ways to get ideas

Mitch Ditkoff's article, "14 Ways to Get Ideas" presents, as the title would portend, a number of ways in which a person looking to create (no matter what the product) can find inspiration and get that extra push. Fourteen separate approaches are presented to the reader, each with an explanation, ways to go about enacting the plan, and some prompts to get started. Some suggestions seem more helpful than most and here I'll outline three of the plans presented in the article and examine their validity as a practical means of finding inspiration.

7. Listen To Your Subconscious
In the article, Ditkoff encourages a focus on the subconscious mind as opposed to the conscious. That is, the thoughts that occur to us without us realizing it--almost like automatic reactions, or the sort of thoughts that might occur in a sleep-like state. I find this particularly interesting as a fan of surrealism, an entire art movement born out of the subconscious mind. I believe that limiting your thought processes to simply those we work through when completely aware is silly. Daydreaming, automatic writing, and other exercises to unlock the subconscious can be incredibly helpful when it comes to generating ideas, even if it means that you'll have to unscramble and decode your subconscious mind to make anything coherent out of it.

8. Take a Break
This piece of advice is a little iffy to me. On one hand, I do understand that mental exhaustion can lead one to think or work in circles, which really does nothing to further creative endeavors. However, everyone's lives are hectic and multi-faceted, and as soon as you step away from a piece of work and put it to rest for a while, you run the risk of losing it altogether. Admittedly, you might return to a project weeks, months, maybe years later with a new perspective which may help bring some more light to the situation, but it's still risky to avoid immersion in favor of taking a break, in my opinion.

14. Suspend Logic
This is one of my favorites, which shouldn't be surprising since it's in a similar vein as listening to your subconscious. One of the major issues that comes with being a student and feeling relatively underpowered in actualizing our creative visions is that we are so painfully aware of the lack of resources we have--whether that's money, equipment, or any other manner of things. Rather than drowning in these kinds of limitations, I think it's better to let your mind go nuts. This doesn't just have to be in terms of limitations of actualization, either. You shouldn't be afraid of thinking outside the box--far, far outside. Dream as big as you'd like, regardless of whether or not you have the means to make any of it happen. After you have everything worked out as being ideal, that's when you can let yourself start to worry about how to pull it all together.

In a separate bullet point, Ditkoff recommends that the reader look for "happy accidents" in order to gain creative ideas. The question he poses actually fits fairly well into a current situation I find myself in, which is: What “failed experiment” or unexpected outcome might be interesting for you to reconsider? Who else might you invite to participate in this effort?

Very often, I find myself partaking in creative endeavors that are not my own. They are ideas hatched by someone else that I elect to help with, lending my expertise (which, apparently, falls under art direction more often than not) and generally helping to see the product to the end. While on one such project (which will remain anonymous, since I'm not a total jerk), both myself and a friend (also nameless) found ourselves so incredibly stifled by the people around us that all we could do was discuss how much better our set would be run. While enduring the unprofessional way in which the director and producer carried themselves, creating needlessly long shoots and no room for input outside their own, both my friend and myself found ourselves noting every single mistake. Having endured these hardships ourselves, commiserating all the while, we vowed not to run our productions in such a fashion, and, more than that, began to plan a project of our own wherein we could exercise our own creative freedom that had been otherwise stifled during this project. I, personally, feel it's important not to be discouraged entirely by the negative experiences one inevitably encounters while undertaking creative endeavors. Chances are, you're going to fail a hell of a lot more than you'll succeed.

And with that happy thought, I guess I've reached the end of this wall of text.