TRANSCRIPT

Hello lovely creative welcome to day three of Light Up Your Creative Joy. I really hope you enjoyed mapping your many passions and it's given you some ideas of what you could explore going forwards. Today we're gonna be doing something a little bit different. We're gonna be playing with idea generation.

So what is idea generation? Well, idea generation is how we come up with things that we find exciting, fulfilling, inspiring, our creative ideas. And for some people, this is really the easiest part of the process.

For idea generators, they feel like they always have something new. There's always something they want to do. And for them, the challenge becomes, how do I choose between my many ideas how do I work out what's important enough to choose for the next few days or the next few hours? How do I get started and how do I finish this project so I can share it with people?

Of course, for some of us, there is this sense of feeling stuck or feeling limited, and even the most energetic idea creating people can experience burnout or kind of idea creative block. So some people might feel that they really want to have more fun and freedom with their creative ideas but their insecurities or their kind of self doubt in their own creative abilities gets in the way.

Some of us might have experienced messages when we were growing up that we're not supposed to have fun ideas, we're not supposed to spend our time up in the clouds imagining what could be. We're supposed to focus more on what's in front of us right now and so it can make it difficult to give ourselves permission to play and have a go.

At coming up with things that might initially seem a bit out there or a bit absurd, but could be the path to coming up with something really brilliant.

So I was trying to come up with something that would work for both of these examples of types of creatives that I've given. Something that would help the people who maybe are struggling to come up with all the ideas that they want to, to feel more free and playful and that things could flow a bit more easily.

But also something that wouldn't leave the idea generators with just too many things and feeling overwhelmed and stuck. So, you know, not just being like, here, go and choose something.

So the Dadaists used something called the cut up technique, which you might already have heard of. They believed that it was very difficult for the human brain to do anything new, or original, or unexpected. That we were often just existing in kind of an automated habit mode.

And therefore, they thought the best way to come up with unique and original ideas was to randomize things, or to create systems that invited new and original thought. And so with the cut up technique they would take a newspaper or a magazine and a book and they would cut up all the different words within that And then they would, you know, move them around and put them back together in ways that created different or unexpected prose or poems.

So actually you might have already done this if yesterday you wrote down your different creative passions and you moved them around on the table to create your passion map.

We're going to be using our inspiration boards as our starting point for this activity. I've looked at mine and things are going to be a bit rustly on the microphone today, I'm sorry, I don't think I can do much about that. And I have a list of ideas.

So in this first column I have nouns, so I have a moth, the moon, an owl, a dragon, a stag beetle, all things that were on my inspiration board, all things that I really love. In the middle column I have verbs like reading, dancing, singing and creating. And on the last column I have spaces, places, settings.

All in my inspiration board I just kind of went through and picked things that felt exciting or interesting or imaginative. So I've got a library, a woodland, in a frozen forest, beneath the stars, in a Victorian theater and in a tiny cottage. And so I've cut those all up and I have folded the nouns first and I've put them in this plant pot that I decorated at a ceramics decorating center I'm gonna have a little rummage. And choose three. And just lay them out in front of me. One, two, three. Okay, and then I'm going to tip the rest out and put them to the side. So, I'm now going to do the verbs. So, take them up, take out three, and put them underneath the nouns.

I'm doing them like in a line. So I've got the two verb and noun together, and then put them aside, and then lastly take my places, my settings, and three. One, two, three. So sometimes this really works and sometimes it doesn't work at all. Sometimes they're ridiculous and sometimes they're very magical and obviously yours will be completely different from mine. Yours might be a world away but mine are quite silly and imaginative because I am quite silly and imaginative.

So let's get started. So my first one is an owl. And what is my owl doing? My owl is creating. I do not know what. Could have done with another one there. And it is creating

In a library. So, I feel like that could be quite fun. He could be writing a book in a library, just imagining like quite a wise scholarly owl, maybe with a pair of glasses, sitting and creating in a massive, gorgeous old library. Let's see what the next one is. So I've got a moth. Personal favourite. My moth is singing.

Do they sing? I don't know. Maybe they, like, use their wings to sing, like grasshoppers. I'm not sure. Don't know much about moth performance techniques. In a Victorian theatre! Amazing. I love it. So I'm imagining a moth, and like, maybe, uh, wearing a lot of velvets, because they look very velvety and, and furry.

Maybe it's like a , operatic moth, who is singing, standing under the lights of this massive Victorian theatre. I want to make that one right now. What else have I got? I have got a dragon. We do like dragons in my house. And my dragon is reading Studious Dragon. She likes to know what's going on in the world.

She's well read. And she is Beneath the Stars. I love it! I love the image in my mind of this dragon sitting reading a book maybe next to a lake with all these stars above. How would, how would she see what she was reading? Maybe they have really good sight in the dark? Laughs. So anyway, that's the idea.

And whilst it may seem a little bit silly, I read that T. S. Eliot's Wasteland was actually created using a similar approach. And in fact, It's about really opening up what we can do for inspiration, opening those doors to new or novel or playful experiences, rather than feeling that we have to just sit there and very seriously work out what we're going to do.

We might not make any of these things, but we might find from coming up with these ideas that are something we wouldn't have come up with were we trying to force an idea through. It might just be the starting point for something exciting. So I have got a example, a winter themed generator that you can print off and use if you want to have a quick play.

And I've also created a blank one for you to use yourself. So remember your starting point is your inspiration board. Find things that light you up, that excite you, that create that little glow, that create that curiosity.

And I think what is really valuable about this activity is that often creative thought is isn't that valued in our society. If we're multi passionate we're made to feel that we have to find our one thing and that we're always meant to be kind of problem solving to the ultimate solution of what our creativity should be in its final form.

And actually that can dampen the curiosity and excitement that is quite essential to creative play. .

So I hope this activity does that for you. It just opens up this whole new way of randomizing your creativity to see if anything's interesting or anything sticks. So have fun playing and I will see you tomorrow for day four. Bye bye.