editione1.0.2
Updated July 24, 2024Youβre reading an excerpt of Creative Doing, by Herbert Lui. 75 practical techniques to unlock creative potential in your work, hobby, or next career. Purchase now for instant, lifetime access to the book.
Every effort begins somewhere, from some idea, some element of work. The vision of this prompt is to build your own collection of elements that you can apply and combine with others, sometimes more than once.
Itβs important to keep these departure points as small as possible. These days, we are blessed with technology that can store and organize all of our departure points.
For example, even though Iβd written hundreds of articles in my 20s, many of the ideasβpoints, stats, and quotesβembedded in them were too interlinked and dense for me to move around and re-use in new ones. My solution to that was to extract the ideas and put them into index cards and Notion for my Zettelkasten note-taking system, which I learned from How to Take Smart Notes by SΓΆnke Ahrens. Each stat would get its own separate index card.
Itβs possible to do this with other forms as well. If youβre in the recording arts, you can separately save different elements of songs for easy access. If youβre in visual arts, you can work digitally and do the same by saving elements in different layers or files altogether. Be descriptive in your filename so you know what to search later. Iβd highly encourage you to take even just a few minutes to set up a simple system for staying organized.
This can also be as simple as starting a project with a bankerβs boxβa literal cardboard boxβand keeping everything related in there like choreographer and author Twyla Tharp does. Or it could mean setting an hour every Monday to review your notes in your journal and phone.
Combining and connecting are key parts of any creative process. As you go through these departure points, and your mind soaks them in, youβll notice that new ideas and connections start to emerge.
If you go to an improv comedy class, youβll see that participants are encouraged to agree to and build upon everybody elseβs ideas. Comedian, filmmaker, writer Tina Fey calls this the βRule of Agreementβ in her memoir Bossypants, describing it as a reminder to:
βRespect what your partner has createdβ and to at least start from an open-minded place. Start with a YES and see where that takes you.
So try saying yes to every prompt or idea from others, at least once. If the need arises, you are free to make modifications and to add an element of your own to the prompt. I would be extremely happy to hear that youβd augmented one of these prompts to fit you better.