How do you get better at being creative?
I'm starting a new phase in my life and with that, quite a few shifts in personality/hobbies. The big hobby that I've started to get into is filmmaking. I feel really comfortable and confident in the technical aspect, such as cameras and all the equipment used to make good films.
The huge part that I've struggled with and continue to struggle with though is writing and creativity in general. I feel like I'm in some sort of restraint when it comes to my personal creativity since I suppressed a lot of my emotions when I was younger and now that's coming back to haunt me. I don't know how to "break free" from said restraints to become more creative again. Sometimes there have been little bursts of creativity that I've had sometimes after waking up as a remnant from dreams or potentially just the recovery of sleep but I don't know how to capitalize on it.
Do y'all have any recommendations on how to become more creative or just to be able to come up with ideas more easily?
Writing is like any activity: you get better by doing it. Set aside a time every day or every other day that is your writing time. Get it in your head that this is your time for writing. Turn off the internet if you have to or anything else to reduce the noise and force yourself to write.
This is like going to the gym, you don't get stronger by reading about the most effective ways to get stronger (though that can help), but you actually get stronger by going to the gym and lifting.
And at the gym you don't stop working out every few moments and review video to see if your form is good. You work out and then maybe go back later and look at how you did well after. This is to say: don't edit while you're writing. Writing and editing are two different skills and activities. When you are writing, you're writing. Let editor ZucchiniZe worry about what was written later. Give yourself freedom to write whatever without your inner critic stepping in.
Listen to @39hp about writing from a prompt. This is not cheating. When musicians learn to play or write music, they first often play songs by other people entirely. Often without even a hint of their own spin on it. You can, and should if it's helpful, write fan fiction if that's what gets you moving to start.
You sound like you're interested in world building. This is good and fun and there's a lot of great world builders out there. But, especially with film which is a very commercial art form, you need to remember to tell a great story first and foremost. Unless you're doing something very experimental, you need a quality story or the best universe in the world can't carry it. A lot of your favorite books, films, etc started with a single scene or dialog exchange that then was expanded and added to and even built around. I'm sure some writers build the world first, but that's often not the case. Story is king, even if you plan on doing stuff where story isn't king, understanding story and knowing why you're breaking the rule is vital.
By having less tools at disposal. It forces you to work with what you have and think/work/whatchamacallit in new ways.
One thing that's really helped me a lot is creative writing. It takes almost no monetary investment, though it is a hobby unto itself and requires the time you'd devote to any hobby.
What I found is that creative writing gave me the space to explore and develop new ideas, even if just a little bit at a time, because I knew that even if I hated what I ended up with, it would not have cost me much more than time. I think it's important to take the time and work on things, knowing that there's a possibility you don't like what you end up with. I think that only by giving yourself the room to creatively fail, even catastrophically, can you discover what you really love.
I’ve tried creative writing and in my original draft of this post I actually included it in it. But whenever I sit down to start to try and write anything I’m always presented with zero ideas for how to start, and when I use some sort of prompt or anything to help me come up with ideas I end up feeling like I’m “cheating” somehow and that it’s not true creativity.
Do you have any recommendations for how to get better at the ideation process itself?
I’m doing a test run for a weekly writing prompt group, and as part of that I’m going to be describing my process of addressing that prompt.
I suppose my first piece of advice would be to not be afraid to “cheat” or “copy,” especially as you’re still trying to find your voice. I can’t remember who said it, but a comedian speaking on comedians said that all comedians started by copying. If it was just to themselves or just to their friends, they did this and it taught them pacing, delivery, and the mechanics of telling a good joke. Of course that become problematic when you go mainstream, but we’re talking about just starting.
There’s also the idea of The Hero’s Journey which I would highly recommend reading. It’s an intense study of how all aspects of all stories can be divided into recognizable riffs off of a universal Proto-story. It really breaks down the mechanics of stories and helped me recognized why certain stories stuck with me while others have not.
As for coming up with big ideas whole cloth, I think you’d need to find someone better than me. All of my bigger projects are riffs on Lovecraft where the real horror is man (original, I know :P).
I actually wrote a paper on As I Lay Dying and it's relation to The Hero's Journey and Greek Mythology.
The way that (almost) every story can be broken down to the same base principles is one of the most interesting things to me but I never really considered actually using it for my own writing since it felt so foreign, and I guess I don't have that good of a mindset about being/getting better which is something I also need to shed and change for (hopefully) the better.
Whenever I try a writing prompt I always have the same issue. Sometimes I'd have the endgame all figured out, the grand strides and whatnot, but have no idea how to set the tone or even get the story started. So i just flail around a bit and wind up deleting whatever I write.
Don't let go of the idea though, because next time. With another prompt. You'll be in a position where maybe there's some overlap. Maybe you had an idea for a treacherous interplanetary espionage, but had no idea how to introduce anything, what "future" to set it in, how life would be like, or anything like that. So you give it a shot anyway and maybe just draft the flimsy bits and flesh out the fun parts before giving up.
But then a little bit later I'd read another prompt and gears would start turning as I'd start playing with both prompts in my head. Seeing if there's any interesting intersections. What would happen if those two stories happened in the same world. If one is "modern" and one is "future" then that presents a strange social boundary. Or maybe the prompts are two separate points in history and there's either a tragic or phenomenal story to be told.
I think the trick to avoiding feeling like you're cheating, is to make it transformative. Normal prompts are boring for me because I can never vizualise anything specific. If I tried to do a prompt without recycling some of my failed ideas, I'd get absolutely nowhere instead of barely anywhere. You'll just have to wait until an idea infests your mind enough, i guess. The perfect storm of ideas is quite rare, even if you start doing hadron style prompt collisions.
Also, I think the important part of any creative process is to just play around with it. I must have spent at least a few months in total trying to get "the right feeling" for this one story because whenever I commit to anything, the story changes in my head and gets more interesting. On paper though, it just gets more sprawling and hopeless. I don't really care though since at least this way, it gets 100% audience approval c:
I don't think any creative endeavor exists in a vacuum. Musicians can be inspired by the music they listened to as a child or new music they encounter later in life. Painters can be inspired by what they see around them or by trying to capture a feeling they had in response to some external stimulus. Being inspired by a prompt isn't "cheating" any more than the other examples I mentioned are "cheating." Even things you write solely out of your own head are likely to be at least partially inspired by something external, even if you're not aware of it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9C_HReR_McQ
This should solve all your problems with being creative
Yes.
There's more?!
You have only dipped your toes in the eye of the abyss.
https://www.youtube.com/user/thisisitcollective/
edit with correct link and: They released one about a year in between
By having less tools at disposal. It forces you to work with what you have and think/work/whatchamacallit in new ways.