A good start would be to try any of these 170+ ideas in an Oblique Strategies stylee from Synthgear.

Oblique Strategies for Electronic Music

There is a lovely and inspiring post from Sarah Prout about the importance of creativity. This is just what you need on a Monday morning to bring things into perspective and begin to plan the week ahead.

Make sure that you don’t get bogged down with the ‘doing’ creativity. Creativity is also about ‘being’. Be inspired, be creative and be yourself. Don’t get lost in the busyness of each day.

Stop. Breath. Be inspired. Be.

The Importance of Creactivity

It’s the beginning of a new week, or the start of a new day. Or perhaps you’re stumbling on this at some other time. Well it doesn’t matter when. It’s time to think about doing something creative.

What’s the weather like? Go on, look outside if you need to, I’ll wait. Is the sun blazing down? Is the rain hammering into the puddles it has already formed? Is the atmosphere as grey as the mood it has just put you in? Well that doesn’t matter either.

What does matter is that you can use the inspiration of the outside to engage your creative thoughts. What does the weather make you think of: warmth, heat, dryness, arid landscapes, global warming, rising sea levels, end of the world, drowning, depression, moods, angst. ? The list is endless.

Use the weather as a starting point to do something creative today. But don’t just see a shining sun and paint a shining vista. Turn things around, the weather is just the starting point. Let your imagination run and develop the theme. Go and create that subverted weather image, wordscape or aural texture.

And also where not to find good ideas. What better way to start the week than with a little bit of inspiration.

Seth’s Blog: Where do you find good ideas?

Waiting for inspiration is another way of saying that you’re stalling. You don’t wait for inspiration, you command it to appear.

Those words from Seth Godin were quite apt for me this past month or so. I am writing a book. Not just any book, a commissioned 40,000 word novel, with a deadline, the real deal.

The problem was I had come to a full stop. The words weren’t coming and the prose that had seemed so easy for the first 10,000 words had dried up. I was at an impasse and the deadline was fast approaching.

The first hurdle was to renegotiate the deadline. I thought, that if I could reduce the pressure on myself, then the words would return. They didn’t.

I found myself continually staring at the word processor day after day and not getting anywhere. This was not going well, I really had a case of writer’s block. I was becoming overwhelmed and sinking fast.

When things get on top of me, I normally sit down with pen and paper and plan my way out. I list  what needs to be done, and that process often shows me the way to go. So I did the same with the writing. I already had the outline of the novel and also the chapter and scene breakdown. But could I break things down even further?

I began to write a sentence or phrase for each paragraph. Slowly the scenes and chapters began to fill up. As they did I found it easier to return to these sentences and elaborate on them, the block had been broken and the flood of words began to flow.

It worked for me and perhaps it will work for you. Keep reducing the task until you have the final version filling the space. As Seth says, you command inspiration to appear!

Feeling totally (or maybe just a bit) drained and out of creative ideas? Perhaps you need to take a break, or make time for some creative input. Why not take a micro-sabbatical? You’ll find the reasoning behind it and some practical ways to have one by reading a great post by Bradley J Moore called Six Ways to Take a Micro-Sabbatical.

I’m off for a micro… care to join me?

Remember mix tapes? Of course you do. A mix tape was a tape of songs that meant something to you and, hopefully, for the person you were making the mix tape for. If the mix tape was for a girl or boyfriend then odds were the tape would contain love songs. If it was for one of your friends it might contain an introduction to a genre of music you thought worthy of sharing. The point is, the music on the tape often had a purpose.

One purpose of music is to create atmosphere. And atmosphere is very important to the creative process. Music can lead us into the right frame of mind to get that creative task done. And it isn’t simply about music that you like.

I don’t know all the scientific explanations about right and left brain process and how certain types of music can get them working at their peak. What I do know is that different styles of music help me for different creative activities.

A lot of our creative time is now spent in front of a computer. This is good news for creating an atmosphere. Whether you have access to music stored on your computer or streamed via the net, you can create playlists depending on what you are creating.

When writing, I prefer something ambient and quiet, but when working on an image the sound is much louder and rhythmic. With this in mind I have created different playlists to use. I simply turn on the player (current favourite is Spotify) and click the preferred playlist.

Do you have a favourite style of music depending on your creative task? Have you got any recommended soundtracks to help creativity? Let us know in the comments.

Photo by Clix

The Abundance Blog lives up to its name with this list of 17 creative resource links. They are aimed at getting the right (creative) side of the brain going. There is pretty much something for everyone in the list, so enjoy.

17 Resources to Awaken Your Right Brain – Abundance Blog at Marelisa Online

Found this via Moleskinerie and had to share it. The YouTube blurb has the following to say:

Radiolab presents: Moments by Will Hoffman. This film is a celebration of life that was inspired by David Eagleman’s book, Sum.

• The launch of a Windows killer operating system
• A revolutionary networking tool
• The latest and greatest version of Photoshop

What do all these three have in common? Well, apart from CS10 they are all imminently on the way and will change the way we work, allegedly.

The web is creaking under the weight of tweets, blog posts and conversations about Google’s Chrome operating system and it’s Wave concept. And this post is another one of them.

But what does it all mean for us?

Actually it could mean quite a lot. A move from workstation to netstation, which the Chrome OS would encourage, has been creeping into our lives little by little. There are web apps for almost everything these days, for writing, drawing or music creation.

As for Wave, the growth of twitter has shown how a new networking tool can take off.

However, what we must not do is sit around and wait for these new innovations to come our way.

Tool Procrastination

One danger in our creative journey is tool procrastination. I have sat at home many times and said, ‘if only I had the latest version of [insert any desirable piece of software] I could be much more creative!’

And that, my friends, is a lie. That latest piece of shiny software won’t change a thing. If we are thinking like that then we are procrastinating. We are using the lack of software as a reason not to be creative.

Creativity is from you not the software or hardware

Ideas and creativity come from us, from within. Leonardo didn’t leave his idea for a flying machine as an idea because he didn’t have a CAD program to make it look great. Mozart didn’t keep the tunes in his head because his sequencer couldn’t handle the complicated rhythms.

And you don’t have to sit and wish that you had the latest shiny piece of software or hardware to share your creations with the world.

Use what you have, your mind and anything to hand: create!