Lately, my lunchtime reading (out of the enormous stack) has been the book Imagine by Jonah Lehrer. It’s a fascinating investigation into the conditions under which creativity occurs. While the book has attracted some bad press recently, the main messages ring true with my own experience.
I’ve been thinking a lot about creativity lately, because my novel is chugging slowly toward completion. I’m now in the midst of a 4th (and hopefully final!) draft of this 4 1/2-year project, so fostering the conditions under which creativity can blossom is a major preoccupation. While I may not be as scientific about it as Jonah Lehrer, I do have a few favorite ingredients for effective creative work.
First ingredient: chocolate. Chocolate makes everything better. Especially if it also has coffee in it!
I must have picked up this habit while I was in Britain. I never even liked black tea until I drank it in a window seat overlooking the rugged Welsh countryside. With a book, of course. (That’s Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia, if you’re curious.)
Of course, I don’t take pictures of the long hours I spend slouched in my office chair, or the late nights when I have to push up my eyelids to keep them open. The ones pictured here are the nicer moments. But they’re important to the creative process. Says Lehrer:
“This sort of mental relaxation makes it easier to daydream and pay attention to insights; we’re less focused on what’s right in front of us and more aware of the possibilities simmering in our imaginations.”
I’ll buy that.
What are the ingredients of your creative process?Â
Alina Sayre, Author 
I’ve been thinking a lot about this too lately! I quit pinterest cold turkey because it was sucking my creativity out of me! Great ideas on there, but I realized that getting all these crafty ideas was stopping me from having my own original artistic ideas. Creative laziness… no good! I’ve been wanting to paint/do some art lately, but the well has been a bit dry… just a few, not fully formed ideas
Figuring out ways to fuel it. I have too much business usually, and need to make more time to just sit & think and daydream 🙂 Need to get my site & blog back up and running so I can get these thoughts out there & let them grow 😉
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Awesome! It’s so true; I read a blog post about making time for the pre-art creativity to happen. We need space in our lives to exhale, and in the nothing-time, the ideas start to churn. Great idea about Pinterest–I think fasting from social media last week helped me to get off the social media hamster wheel for a while and sit with my own life and ideas 🙂 Can’t wait to see what comes of your cultivating-time!
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Being outside and gardening, especially weeding (menial labor!)seems to be instant creative fuel for me, though by the time I’m done I’m so tired I can’t always put the creative ideas into practice. But I’m always inspired by the ideas God seems to bring to mind outdoors. I say God because most of the time these ideas seem to come out of the blue, applications of weeding to my inner life. Maybe I will try some of your suggestions to move to the next step of actually implementing those creative ideas, and, like Elaine, get that blog reignited! By the way, I notice that in your photo of that delicious bar of dark chocolate, the wrapper has been tampered with :0!! Thanks for getting the fuse going!
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Yay for gardening inspiration! Can’t wait to see that blog up and running again 🙂
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I can TOTALLY relate to chocolate and post-it notes but will sub Coffee for tea. There are many things that fuel my creativity — I try to pick one each week and blog about it. :-)I definitely believe in getting away from the computer to allow inputs from all over the place — with input there is no output.
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Hm…I’d say coffee is a very acceptable substitute 🙂 You’re right, though–the computer is no substitute for input from real life.
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Chocolate, coffee, a long walk, a funny radio show, anything that’s cleverly written (movie, tv show, book, etc), and trusting the possibilities our creative minds offer up. All of these fuel my creativity.
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Awesome, Tami! I also love long walks. They give my brain time to mull over ideas. Plus, the beauty of nature inspires me 🙂
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