By far the best way to capture ideas is with a pencil and paper. The fewer things that can hinder the collection of an idea the better. A tablet may come a very close second these days and I live in the hope that they may take over; hey I love sci-fi and the future for me is always bright, shiny and wonderful.

One thing I saw that seemed quite interesting was The Musician’s Notebook: Manuscript Paper for Inspiration and Composition (Parchment Journals).This book, and several others, take the next step from just a piece of paper or notepad. They give you some templates for you to use.

By providing you with a set form to plunge your creative ideas these pages take some of the load from your brain, allowing the creativity that little bit extra grey matter to play with.

If we don’t need these particular books we can always make our creativity that little bit easier by creating our own forms or pages. Any resources that we can prepare for when creativity arrives is of use. Personally I have tried many different pre-made pages to help. Some have worked while others have limited my creativity. When that happens the pages get a reworking or end up in the bin.

What capture tools do you use?  Or have you ever created your own?

I have, running in the background of my pc, a wonderful little utility, AdesClrPicker. This is a simple utility to tell me what any colour (color) is on your screen. A simple ctrl + alt +a and a pipette icon hovers over the screen, magnifies the area where it is to pixel precision and tells ne what colour / color it is hovering over. It imparts this information in glorious html format for me to slip into any new web design or idea that I have. But the program isn’t limited to html, it offers a range of outputs. It also remembers recent colours / colors and a whole lot of other neat little attributes. You can download the latest version from here.

If you’re in a browser though, and that browser happens to be firefox, you could use colorzilla. A little plugin that sits neatly at the bottom of the browser screen ready to be called into action. The latest version is available from here.

Both programs are nice and simple but come in very handy, if you don’t want to open up an image editor and use the colour picker from there after waiting ages for it to load… you know who you are.

These are two little tools that can save a lot of time and effort. A little bit of preparation and you’ll no longer be running around trying to find the hex value of that wonderful tone used on the front page of your favourite site. And one day we may all agree on how to spell colour… I live in hope.

The premise of this site, well the thinking behind it, is that creativity is finding the balance between three things. Those three things are preparing, being inspired and a little bit of hard work; or preparation, inspiration and perspiration.

One problem that creatives face is demanding that the muse shows up on demand. There are ways to bring on the muse, and we’ll look at those elsewhere, but sometimes we need to accept that the muse is a way off. During these times we should use the space to do a little of our preparation work. And, quite often, this will hasten the arrival of the muse.

So what do I mean by preparation work? Preparation work ranges from sorting out your pencils to clearing the fog from your brain. It is anything to do with setting up your creative space. This is making sure you have the right tools, software and hardware. It is also making sure your brain is in the right place; you may need to shift stuff from your head onto lists, or deal with that pressing issue that is using up so much mental energy.

Get the preparation right and the inspiration will have space to do its thing. Anything you need to prepare?

I’m not going to say much because following the link says it all. But, let me drop in a few words to make you want to scratch the itch: free, ebook, future planning, being creative, making a living… I’d best stop there for you to follow the link!

Flying in the face of convention… | Alexia Petrakos

There are times when we feel like a total and utter creative failure. Okay, confession time, I do. I don’t know about you but I am confident that some of you feel the same.

We may spend hours, day or even weeks being creative only to give up near the end, with feelings of inadequacy. The work that we have produced, despite the praise of our peers and friends, is deemed by us alone as complete rubbish. Our creative efforts are consigned at best to a hidden folder on Flickr and at worst to the delete button or the bin.

We are our own worst enemies. We go further than simply being critical of our work, we metaphorically and sometimes literally, tear it apart… and ourselves along the way too. But, and here it the big but, there is no reason to be doing this.

There is a great article at the Harvard Business Review that looks at managing your inner critic. While the article is aimed to help those in a business environment, the practicalities for dealing with this inner critic are transferable.

So, instead of ripping your work and yourself to shreds, have a read of the article below.

How to Manage Your Inner Critic – The Conversation – Harvard Business Review

And, over at Leo’s Zen Habits there is another post offering some similar advice, so I thought I’d add that here too.

Writing can be seen as mix between a dark art and the pursuit of the unhinged. Sitting down for ages crafting words isn’t always as enjoyable as it could be. But if you approach your writing as a chef creates his signature dish, then this just might help.

I thought it only fair to return to the creative cookbook and find a few more ingredients you could add to your literary larder. If you haven’t seen the previous post of ‘Compelling writing ingredients’ then follow the link.

Remember, a good recipe doesn’t use all the ingredients you have all of the time, and sometimes the subtle flavour is more effective than the one that hits on the first mouthful. But enough of this extended metaphor, let’s get on with the post.

