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Thursday, December 06, 2007
Making Creative Output A Practical Reality
By Mary McNeil
If you want to bring your creative ideas to life, you’ll know that you need more than just inspiration. It takes planning and persistent effort too. So if you're brimming with creative ideas but struggling to develop them into tangible output, here are a couple of techniques you can use to make creative output a practical reality. 1. Declutter your way to creativity Clutter takes many different forms. The most obvious is the physical clutter in your home. Less obvious, but just as constricting, are the emotional and mental clutter you carry around in your head and in your habits. I'm a great believer that the first step you need to take towards greater creativity in your life is to create a space for it. Sometimes you need to create space without knowing what will fill it. Just clear the clutter and trust that something creative will appear once there's space for it. In my experience it always does. Other times you need to create space with a specific purpose or creative project in mind. The process of decluttering itself often involves tough decisions, followed by a brief period of grieving for the ex-clutter. But once you've got through that, you experience a fabulous lightness and sense of possibility. This is the space in which your creativity can come out to play. So if you stop for a moment and think about where the clutter is in your life, what springs immediately to mind? If you were to clear one particular area or type of clutter in your life, which one would free you up the most to get creative? What's the first step you need to take to get clearing and to create some creative space for yourself?
2. Create structure to support your creativity There's a fairly widely held belief that truly creative people need to live unstructured, bohemian lives and that any hint of a routine will kill their creative output. Now while that may be the ideal for a rare few artists, for most people it removes the possibility of a support system. I believe that the structures and routines you build in your life are the foundations which support your creativity. They can, of course, also stifle it. So you need to make sure that you're building the right sort of foundations. And that means designing your day-to-day routines thoughtfully. Ultimately you want your creativity to have some output. That involves creating the space and the routines which will allow you to practise your art regularly, whatever form it takes. The grander the scale of your creative ambitions, the more space and disciplined structure you will need. Have a think about how much time you want to spend each day (or each week) on your creative projects. What routine or structure could you put in place to ensure that you get the time you want? If you can't get all the time and space you want, how could you get at least a part of it? What's the first step towards it?
