Quick Answer Creativity is both — a genetic baseline you’re born with and a skill you can develop through practice, constraints, and exposure to new ideas. Most creativity experts today agree that creativity is not something you’re born with; it’s something you do. Anybody can be creative. This is a pleasant, inspiring...
Somebody asked me to recommend a book list recently so I did some searching and found a dozen or so lists of “best books for writers.” But few of them are very good. The majority just deal with the inspiration and motivation, to get you to actually start writing. The current pop culture ideology is
Today I read two articles. The first is the plagiarism case indie author Rachel Ann Nunes raised against Tiffanie Rushton, an elementary school teacher. Tiffanie allegedly took Rachel’s self-published book, added some sex scenes and republished it as her own. Rachel has already spent $20,000 in court fees and is using PRweb.com to get the...
I had no idea what Black Box was about when I started watching, but was soon delighted with it – a brain scientist with psychological issues recounts her last near death manic episode to her psychologist. While I’m writing about drugs and creativity, she makes the opposite point – sometimes we normalize our episodes with
I started this post a few years ago when I was working on a book project called “The Creative Brain on Drugs.” I’ve left some of the original content down below – but more recently I’ve been focused on writing faster and boosting word count: when I searched for “best smart drugs for writers” Google
I’ve seen a lot of time travel movies over the years, but none have made me seriously consider the issue of time travel until I started watching “About Time.” I think the charm of the movie is watching the disaster unfold as socially awkward, disarmingly frank but also very creepy and strange “Tim” (Domhnall...
Developing my own philosophy of Creativindie and working on a manifesto for this site, I’ve been reading all the books on creativity that I can find. Some offer valuable tips. Others are inspirational but mostly useless in terms of making your own success through creative talents. These books range between academic researchers with real...
I know one of the biggest challenges for writers is A) coming up with creative ideas for their writing and B) going back through their writing to self-edit, rewrite, improve and restructure. These are vastly different skills which need vastly different mind-sets. But there’s a simple and easy trick you can use to switch between
I’ve been reading a lot of books about creativity. All of them deal with the struggle of the creative life: art is WAR. Creativity takes effort. We have to fight through it. REAL art is about emotion, struggle, anxiety. Real art is about passion, True experience. Real art is Creating Something New – it’s a
Any artist or author can tell you where creativity comes from. It usually arrives when unexpected, as flashes of insight when focusing on something else. It cannot be controlled or called. True genius is spontaneous, wild, and unpredictable. But is it crazy? Nietzsche made famous the distinction between Apollo, the rational mind, and Dionysus...
A few years ago I was at a party. This was back in the days when I fire-danced (spun a staff with lighted kevlar ends) for fun and was involved in a small community with similar interests. At the party I girl I knew started talking to me about fire-dancing. She was a little tipsy,
