Two More Strategies for Overcoming Creative Stagnation
Answers in Unasked Responses
No matter how hard we try to avoid it, we are creatures of habit. Habits keep us safe and allow us to accomplish great things. But, they can also lead to a sense of stagnation. The water of inspiration can only be drawn from the same well for so long.
Watching a movie, enjoying a work of art, attending a concert are all great ways to feel stimulated and inspire a sense of creativity. Yet, they often don’t actually generate any new ideas because they are functionally passive. There’s nothing wrong with that necessarily. Sometimes passivity is needed to rest the mind and body.
But, it’s also important to actively seek out inspiration by asking questions and using unusual methods to find the answers. Building habits and performing exercises that create inspirational results with a purpose force your brain to make connections that are unobvious.
One fun tactic for this that I’ve used is Oblique Strategies. Created by Brain Eno and Peter Schmidt, when used properly this card deck can push your mind into uncharted territory. Learn more about it www.enoshop.co.uk
Similar to Oblique Strategies but weighed down with hundreds of years of history, myth and personal belief is a great deck of Tarot cards. Find a deck that you like, ask a question and pull a card. After removing any sense of supernatural around the imagery, you try to find an answer in the results. Each image has a meaning, by diving into that meaning (or your own specific impression of the given image) you are drawing lines between two unrelated things. Some decks will be more useful than others for this and some belief systems might make this unattractive.
The same technique can be used with any great book of art. Ask a very specific question, turn to a random page of art and inspect that art for the answer. It’s in there somewhere. The human brain is a connection making machine and forcing these connections to be made are where real incredible breakthroughs can come.
Setting Controlled Limits
When you’re free to do everything, it is often impossible to do anything. Choices abound in all areas of our lives and they can be absolutely exhausting. Limiting the number and types of choices you make can not only clear up mind space for other creative types of thinking, the limitations themselves can force your hand to break through what was originally a stumbling block.
If you think your project requires 5 pages, force yourself to find a way to do it in 1. If you’re used to using a specific set of colors, remove those as options. Figure out how to talk about your subject without using using the language generally associated with it. Write a rock and roll song without a guitar and drums. Draw the portrait with one line.
We are so spoiled with the tools that we have at our fingertips at any given moment. Limitations strip us of our safety net and force us to new things and new ways of thinking.
