12 Simple Ways To Be More Creative
Successful authors share their “insider” secrets
“The air is full of tunes. I just reach out and pick one.” — Willie Nelson
Willie Nelson made finding creative ideas sound easy. Any artist knows that the only way to keep working is to keep coming up with new ideas. That’s not always as easy as ole Willie made it sound.
Recently, through reading, (my all-time favorite way to come up with ideas), I came across mention of two interesting techniques. That discovery got me researching. Most of us writers have a stash of idea-generating strategies, but we can always use new ones. We might as well get them from successful, published authors.
12 titillating techniques for getting creative ideas
1) Read old local newspapers
The New York Times ran a profile piece by Donna Tartt. She wrote a “homage,” to author Charles Portis who penned True Grit in 1968. In that article, Tartt mentioned Portis’ favorite method of coming up with ideas.
“He liked nothing better than to go to the library and read rambling ‘local color’ pieces in the archives of rural newspapers. Those homely old American voices — by turns formal, tragicomic and haunting — are crystallized on every page of his work, with the immediacy one sometimes sees in a daguerreotype 150 years old.”
What a great idea. Get dialogue and dialect, plot and history in one fell swoop of the microfilm machine or the digital archives of newspapers across the world.
2) Use a “word of the day” to inspire a story
Cameron Engle shared this in his Medium story, “Your Path to Creativity.” His technique is to look up the Word of the Day and use it to inspire a story. You might learn a new word, but the purpose of the exercise is not to focus on the meaning of a vocabulary word but to let that word be the impetus of the story you create, like the kernel in a piece of popcorn, that thing that made it explode.
3) Visit yard sales
Donna Tartt, the author of the NYT essay mentioned above and the Pulitzer-Prize winning novel, The Goldfinch…
