4. Break your echo chamber. I have scrutinized who I follow on Twitter and my aim now is to follow diverse, challenging voices and avoid the loud, obvious ones.
5. Be empathetic. Try to think flexibly and openly about ideas that feel odd and jarring to you.
6. Clash these ideas together, make connections, join dots. Tell dad jokes.
7. Read books. Fiction, non-fiction, anything. Just keep reading.
8. And read things you wouldn’t automatically choose. Take inspiration from Stack. Stack is a subscription service that delivers a different specialist magazine each month, on anything from art to tennis.
9. Be OK with having creative droughts. Don’t panic. When this happens, see points 2 and 7.
10. Take the pressure off yourself, be in the moment, don’t force it. That’s when the magi will happen.
PINNY GRYLLS’ FLEX STORY
Pinny Grylls is a documentary filmmaker and children’s author
‘My worst ideas come from sitting on the internet and researching things. You are at a computer, your eyeballs are staring at the screen, there’s a digital wall between you and a real story, which has already been mediated several times. I want to get to a new story, a new perspective, not one already told by someone else.
You need to get off your arse and actually physically meet people. Ordinary day-to-day conversations and events can be doors into new ideas and films. An example of this: I was buying a second-hand car and had to pick it up from Stoke-on-Trent. It was going to be a boring task – collecting the car, signing documents and whatnot. But I was sitting in this guy’s living room, and he told me he works as a hypnotist, specializing in doing past-life regression with traumatized people who work in the fire service. These people had ordinary lives, they were not novelists or professional creatives. Yet, under his care, they pop into another realm and become someone else. They tell stories of being a nineteenth-century farmer committing a murder, or a priest in Tibet. I was inspired to make a film about it and it became a Channel 4 documentary.
I try not to impose a story on the world. The way I work is a collaboration between me and the person who wants their story to be told, who wants it to be witnessed. That’s why you need to meet people, to get the magic, the intimacy. You don’t get it from a screen. You have to be with them physically.
My tip is to give yourself permission not to work. Go on a road trip to buy that second-hand car. It may be a more interesting day than you thought. Don’t force yourself to sit at a screen and come up with ideas. Do the washing up. Read a story to your kid. Do ordinary things, and your brain will go somewhere else. Take pressure off those moments and let ‘being’ in your life be enough. When you take pressure off, that’s when you find things.
I was diagnosed with a two-centimetre wide benign brain tumour which was right between my eyes. I had radiation therapy and they had to scan it every six months. We took time off work and school and went on a family campervan road trip around Europe. We thought, ‘We don’t know what the future is, so we want do this now.’ Recently, I had a scan to see whether the radiation had worked. If it hadn’t, I needed a dangerous operation to remove it. It had shrunk by 25 per cent, I was given the all-clear and it was like being given my life back.
Until that point, I didn’t realize I had been in stasis, not being able to plan anything. But ironically, this had allowed me to be more in the moment and to live! We cram so much into our days; we pressure ourselves. We’re a culture that is geared up for quantifiable achievement and status. It’s hard to get out of that way of thinking. We need to be patient, to give ourselves permission to dream and not fill every moment of downtime. We need to ‘be’ and believe it doesn’t matter if nothing creative comes out of it. It’s enough being alive. That is the ultimate creative act.
LIBERTY & RESTRAINT
It’s tempting to see creativity as relying on complete freedom and expansiveness. Many have found that the opposite is true. Creativity can thrive when there are restrictions and barriers in place. It is these roadblocks which can force breakthroughs. David Ogilvy, the advertising guru known as the original Mad Man, once said, ‘Give me the freedom of a tight brief’. What did he mean by this?
Limits give you clarity, focus and purpose. They also give you a feeling of safety, and safety gives you the confidence to explore.
BEAUTIFUL CONSTRAINTS
Adam Morgan and Mark Barden’s book, A Beautiful Constraint: How to Transform Your Limitations into Advantages, refers to a study of children’s playground habits. In a playground in a wide open field where they could run anywhere, children tended to stay in the middle. When faced with complete freedom, it feels more reassuring to be near the other kids, to keep the status quo. However, if you build a fence around the field, children will explore right to the edge and use the whole space. Ironically, in a contained, safe space, you can roam free.
So think about fences for your creativity. Put in some ‘beautiful constraints’ and you might push yourself beyond the status quo. When Olivia Laing wrote her novel Crudo, her ‘fences’ were that she would write every day and she wasn’t allowed to go back and edit. She finished it in seven weeks. She said: ‘Because there was no intention or plan, I wasn’t self-conscious and I wasn’t worried about trying to get perfect sentences, it was just smashing them down as fast as I could.’
If you are a procrastinator, your ‘fence’ could be a strict time limit on the task ahead. If you are the sort of person who makes long lists about what you need to get done, reduce them to one bullet point. This is your creative objective for the day.
Constraints also make you work harder to be creative and push you to excel. Jerry Seinfeld bans himself from jokes containing sex or swearing – it’s just too easy to get a laugh. These limits raised his game and upped his comic creativity. He says: ‘A person who can defend themselves with a gun is just not very interesting. But a person who defends themselves through aikido or tai chi? Very interesting.’8 He treats his stand-up sessions as scientific experiments, analysing the type and length of laugh he gets for each joke and using that analysis to shave off a word, honing his routine until it is pitch perfect. For him, the creativity lies in what’s left out.
If you have creative paralysis, write a list of everything this is NOT. So if, say, you are planning a hen party for a friend, write down everything she would hate first of all. These are your guardrails – and you can create freely within them.
‘Think about fences for your creativity . . . and you might push yourself beyond the status quo.’
Rules can give you freedom from interruption. We’ve seen how insidious digital distraction can be today, sapping much more real time than the actual diversion took. The writer Zadie Smith has a zero tolerance policy towards social media and doesn’t connect to the internet during her writing time, leaving any fact checking until she has finished writing for the day. ‘If I could control myself online, if I wasn’t going to go down a Beyoncé Google hole for four and a half hours, this wouldn’t be a problem. But that is exactly what I’ll do,’ she says.
Experiment with using airplane mode on your phone, and setting strict times of the day (at the beginning and the end) in which to deal with emails. Use apps like Freedom and Self Control which allow you to block your own access to websites, apps or the entire internet to stop wasting time online. Use time before bed to read, rather than being on your phone – stretch your empathy muscles.
Creativity also requires chutzpah.