Off the Cuff / My Other Journal

On Creativity

“Where do you get ideas from?” I was asked yesterday. Since I haven’t written in my blog for a long time, I thought maybe I’d address this by sidestepping it and make another contribution to all the adipose tissue in my writing.

Someone said, "Creativity is the ability to illustrate what is outside the box from within the box." Since I was never boxed, I keep chewing the cud on various implications and ramifications of these words, and because I am more visual than anything, being inside any box--literally--chokes me. I am more like outside the box, looking in. This should explain a lot of things about me!

On the more serious side, someone else said creativity comes from positive effects. IMHO, negative effects create more emotion, thus opening up the mind to more “out-of-the-box” ideas. Dean Koontz, Edgar Allen Poe, Stephen King anyone?

Whatever the creativity theories may be, I think, what comes from within is priceless, as long as we don’t sit around waiting for our insides to talk, since under our skins, we have a variety of organs and each can make a different sound.

I am, therefore, more on the side of searching for ideas or even reusing used and overused ones. Remember how a very wise man (Moses, I think) once said, "There's nothing new under the sun"?

Besides, ideas are everywhere, even inside the commonest things like the supermarket flyers. Have you ever searched one, especially with an eye for the misspelled items, like Hole Wet Bread or Natural Lawn dry Detergent? Unbelievable aren’t they, all those images misspellings can bring?

By coincidence or synchronicity, whichever you choose to believe, I came across a video on creativity on NPR’s site.

The video is by the comedian John Cleese, someone we can only watch on the PBS channel regularly in our neck of the woods. I figured I’d give a link here to what John Cleese says because most of what’s in the video holds true for me, Especially the part where he says how interruption hurts the process of writing. As I am always interrupted, this accounts for the condition of my recent work. Thanks, Hubby!

Anyhow, here’s the video if you’d like to watch it.