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How to Jumpstart Your Creativity

November 10, 2021 //  by Janet Grant//  4 Comments

A few years ago on the PBS News Hour, I saw a report on jazz legend Herbie Hancock, who talked about an especially memorable time he performed with his mentor Miles Davis. Herbie hit a wrong note–flat out wrong. He momentarily was devastated.

But then he realized that Miles had improvised on his instrument in a riff that made Herbie’s wrong note sound right. The notes Miles produced put the note in a context that suited what Herbie had played.

Herbie, in the interview, commented that Miles didn’t pass judgment on that note or think of it as wrong. Instead, he thought of it as an unusual choice and then improvised his way in a direction he wasn’t expected to go.

Jumpstart #1: Try Something Crazy–or That Seems Wrong-Headed

We’ve all heard about how debilitating it is to pass judgment on our own work, but how do we alter our thinking when we  set aside our ideas of what’s right and what’s wrong? Is it wrong to write a novel in second person? Is it wrong to start your nonfiction book at the end rather than the beginning?

Okay, those are pretty crazy ideas, but maybe there’s a kernel of an idea in those questions that leads to a new way of seeing what you’re writing. Let’s not limit ourselves by right and wrong.  We can always pull back from limitless thinking, but if we never venture there, we’ll not see anew.

Jumpstart #2: Take the Old and Make It New Again

Along those lines of how to jumpstart creativity, in that same PBS interview, I learned that Hancock won a Grammy Award in 2009 for reconfiguring Joni Mitchell songs into jazz pieces. He talked about how being inventive often is taking what already exists and finding new expressions.

As you look at what’s being published nowadays, where do you see inventiveness, taking something old and making it something new? Ways of reconfiguring how we think about an idea or writing style and doing something new with it?

Examples of Old into New

  • Reconstructed fairy tales. Taking a fairy tale and wrapping it in contemporary clothing.
  • Mashups like Jane Austen and Zombies, Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters.
  • Books that imagine what happened in some dark corner of a well-known historical moment or a famous person’s life. The novel March by Geraldine Brooks explores what was happening to the father of the Little Women while he was off to war. It won a Pulitzer Prize.

What other books can you think of that borrowed something old and made something new out of it?

Using the ideas behind these two jumpstarts to creativity, how could you reconfigure a book idea you’ve been playing with?

TWEETABLES

Writers, what would happen if you saw your work-in-progress with new eyes? Click to tweet.

Set aside old formulas to create a new way of seeing your writing.  Click to tweet.

If you’re stuck on how to approach your latest writing project, try these two ideas. Click to tweet.

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Category: Blog, Writing Craft, Writing LifeTag: how to be creative, how to see a book concept differently, renewing creativity, Writer's Block

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  1. Andrew Budek-Schmeisser

    November 10, 2021 at 7:01 pm

    Never thought about myself
    as being all creative;
    there may be talent on the shelf,
    but, really, I’m a native
    of the catchy advert jingle,
    ephemera, now here, then gone,
    nothing to give heart a tingle
    or be recalled beyond the dawn,
    and that is really quite all right,
    for I can often bring a smile,
    a moment turned into delight
    in a time of trial,
    whose spirit can outlive the words
    that fly away, my singing birds.

    Reply
  2. Wendy L Macdonald

    November 11, 2021 at 10:29 am

    Thank you, dear Janet, for sowing new seeds of thought regarding projects we may have weeded out.

    While I work on a book that’s dear to my desire to contribute something helpful to the world, you’ve inspired me to keep an old nonfiction manuscript in mind too.

    It’s got two timelines running alongside each other. When I first started inserting the flashback chapters in between the main ones, due to critiquers’ suggestions that I can’t leave all the back story out, I felt like I’d failed and was potentially ruining a completed manuscript. (I didn’t want to visit the past.) Your post has shown me it may be a “happy little accident” (Thank you, Bob Ross.) or a winsome Hancock maneuver that may make it a marvelous read. Here’s to hoping.

    Blessings ~ Wendy Mac
    P.S. Thank you, Books & Such, for all the help & hope you give to writers.

    Reply
  3. Kristen Joy Wilks

    November 11, 2021 at 4:28 pm

    What a fabulous story, Janet! I love how with his mistake and his mentor’s inventiveness, they made something unique and lovely. That is so like how God works with us!!! One of my sons’ favorite authors took the structure of a classic sports movie and placed that story in space with a young pilot. He also took your classic character arch of someone who lacked confidence growing to someone powerful and flipped it. He took a confident and ferocious teen girl who just wanted to kill some aliens and grew her into someone whose eyes are opened to the value of life and learns to hold back her strength in order to help others. Made for great books that my sons all love!

    Reply
  4. Shelli Littleton

    November 14, 2021 at 12:22 pm

    I have just discovered Joni Mitchell recently and fell in love with her and her work. Music always inspires me.

    Reply

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