We often ask of our entertainers, artists and writers; “Where
do you come up with this stuff?”
People in
general view those that dare to dabble in the arts as some type of peculiar spectacle,
hard to understand, and even harder to fathom where the ideas come from.
While I’m
not sure I am even qualified to answer, I can say the root of any creativity is
in the idea. Coming up with an idea for a drawing, painting, poem or a screenplay
I could say is the easy part. Everyone has ideas, EVERYONE. Where things get difficult
is deciding to do it, the execution is the work of it.
How should it look? What should its
mood or tone be? What am I trying to say? Am I trying to say anything? These
are the questions that those creative folk wrestle with daily. Believe it or
not, there are certainly those of us out there, those savants, those people
filled with nothing but passion and purpose and know-how that have the actual creation
step mastered. Perhaps that is where the “genius” piece comes into play. However,
most of the rest of us have to engage in actual work in order to get to that
finished product from our brains to the page, or stage, or screen.
As a writer (writer meaning; amateur,
and largely unpaid) for me, things always work better if I base a story on real
events, people and places. Personally, that old cliché of “Write what you know”
tends to work. I get more detail, more emotion- more everything in whatever ends
up on the page. The characters are people you could know, the circumstances
feel familiar, maybe even raw to the reader. Or I hope they do anyway.
But I digress, my point in saying all
this is to place before you the fact that the idea is what’s important. The key to starting any creative
endeavor is to have an idea that you can build upon. I believe that everyone
starts at this point with an equal opportunity.
We all have ideas. Some we’ve shared. Whereas some we’ve kept to
ourselves for fear of reprisal, theft, or maybe even embarrassment. But the
point is everyone has something, based on their personal perspective that they want
to see brought to fruition.
Where most get caught up in indecisiveness
is the follow through. Maybe you’ve been told you’re not creative, you’ve no experience
in a creative medium. Regardless of what made you second guess your spark, it doesn’t
matter. What needs to happen is the act of trying to get your creation from
idea to reality.
Think back to when you were a
child. Did fear of criticism stop you from coloring the pages in a coloring
book? Absolutely not! If you were one of the truly lucky ones you weren’t even
held back by lines! Some of us even dared to make the sun green and the grass
orange (Not me, of course I’m way to straight-laced for that sort of unruly behavior).
So while being “creative” can seem
daunting at its core it’s simply a matter of putting rubber to the road. My
advice to anyone that has been sitting on a marvelous idea for days, weeks, or
years: Take that idea and do something with it. And remember, the secret is, it’s
not as hard as you think.
