooked ideas they can later dip into. When you have some creative energy, its easy to just dump it out and then, later, when you're in a more sober and productive mood, start implementing those ideas in an effective manner. Or as w…
This is exactly how I make music. There's three distinct steps, sound creation, arrangement, and mastering. Usually I don't spend more than 15-30 minutes on any one track and sometimes as little as 5-10. But I have a huge pile of unfinished work in various stages, some I never get back to, but some I finish happily enough. My key to creative happiness is to be entertained, engaged, and moving forward.
Re: To Be More Creative, Cheer Up
#5>Bilder offers up one last bit of practical advice: Just get your ideas out there—on paper, on canvas, out of your head. This is why a lot of creative keep a "brainjuice" file full of half-cooked ideas they can later dip into. When you have some creative energy, its easy to just dump it out and then, later, when you're in a more sober and productive mood, start implementing those ideas in an effective manner. Or as w…
As a 'creative' of many years (not all of them public), I have folders and folders of dead ideas I never used, many of which I agonized over for weeks and even months to no actual productive end.
Kurt Vonnegut famously said that the reason he invented Kilgore Trout and his stories was that he loved coming up with the short little SF parables, but that writing them out was just rubbish and usually not as good as the core moral itself.
That said, you can do yourself a lot of harm dwelling on never-finished ideas; at some point you have to learn to buckle down and commit to something. You'll never finish a thing, until you finish your first thing. But once you do, you'll finish another and another, and you'll keep finishing things only as long as you keep finishing them.
Re: To Be More Creative, Cheer Up
#6I have to say, I can't help thinking the author doesn't know anything about Hemingway or Picasso. Both are very famous examples of how depression can be creative. You can name many others like Virginia Woolf or Emily Dickenson.
I think both depression and exuberance can be creative, albeit creative in different ways. Exuberance is very good for, as the author notes, divergent thinking. You simply have the ability to come up with so many positive possibilities. Depression on the other hand is very converging. You just know for sure that something bad is going to happen.
EDIT: I should add that Hemingway at least was likely bipolar. So it may very well be that he's a good example of how both depression and exuberance can be creative.
Re: To Be More Creative, Cheer Up
#7I have to say, I can't help thinking the author doesn't know anything about Hemingway or Picasso. Both are very famous examples of how depression can be creative. You can name many others like Virginia Woolf or Emily Dickenson. I think both depression and exuberance can be creative, albeit creative in different ways. Exuberance is very good for, as the author notes, divergent thinking. You simply have the ability to…
> Both are very famous examples of how depression can be creative.
That probably had more to do with their substance abuse.
Re: To Be More Creative, Cheer Up
#8I have to say, I can't help thinking the author doesn't know anything about Hemingway or Picasso. Both are very famous examples of how depression can be creative. You can name many others like Virginia Woolf or Emily Dickenson. I think both depression and exuberance can be creative, albeit creative in different ways. Exuberance is very good for, as the author notes, divergent thinking. You simply have the ability to…
> Both are very famous examples of how depression can be creative. That probably had more to do with their substance abuse.
We don't really know the full relationship between substance abuse and mental illness. There's a very well-known correlation between the two, but it's questionable whether the substance abuse causes mental illness or the mental illness causes the substance abuse. It's likely some combination of the two: the substance abuse aids the mental illness and the mental illness aids the substance abuse.
Re: To Be More Creative, Cheer Up
#9I have to say, I can't help thinking the author doesn't know anything about Hemingway or Picasso. Both are very famous examples of how depression can be creative. You can name many others like Virginia Woolf or Emily Dickenson. I think both depression and exuberance can be creative, albeit creative in different ways. Exuberance is very good for, as the author notes, divergent thinking. You simply have the ability to…
> Both are very famous examples of how depression can be creative. That probably had more to do with their substance abuse.
Whatever causes we claim after the fact for these people's condition, depression has been compatible with a high level of artistic creativity for many, many famous artists (out of laziness, I'll only add Kafka and Foster-Wallace).
Re: To Be More Creative, Cheer Up
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Both are very famous examples of how depression can be creative. That probably had more to do with their substance abuse.
We don't really know the full relationship between substance abuse and mental illness. There's a very well-known correlation between the two, but it's questionable whether the substance abuse causes mental illness or the mental illness causes the substance abuse. It's likely some combination of the two: the substance abuse aids the mental illness and the mental illness aids the substance abuse.
I think the implication was more that the substance abuse effected their creative output.