Losing your creative edge

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When you run out of ideas, what do you do to deal with the slump until you come up with new ideas?

First of all, set up some limitations. When you have no limitations, it is hard to find the one thing that you want to do. So if you set up some limitations, you can then focus on what can be made interesting within those parameters. I heard this story third hand so I'll probably mess it up, but apparently Stephen Sondheim said that if you asked him to write a love song, he wouldn't know where to start, but if you asked him to write a love song about a woman in a red dress standing under a streetlight in the rain, then he could do something with that.

One exercise is to set yourself a goal of coming up with 100 ideas of whatever it is you do. For example, write out 100 things you can do with a pencil. They don't have to be good ideas, but you have to come up with 100. If you want to write a story and let's say you've set up the above mentioned limitations, pick an element (maybe there is a dragon in your story) and write down a list of 100 things that dragons do. Or if you want to paint a picture or make a drawing, make 100 quick sketches of how you might see a particular object (Like Hokusai's 100 views of Mt. Fuji.) At any rate, the point of this exercise is to loosen you up and get you working without worrying about it being bad. The point is to limber up your imagination.

Steal other people's ideas. Look at what other artists do and if they have a good idea, use it, but then modify it so it is your own. Sometimes it can be useful to steal from an entirely different genre or medium of art. If you are writing a story, you might look at artworks and start thinking, "what sort of story could I weave from this image?" Or if you are a photographer, listen to some music and ask yourself how you might translate that into a picture.

Or you can just drink a lot of alcohol.

Lars

I think Jagatai has some good ideas.

With photography I'd get inspiration from some other people. You want them to be your own but you can take little bits from them and turn them into your own.

I get my story ideas from what I've watched on TV or a movie. It could be a little part of a movie but I can make that into a whole synopsis.

Slump, hey? Well there's nothing wrong with going on a break until those ideas come back or you form new ones. Getting back into it is the hard part.

My projects all involve lists of geographic data. I think I have covered everything, so that's the thing. For me, it's either having difficulty thinking of new lists, or debating if I should have a new project altogether, in another field of interest.

>My projects all involve lists of geographic data. I think I have covered everything, so that's the thing.

You could expand into mapping the data.

It seems to me, that my creative edge has been replaced by a musical edge. I've traded in my coloured pencils in for drum sticks.

lucky you. problems in my head take years of dwelling until the best solution comes up.

This may be a bit off the wall, but have you looked at psychogeography? I can't say I completely understand it myself (it's a very abstract and complex sort of idea), but it's about different and creative ways of looking at the geography of cities.

There's an article about it here:
http://www.utne.com/2004-07-01/a-new-wa ... lking.aspx

Maybe it can jog some new ideas or directions to take?

That sounds like a good idea. I have a whole shelf of geographic data.

I always try to find new interests, but there comes a time where I feel like I have covered everything.

Dunno. With music, I've not had a really creative phase for decades....nothing proactive anyway. There is still creativity in my output but it finds its expression almost as a by-product of the more mechanical processes that I run. I haven't been able to bring myself to attempting to write songs for a new album of recordings or for performing like I used to. But a lot has happened by way of a decision I took about 3 years ago to get out and perform at one of our local music clubs. I just did cover songs with a guitar and voice, but I found that I was automatically creating my own arrangements (I had no choice because the original records have a lot more instruments on them).

Anyway, some other musicians seemed to like my style and they started asking me if I wanted to perform with them....they have a lot of ideas and I just kind of "filled in the gaps" as well as I could, and I found that my creativity just found its way into what I was playing. I suppose that's the constraint thing that was mentioned by jagatai which allowed me to focus on well-defined tasks. There's also been a lot of Web collaboration music for me, from other musicians requesting vocal parts for their own songs. My creativity seems to work by modifying what's already set down rather than making anything de novo. That probably doesn't look like "real" creativity, but often when you trace back the origins of well-known artistic works, they're often just modifications of stuff that's already been done.

But I still tend to feel that all this work with/for others is one stage removed from my "natural place" as an artist in my own right......I'm ambivalent to the constraints - I seem to need them, but I also hate them because they always seem to get in the way of the music I "should" be creating.

My day job and other mundane calls on my attention tend to sap my creative juices......after a day at work I usually don't feel artistic at all. My fear of letting other musicians down helps me to keep trying regardless (the show must go on!), but sometimes when I force myself to switch roles like that I feel lousy - to me it seems to ruin my performance, but nobody else seems to notice. What I'd really like is to quit the day job, minimise all the other "cold" duties and go live in an environment that lives and breathes art. But I'd soon run out of food.

If one can't think of new interests, what is the next plan of action?

If you have difficulty finding new interests, just google search various topics, random words, anything that comes into your head. Look at things you have never thought to be interested in before. Eventually you will find something new and fascinating.