How, specifically, do you come up with your best ideas? What really sparks your imagination?

These are not always easy questions to answer, but they’re fairly important for creative people to at least attempt to answer. I’m currently taking a course through Coursera (www.coursera.org) called “Cracking the Creativity Code”, it’s done through the Technion Institute in Israel, written by a professor (a Canadian ex-pat!) in their School of Business. It’s been an interesting course so far, though their focus is on creativity and innovation in terms of business and entrepreneurship rather than the arts, so I’ve had to do some “translating” of a number of their concepts and ideas from a business context to an arts context.

One of those concepts was that of the Personal Creativity Machine, and the questions above. In the course, they gave the example of one of their former students, who’s answer was that he called up the genie (the big blue one from the Disney movie Alladin, voiced by Robin Williams) in his mind, and thought about what he would wish for. He’d then consider why he was wishing for it, and, because he doesn’t want to actually use any wishes, he’d find a way to make the wish come true by himself.

It’s an interesting and imaginative technique, and I could see how it would work if you’re looking for business and entrepreneurship type of ideas, but I don’t think it’s quite as useful in a creative arts context.

But it still got me thinking about how I find ideas, what techniques I use, and what fires my imagination. In that respect, my flash fiction project this year is already bearing fruit because it has forced me to keep my creative cycle very short and tight and I can examine it a little better. What I’ve found is that for me, stories are sparked by concepts and settings rather than characters or dialogue. I’ve come across a number of writing prompts online that are snips of dialogue to start with; some are quite clever and evocative, but they don’t spark anything for me. When I try to write from those dialogue based prompts, I usually write another two or three lines and then I’m stuck and I can’t get any farther. However, when I see Wil Wheaton make a throw-away comment about the problem of clones escaping from the lab, or someone else mentioning a Library where things have been put away for good reason, a spark ignites in me, and I can write a story.

Now that I have identified this, it makes my search for good story ideas a little easier and better, because if nothing else, I know what isn’t really helpful, and I can mostly ignore. It isn’t really a creativity machine, but it’s a step towards understanding what works for me and what doesn’t. It’s a step towards the prototype of the machine, perhaps.

[sgmb id=”1″]