10 Tips to Get More Creative

Mar 13, 2023

Being creative can mean many things. I’m not suggesting you write a novel today. (Although if you want to, go for it). When I talk about making creativity part of your life, I’m talking about the endless opportunities for all of us to be creative. When you were a kid, you probably did loads of creative stuff without even thinking about it. These tips are to help you find some of that spark again. Maybe you love to cook so try a new recipe. Maybe you love to garden – can you redesign a flowerbed? Maybe you love writing or reading or building things with your hands. Whatever floats your boat, let that be your window to creative living. Being creative doesn’t just apply to professional artists. It can apply to all of us – what does it mean to you?

You don’t need to be good at something. You don’t have to be good to justify being creative. Honest! I’ll share some first drafts occasionally in the newsletters to show you just how bad I let my writing be. The only way for me to make it better is for me to dare to put it on the page in the first place. So maybe you’ll make a total, terrible mess, but that’s okay. Do it anyway.

Make time for something creative every day. I can hear you through cyberspace. I don’t have time for that. I’ve got the serious business of life to live and no time for messing around with acrylic paint. But I believe that doing something creative IS the serious business of living. I think it makes us better, better workers, better parents, better citizens, better better better all round if we find our creativity. Okay, I hear you. You’re still not finding time… try five minutes. Seriously. In five minutes you can write a hundred words. Or you can sketch a doodle. Carve out half an hour once a week. Make yourself make a little time, then take it from there…

Or you can just daydream. Daydreaming is key. Yes, that does mean lie on the coach for five minutes and look out the window. Sooooo many people tell me they’re too busy to daydream. And maybe today you are. But there must be five minutes during a week when you can take the time to do nothing. Your imagination is ready and waiting for you and once you’ve let yourself put aside your things to do list, you might be surprised at how full of life your busy brain can be. (Turn off your phone when you daydream, by the way… not that internet surfing isn’t fun, but you need space for your mind to roam free).

You don’t need an end result. Do you know how many times a week I get asked about how to publish? Heaps. And yes, sharing my work with readers is fantastic. The icing on the cake. But it’s not why I write. The hundreds of folders on my desktop full of unshared writing attest to that. I write because it fills me up. It makes me feel good. It makes me happy. It makes me kinder. Yadda yadda. All this to say, don’t worry if the painting you did looks like a sandwich instead of a dog. It’s hard to let go of end results but it’s the only way to alight that creative vibe. You can’t publish a book if you’ve never written anything. You can’t show someone a painting if you’ve never dipped a paintbrush into the watercolours. Eventually, thinking about the end product is interesting. But start with the beginning.

Use prompts and tips. You’re buying my line that creativity is important in day-to-day living. You’ve carved out your five minutes. But you’ve got nothing. You can’t think what to do… try using prompts and tips from the great Interweb. So what if you haven’t written anything since high-school? Doesn’t mean you can’t use a photo-prompt and write a poem. Use a first line prompt and pull out your phone to take photos inspired by it.

Try again. Redo your creative things differently day in, day out. If it’s a mess, try it again. If that sentence doesn’t work first time, rewrite it. Rewrite it again. I rewrote my first published picture book over three hundred times. I’m NOT JOKING. Each time I learned something, figured something out, and yes, I felt frustrated along the way, but I also feel proud of the final result. It was worth every rewrite.

See opportunities. Being creative is about seeing things differently. If there’s something at work or school that seems unsolvable, try thinking about it differently. How could the problem become an opportunity? How could you approach the issue from a different angle? Think like this, then doodle, write, dream, and see if your imagination has new ideas all of a sudden. I think of the imagination as a muscle. By working it out, it only gets stronger.

Look out. Observe this crazy world we live in. Notice when something inspires you. What is it? A trip to the art gallery or waiting for your coffee in the line-up can become a moment for paying attention to everything that’s going on around you. Listen to what other people are talking about. Wonder at the world. As yourself “what if”…. and then pose the most unlikely ridiculous answers. Even the most absurd answers count as creative responses. In this way you’ll learn to think creatively.

Insist to yourself that it’s worth it. I really don’t want to sound like a space cadet here, but I’m telling you how I approach my writing life and I hope you can take that to your own creative life. So, what do I mean by ‘it’? I mean that you need to take your creative self seriously. And what I mean by that is acknowledging there is something unique and fantastic inside you that makes you YOU. The difference between a human being and a cookie? You can make a cookie with a cookie cutter. Or something along those lines. Telling yourself that it’s worth making creativity part of your life is the first step to actually living a more creative existence. It’s not frivolous. It’s essential. I believe it. I hope some of these tips help you believe it too.

Thanks for reading. Please let me know what you do to make creativity part of your life.

Ali

xoxoxox