Wow... Yes & No! Explanation: Opening your mind to the work of others will not make you more creative on it's own. You need to have a healthy imagination also to play with. Sometimes I just lay back and I'm thinking of random ideas until they enter a chain of events that I want to write about, other times it's just the characters. Well let's say this... Just because I read a lot of books didn't mean I became more creative. If anything, I tend not to read that much. Why? Well with pros it's cool, sometimes I find quirky books that get to me, but beyond that as a writer I start just being a judgemental little bitch and it ruins it for me. I start seeing things that are below the surface and question off choices or just lacking quality in the material. I hate to say it, but on this site I try my best to read other people's work, but I can be VERY HARSH if I were to actually respond a lot. So my ideas come from my own imagination, and if it's lacking that's fine too. I like my ideas, they are from within me. Though if you're looking for inspiration just read around. I mean, all the books I like are in entirely different genres from what I am writing about. The closest thing is "Annie On My Mind" which is a little L-Love Story, but my work throws in some form of paranormal event(mostly focusing on death). Out of body experience, communicating with death, being in 'limbo', seeing the date of a person's death... Despite how dark all that sounds, all of my stories are bubbly with a happy ending. I'd say that makes my work unique and it's because I have a quirky imagination!!!
Reading/TV watching can give you great ideas about what works and what doesn't and what's happened to other people, but creativity comes from perceiving these things in a unique way and expanding on ideas. Watching the world and imagining gives me creative ideas. I will stand outside sometimes and look at nature or people and come up with stories. I looked at a computer store one day and thought, What if a pretty girl without a clue about her broken laptop walked in there and a computer geek was infatuated but intimidated by her beauty, and then he ripped her off, but then he felt bad about it when she asked him out for coffee, then what would happen? So I wrote a story about it.
As always I couldn't agree with you more I was expressing my point of view in a question where there is no right or wrong but only individual answers. If you re-read my first post you'll see I said "I don't think it maks ME a more creative writer", not stating this as a general fact.
I totally disagree, I find TV much more immediate, you can instantly get some very vivid gut reactions to TV shows, books are much more slow burners. There was a time when novel readers were looked down upon and scoffed at for being unintellectual and 'not as good' as poetry and other sanctioned forms of art - why would we start doing that with tv and film? We know where it will end. And as for picking out? Surely that is the same with novels? There was a lot of bad novels, same as there is day time tv. Does being aware of other creative works make me more creative? Yes, it shows me new ways to think, write, paint etc. Of course it does because it broadens your horizons. Now I'm not saying that any of this is ever better than first hand experience, but how many of us actually get first hand experience of dragons? or being a spy? Not many, for that we rely of others. I will say however I get just as much inspiration from non fiction as I do fiction.
Of course, I was just intrigued as to why a line of music can make you in particular creative but not books- striped-down they are both just someone else's words. I love it when this happens. The visual imagination is a much more powerful and personal tool than the eyes. I find TV in the overwhelming amount of cases to lead to less creativity. When my brother ten yer old brother watches television he becomes a zombie- just stares and does nothing. There are of course exceptions, the TV does have some great parts (eye-opening documentaries, great dramas and such) where in which case a visual stimulus can be great for sparking the imagination. However, when I read my brother some of my stories and played him some Akala and Jimi Hendrix, he went and went and wrote a story, right there and then. TV can be too passive to the point where they are bored but just staring. Reading is active, it engages the imagination, a much more powerful tool.
I don't know why that is. Maybe because a book suggests a specific way of interpretation (at least for me), of seeing the world the writer wants me to see, while a sentence or two in a song can make you interpret it in several ways... according to what you associate those words to, what scenery they makes you imagine. Music awakens my creativity a lot more than reading somebody elses books, even though I still use it for expressing myself in writing. Then of course I often practice the things I learn from books, but it is not where the ideas or creativity, the inspiration comes from in the first place, more a case of using the tools I have been given, learning more ways of expressing those ideas.
From Mark Lawrence's Music and Lyrics (2007): (Alex Fletcher) "You know what I would say to you and Sloan Cates? You can take all the novels in the world and not one of them will make you feel as good as fast as: (singing) 'I got sunshine/ on a cloudy day/ When it's cold out/ I got the month of May.' That is real poetry. Those are real poets."
The major difference between a bad book and bad tv is that when you're reading a bad book most people have the common sense to put it down and do something else. When you're watching bad tv most people continue to sit on the couch and watch it, perhaps even while complaining that there's nothing to watch. I completely agree. This is exactly the reason that books lead to more creativity.
I don't watch TV anymore, I haven't for a few years. It still feels unmitigatedly great, ever since I stopped.
