12 Simple Ways To Be More Creative

Successful authors share their “insider” secrets

Photo by Cody Board on Unsplash

“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…