The Beginning
I have been reading and listening to a lot of books 📚 related to creativity and creative thinking these days. I recently heard a sentence in one of the audiobooks named “Blogging for Dummies.”
The sentence went something like ” If you can write a letter, you can write a blog.” That got me thinking, is it this easy to write ?? I used to think a lot, scratch a lot of thoughts before I typed them on a word pad. It is only very recently that I understand how to get over a writer’s ✍️ block, and here it was a very casual remark that if you can write a letter you can write a blog. Not just writing, but there are videos that suggest that anyone can draw, this got me thinking if creativity was easy.
The answer I got was, YES it is easy and everyone is capable of being creative. I mean we all have creatively lied in our lives countless times. So what is stopping our creativity in other forms of life??
Books that have helped me in the pursuit of creativity
I would like to think I am a moderately creative person. I mean I have done nothing significant other than this blog, but I want to now. I can write poems, songs and long paragraphs like these about a wide variety of topics.
One day I couldn’t write anymore and this was the first time this happened it was an unknown territory for me. I then anatomically dissected writer’s block at that point in time, through audiobooks and YouTube videos, and got a few pointers for getting out of the writers block and being more creative than ever before.
Books📚 are great at answering questions ❓ if you know where to look. I got a lot of help from books like (mentioning them in the order I read them):
- Someday Is Today: 22 Simple, Actionable Ways to Propel Your Creative Life
Book by Matthew Dicks. - The Steal Like an Artist Audio Trilogy: How to Be Creative, Show Your Work, and Keep Going Books by Austin Kleon.
- Storyworthy: Engage, Teach, Persuade, and Change Your Life Through the Power of Storytelling
Book by Matthew Dicks. - Blogging For Dummies
Book by Amy Lupold Bair. - And some YouTube videos 📷 one where Javed Akther Ji spoke on importance of vocabulary.
- The other, where Manoj Muntashir speaks about listening to other poets.
How to be creative??
Listing bellow the pointers I got from the above books and videos
- Creativity is not generating something new it is mostly when you present the same thing in a different way.
Listen to or read on what you want to write about, it helps a lot.
- You may find inspiration in someone’s work. (Steel Like an Artist)
- May find something you want to write about.
- You may also disagree with someone and may want to put it in words.
All these things will get you to writing (maybe it indeed is as easy as writing a letter now that I think of it).
I read a lot of books combine them and regurgitate them here (that is exactly what I am doing now).
- Write about something that you generally deal with
Writing about something you deal with on a regular basis or maybe something you are passionate about. This way you’d never run out of content to write on or may never experience a block because passion trumps write’s block. (Or at least I think so)
- Work on a lot of things together
Initially I thought this was foolish, I am not able to do one thing completely how will I work on two simultaneously. But as I kept on doing this, I found that the writer’s block just went away.
- I start with two or three separate writing ideas.
- Start working on one
- As soon as feel stuck I move on to something else and start that.
- There is no writer’s Block as I DON’T STOP WRITING. The idea is you have a shortage of thoughts on one particular topic, come back to it later work on something else instead( This really works for me).
- Less is more (Limit your thoughts for more creativity)
Although we may think that being creative means letting you thoughts run wild, but sometimes restricting and confining your thoughts results in better results.
All of us have written essays in English exams which went something like write an essay on The last picnic you had in under 800 words. This helps I believe because now you know what to write and how much is enough. Also this drives your thoughts in a particular direction plus you have a time constrain that forces words out of you although the output sometime may be mediocre, but it is better than no creativity.
Storyworthy The Book
This book is so good that it requires a section of its own. It is especially useful for a storyteller or someone who write about his life or things related to that.
A great book that provides you with a lot of exercises, ideas and routines to be a good story teller. It helped me find out Story worthy moments from my daily life. One such moment became an anecdote in one of my previous post.
Homework for life is another such exercise in this book that changed how I perceive and look at my life. I will not talk about it here but you should read this book or listen to it on audible if possible. This helped me make stories out of a seemingly mundane days of my life, I hope it does the same for you.
Conclusion
There are many ways to be creative like the one mentioned in the book “Dopamine Detox: A Short Guide to Remove Distractions and Get Your Brain to Do Hard Things: 1 (Productivity) by Thibaut Meurisse. Which suggests something along the lines of, making it a routine sitting and trying to write something everyday and the words will fall in place. I have just listed the ways that worked for me. At the end of it all I now believe the statement that creativity is easy and YES if you can write a letter you can write (a blog).
I hope you find inspiration or it finds you.