Creativity

To create, you need to let your mind wander freely. Which means no outside stimuli.

Switch off your Facebook, television, radio, MP3 player - well, maybe not that if you rely on a soundtrack to work in, for example - and leave books on the shelves and newspapers back on the rack in the newsagent. You need a clear mind to fly.

You know how I get creative? I look at books in the local bookstores, and magazines on racks.

I don't look for one in particular. Like Ozymandias, I do this thing where I just gather the data in its purest form, from the connections and juxtapositions between the cover images, titles, comments, their positions high, middle and low on the shelves, left, right or middle, out in the corners, on the edges or right in the middle at eye level.

I look at books on free stands in the middle. What kinds of books do they have right in the middle of the floor? Dictionaries and travel books - themes more of escapism than a need to improve oneself. Cookery books and cozy titles about food, babies and cooking - regression, indulgence. Images of death and fear next to the cookbooks - the need to regress to infancy out of a need to block or deny the fears of the everyday.

Books themed around eroticism, dreams, nightmares, violence, rape fantasy, fear, sex, revenge, pain, death imagery, sexual imagery, images of models dolled up to look like, well, dolls, images of moonlight, blood, teeth, vampirism. Sexual indulgence, again as a form of more adult regression and escape into sin, obliterating consciousness, avoiding the question of absolving guilt by living in denial of it.

Books and magazines do not change as quickly as television screens; however, they tell a much deeper, more meaningful story than TV screens do.

And all of this feeds my creativity.

Maybe you can find your own tools, and thereby discover the well of your own creativity.