The Secret to Creativity?

Don't have it. Searched for it quite a bit, looked through just about everything I can find on the internet until everyone starts repeating themselves, and the only conclusion I can come to is that there's really no secret other than putting a lot of effort into it.

This is a bit of a cheat, really, since I'm trying to come up with something to write every day (one of the "secrets" I've read about quite a bit can be summed up as "quantity, then quality"), and happen to be going through a bit of a creative slump. The problem isn't really that I have nothing to write about, it's the fact that I don't know what to say about the things that I've come up with to write about. Ideas are really, really cheap, I come up with them all the time, but good ideas are difficult. Even more difficult is doing something with that idea, so I have a bunch of half-written articles that I may never finish sitting there, just waiting for me to finish writing them. Once you combine the ones sitting here on the blog with the ones in my Dropbox with the ones in Google Drive, I end up with months worth of material if only I could finish them and know what to do with them.

Maybe the secret is that we're not even looking at how to be creative - maybe we need to learn how to execute instead of come up with creative ideas. We're actually really creative by nature, we're just not used to doing something with all of that creativity. Or I don't even know and don't have the authority to say anything and have anyone pay attention to what I say. All I can do is see the world from my perspective and say what I see.

Positive Unintended Consequences

Something I'll encourage everyone out there to do is to create things. If you have an idea and even a small piece of the capability to create what you've thought of, then you should. Sometimes, even the small and stupid things turn out to have uses. Sure, they'll probably also be small and stupid uses, but the fact that they have any use at all is what makes them worth creating.

This is one of those examples that is small and stupid, but the fact that it had any use beyond what I thought of it at first really made me think. As a recent post indicated, I do a lot of writing for The Red Shirt Crew, and a large part of the writing for that blog is reviewing comics. I realize that I'm largely serving as an extension of the Dark Horse marketing machine, but I'm okay with that, as the artists and writers also need that promotion. A time-consuming part of the process is linking to the personal webpages of all the artists and authors, so I created a spreadsheet with a list of all of them to make that easier. It served its purpose well, making that part of the process very simple, which is especially good when you're reviewing long series with lots of repeating creatives behind it. 

Stupidly, I didn't share it with the other writers for a long time. Eventually, I realized that I was just being an idiot and shared it with everyone else on the blog. They all loved the idea, but the thing that stuck out to me was from the writer who reviews Dark Horse Presents, their anthology series. Sometimes, it's difficult to track down exactly what other things an artist has worked on, but this allowed exactly that. I only added the series they worked on because it made it easier to find the names, but it turned out to have another good use that I never thought of that saved someone else a lot of time and effort.

Yes, it sounds like a small and stupid use, but everything has those uses. Everything you create might have those little things that you never thought about before, and that's one of the best reasons why you should create those things.