How to have ideas
You don't have to dress all in black and snort drugs to become and ideas person. Everyone of us is born creative. Life just beats it out of most of us. Having ideas is easy, once you come to expect to have them. I've won awards for creativity and I'm basically a dunce. If I can do it, so can you.
Here's a quick run down on having ideas:
- Feed raw material into the hopper (your brain). Facts. About the subject. From anywhere. Load up. Til you're sick of it. Plant seeds. Add fertilizer. Water them. (Some creatives say they don't want too many facts because they can get in the way. That's bullshit. Creativity disconnected from facts wins awards but doesn't sell product.
- Let time take its course. Stop thinking about it. Do something else. Amuse yourself. Chew gum. Play darts. Take a walk. (David Ogilvy said he used to drink half a bogttle of red wine before sitting down to write copy.) Ideas - new thinking - comes as a result of the lateral operation of the brain. That is, a leap happens between the known and the unknown. You can't have an idea intellectually. Ideas are not the result of a step-by-step process of thinking (linear thinking). To lateralise, the brain must be given the leisure to toss the bits of data around and try various combinations. It can help to sleep on it. Next morning you'll often find ideas popping up like mushrooms. Try this technique. Take a glass of water to bed. Drink half of it then tell your subconscious that when you wake up the next day and drink the other half of the glass of water, you'll have the ideas you were looking for. It works.
- Write down any scraps of ideas, no matter how looney.
- Compile a list of outrageous solutions. No rules. The madder the better. (Any idea worth having is likely to be scary when you first see it.)
- Apply a reality filter, using one criterion: will it best achieve the objective?
- Fight for the solution that scares you.