“Where do you get your ideas from?” and “how do you overcome writer’s block?” are two questions that never go away. But that’s not surprising. The creative process seems at times to be mystical and totally uncontrollable. We all dream of having that eureka moment. But it doesn’t seem to come…

As Thomas Edison famously said, though, genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration. So perhaps we shouldn’t be waiting for that eureka moment, accompanied of course by the lightbulb (not invented by, but commercialised by one Thomas Edison). We should be at our writing desks forcing inspiration to strike.

Well, the truth is probably somewhere in between the waiting and the working approach. I think of it like this. You read. You write. You think. That’s how you acquire the raw materials or the fuel for the creative process. You play around with some story ideas, maybe write a list of character attributes. Then one day you’re in the shower and, from nowhere, lightning strikes: “The aliens are harvesting human organs because their advanced civilisation has gone too far with genetic engineering, unleashing a virus that eats them from the inside!”

Why does this happen (the ideas popping into your head, not the virus – I already explained that was due to genetic engineering) and how can you enhance your creativity? Well, you can delve into the neuroscience if you want. You can also listen to a wiser man than me.

Music producer Brian Eno has some great things to say on this process of focusing, generating the raw materials for the creative process, but also mentally relaxing, creating the environment for ideas to emerge out of those raw materials. Here are some quotes:

“The big mistake is to just wait for inspiration to happen. It won’t come looking for you. You have to start doing something. You have to build a trap to catch it. I like to do that by starting the very mundane process of tidying my studio. It might seem like it has nothing to do with the creative job in hand but I think tidying up is a form of daydreaming, and what you’re really doing is tidying your mind. It’s a kind of mental preparation. It’s a way of getting your mind in a place to notice something… about noticing chances and acting on them”

“The reason to keep working is almost to build a certain mental tone, like people talk about body tone. You have to move quickly when the time comes.”

“Obviously there’s an inequality of opportunities among people. But there’s also an inequality of readiness. Some people are more ready to make use of the opportunities that come up than others.”

“There’s a proverb that says that the fruit takes a long time to ripen, but it falls suddenly … And that seems to be the process.”

What do you think? What works for you? Long walks? Tidying?

I find that if I’m sitting at the keyboard, it’s often when I get up to do something else that the ideas come. But then I have to go back to the keyboard and craft those ideas into something readable…

http://99u.com/articles/7034/developing-your-creative-practice-tips-from-brian-eno