1. Conflict – two or more characters, in disagreement, in any shape or form will draw the reader in! ‘No, it won’t.’ ‘yes, it will, your reader wants some kind of resolution… or the sequel.’
2. Emotion – love, hate, joy and fear, if you can get the reader to engage with these emotions you’ll have them hanging on every word you write. Why do you think love and horror stories are so well read!
3. Progress – a story, should move from A to B, it shouldn’t be static. Even waiting, as in for Godot, is progress; implied progress counts in writing if not in business.
4. Variety of language – the use of passive vocabulary, which consists of words people know the meaning of, or understand in context, but don’t use everyday, is something to keep well stocked. Try eating the dictionary.
5. Use your voice – all great cooks have a signature dish, or a specialty, as a writer you need to find an ingredient that is your own, unique to you. Sounds daunting but it is an ingredient you already have stocked, you simply need to use it.

So out with the utensils and start cooking. You have a story to write.

It takes a little more than pure inspiration to write that killer content. Although the idea is the kernel to any great literary dish, you should always have on hand the following ingredients to lift your words to the writer’s equivalent of haute cuisine.

You may find that taking these ideas with more than a pinch of salt is just what you need.  But you shouldn’t assume that you need all these ingredients all the time, mix and match; experiment.

There are many more ingredients you could use, but these are my top 5:

1. Nearness – The reader can be drawn in with any geographical or experiential situation that they can identify with, try and create the ‘I’ve been there’ factor.
2. Consequence – Try to make the content deal with matters that have an effect; create consequence in what you write.
3. Human interest – Go on you know you want to, go all out for the cute vote, the shaggy dog story at the end of the news keeps you hanging on for the weather report. Alternatively the opposite is also true, a report on the cost to life of any disaster can be a compelling read.
4. Drama – Action and intensity… if you’re writing a story, this can be quite a good hook.
5. Oddity – Pique that mind, interest that soul. Let eyes pour over your words, washing them into the bowl that awaits like open mouth – sometimes being weird works, trust me, I’m an editor.

Remember these are ingredients, it is up to you how you use and mix them, or even add a few more of your own.

And if you want more:

Five more ingredients of compelling writing

There is a wonderful, simple post over at White Hot Truth by Danielle LaPorte. It claims that there are 11 productivity tips that creative types already know. Whilst this may be true, I also think that it is a list of 11 tips that we could all do with being reminded of.

So go, take a look and make sure that you all 11 are inhabiting somewhere in your creative world.

11 productivity tips that creative types already know

Most of us fall into one of two creative types, we either

• have 500 creative ideas before the first cup of coffee slides down our throat
• have one creative idea that is the best thing since the sliced bread we are about to toast

Either way, those ideas need to be captured and developed.

We may work with others and so a quick email or tweet to one of our creative collaborators may be the next thing to do. Alternatively, we may have captured the idea on a piece of paper to work on when we have a chance.

The next step for us is to develop the idea to something more than a thought or jot on paper. Quite often the creative juices will be flowing at this time and so you want to crack on with developing your idea. Unfortunately this is where a lot of energy is misspent.

We can end up putting so much effort into getting ready to develop our idea that our creative energy is all used up. But with a little preparation we can save a lot of time.

Preparing our creative space and tools is one way to focus the energy we have into the creative act and not waste it.

I dabble in recording music and I use Cubase. This is a great multi-track digital recorder. However, if I have an idea and launch the program, it can take me a while to get to point of doing anything creative. Therefore I have set up some templates in the program. These templates are ready to record straight into. The settings are ready and the common instruments I use are already loaded.

So, when I have that creative musical spark, I don’t need to worry about setting up the computer. it is all ready for me. Any energy that I do have can be almost totally channelled into creativity. So to make things easier for yourself

• prepare any templates for programs you may use
• keep a box of art tools close by that don’t need unpacking
• learn shortcuts for any computer programs you use

Creative energy is precious, don’t waste it. It only takes a little preparation to free your energy and let it roam. So do that preparation, before the next big idea comes along.

The wonderful Smashing Magazine has just listed some other great time-saving tips for designers and you can find them here.

There is (yet) another great post, and ongoing conversation, over at Lateral Action. The post by Mark begins with the premise, in the movie world, that the film Watchmen will be a commercial success due to the publicity it has gained through the legal dispute between Warner and Fox. I’m not going to get into the debate on this site, if you want that, then go and join in at Lateral Action.

Mark questions those creatives who complain about not being recognised for their art when they don’t promote it. This is something I totally agree with. I’ve mentioned it before here, if you are doing art for art’s sake, then you’re doing it for yourself. But if you want it to be enjoyed by others, then you need to put promotion into your strategy.