I require contentment. I demand tranquility.
When writing, what are your orders? Who cannot talk to you? Where must you be? What must you see and feel? Crops are harvested in autumn; similarly, there is a time and place for you to cultivate your creativity, to gather your imagination. All good writings flourish from this visionary pinpoint and it is imperative to define yours early on, to tap into it at will and launch the best works possible—for you or your business.
The other day, I was asleep on a kayak. Still water, still sky. Dragonflies had fallen all over me. The wind and the sun and the dragonflies were my only companions. In that ceaseless silence of movement, I found myself able to think clearly. I formed the idea for this blog post. I focused on words and wonderment. In the landscape of my writing, nothing can move.
Discover Your Movement
Discovering what movement your imagination requires is an exercise in learning about yourself. Frank O’Hara wrote poems in the middle of parties. For him, movement was poetry.
Creativity is fickle and might hide away even on days when you need it most — when trying to write a report for work, when trying to write a thank you letter, when trying to woo a lover.
Finding what environment pleases you most will help draw that elusive creativity back into the spotlight, where you can study it and glean from it what you need.
Build a Sensual Foundation
I was born a sensuous person. To write, I must be inspired by one of the five senses. The touch of a velvet pillow. The taste of blue raspberry. The scent of the wind around a lemon tree. The sight of a sunset thick with fuchsia waves. The sound of rain on the river.
These five senses are the foundation of human experience. All literature, from poetry to Excel spreadsheets, begins as sensory stimuli pricking the mind into a thought, then into action. To locate the environment needed to maximize your creativity, ask yourself this: what would it look like? What would you hear, if anything? What senses would inspire you forward?
Years ago, chocolate companies would send their products into British schools to see which chocolate bars the children preferred. Roald Dahl was one of those British schoolchildren inundated with the taste and smell of chocolate—a sensory explosion that inspired him to write Charlie and the Chocolate Factory years later.
I require contentment. I demand tranquility. Some require movement, some demand chocolate.
To maximize your creativity, demand your pleasures and require yourself to write about them.