The way i see creativity is like this; all the creativity we get comes from something we learn't while watching tv or reading a book, e.t.c Some people are saying if your a natural you can just get creativity from nothing, i don't think thats possible. I think we all absorb the things we hear, watch, read and then we bring out new ideas from them, even though you have this new idea, doesn't change the fact that you originally got it from what you read, watched, heard. Sometimes the idea is so NEW and DIFFERENT that you don't recognise that you got it from what you.. read, watched, heard. Its kind of like with colours, you take red and mix it with yellow, you get orange. The orange doesn't look like either red or yellow BUT thats where it came from. So expose yourself to more colours, you make more colours....read more books,tv e.tc u get more ideas BUT i think it depends on how naturally creative u are. The more naturally creative u are, the more u create from the things ur mind picks up, if ur not naturally creative i think it won't make a difference. So picking up stuff is like learning more colours, natural ability is like the ability to mix the colours to make a new one. The question is how do u improve this natural ability..is it just will power? is it something beyond your control? Is it something you should have learnt as a kid or can it be developed?
Funny, I watched TV through out my childhood and it's pretty much made me who I am today...in a way. According to people, I'm pretty creative? I don't watch TV any more though.
I know how you feel. I moved into the master bedroom after my Dad moved out of it (it's furthest from the kitchen and all that, so he doesn't have to walk as far now), and I left my TV behind. My life is exceptionally brilliant in a (somewhat messy) very clear-cut room. I've started putting up paintings on the walls just today. TV is very seriously bad news. I mean, there are series' that I'll miss, but I can wait for them to come out on DVD (or on torrent sites but why would I do that it's illegal *cough*). Wall of words! Tl;dr.
I was just thinking, while writing I usually listen to music. I find that music definitely helps me relax and in turn help me think better. Depends on the music of course!
Inspiration can be found in nearly everything. Part of it depends on how you view the world around you. You can take experiences and events and run with them creatively. It's a matter of asking why something happened the way it did. What prompted that event or encounter? Why did it happen the way it did? What will result from it? You can take the event that you witness or experience and build on it to develop a story. Might not always be a worthwhile story, but it's an exercise in creativity.
It's true that we watch bad TV and it doesn't benefit us in the least. We aren't sleepy yet, but our brains are tired and we want to relax and zone out, be spoon-fed nonsense. I actually see value in some writing that's bad. As writers it's valuable to expose ourselves to a variety of styles, and we can even benefit from reading styles/plots/etc that don't work. I don't mean amateur riddled-with-grammar-mistakes nonsense writing, but stories that somehow got published and just never did well because they flopped. It's harder to recognize why something works, but when something doesn't work, we see it, we can understand why it failed, and we can avoid these mistakes ourselves. I'd argue it can even feed our creativity. We can ask ourselves, What would I have done differently? What better directions could this have been taken in?
I have gone for years without watching TV. Generally, I am busy with life, and I get more done. Nowadays, I've found through watching movies and DVDs that there are certain programs I find entertaining in a provocative way, and those things are worthwhile. Documentaries, 20/20, Law & Order. Quality is important. And sometimes I'll be at a friend's house and they'll put on some mindless reality show, and we'll observe it for a while. Even this makes me think, because I'm let in to another person's life that I may not have been able to imagine. Perception is important too. And then every so often I like to laugh. Two and a Half Men is pretty funny.
Im the same as Suadade and Joanna, I stopped watching tv years ago and the last months I have been watching only that random tv-show when I was living with my mom who was watching tv all night but it makes me restless, I can't sit down and enjoy it like I used to when younger. I prefer writing or reading to tv-watching. And I do think too that I get a lot more done since breaking the slavery of the tv, hihi
I think creativity happens when you stop viewing things in the world with a prejudice. Observe it without a pre-disposition of liking or not. Let it exist in its context. Sounds all nice and flowerly and virtually impossible but key is to not corner yourself within a viewpoint to the exclusion of other things. More to the point of writing; write a story. Don't write a fantasy or YA or thriller. Write a story. Don't let the parameters get in the way of the story. This mean giving up the prejudices that exist within the genres and ideas that people ascribe to because of the rules of genres are limits. Creativity seems to be lost when within a limit. Also, everything can be an inspiration.
I'm going with Jung's view. "The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves." You cannot really force yourself to play, but you can create room in your life that allows and encourages it. Stress, schedules, pressure, fear of not beoing good enough at the craft -- all these things kills the playfulness, i.e. creativity.
Interesting point! And I definitely agree with you on writing the story first and "worry" (if one should at all do that) about what genre it fits into later. a good story will always have its market I guess, so limiting oneself to theparameters of a certain genre isn't going to help creativity. I have no clue what to call (genre-wise) my current novel, when i started out I thought something on the limit of chiclit, but then the story took over and now it's more serious and not as easy going... I thought romance but I'm not sure where the limits of romance are...when someone say romance I automatically think 1700's or 1800's, or the kind of novels you find among harlekin novels, and this is nothing like that. But I actually don't worry about that at all.
