Where do you discover new ideas? How do you find inspiration? What gives you new perspectives? What is the flash that takes you from something routine and conventional to something rare and extraordinary? How do you learn to create? How do you place ourselves in situations where creativity flows through you? How do you create creativity?
As paradoxical as it sounds, one of the best processes for creating involves denying. You develop creativity when you overcome obstacles. Necessity is the mother of invention. When conventional avenues are inaccessible, you find unconventional avenues.
Have you ever heard a skilled musician perform with nothing but a woodsaw and a bow? Or with water-filled glasses?
Have you ever seen a Japanese sumi-e painting where just a few ink lines capture the motion of waves or a galloping horse? (I said “capture” in the present tense, not “captured” in the past tense, because that motion remains captured in time, in the present tense, for every new viewer who happens to see it).
Have you ever witnessed the creativity of a mime or a clown who managed to tell a rich story using nothing but their gestures?
The mime Marcel Marceau said, “You know that in mime, we recreate objects which are not there. We make the invisible visible, and the visible invisible. And the stage becomes, suddenly, what we want the stage to be.”
I had the chance to re-watch Charlie Chaplin’s film The Gold Rush recently, nearly 100 years after its creation, and it was every bit the masterpiece that I remembered it to be. Chaplin’s humor begins with a simple idea — such as, there’s nothing to eat — and then builds from there.
What do you eat when there’s nothing to eat? You eat a shoe. Chaplin pulls the shoe out of a steaming pot and places it on a plate. He ladles hot water over it like broth over a chicken. He portions the shoe for himself and his cabin mate, and sets to the task of eating it, twirling the shoelace on a fork like pasta, chewing the tender bits from the shoe nails, offering up one of the nails like a wishbone. Chaplin manages to milk several minutes of classic comedy from a simple idea: eating a shoe.
Just because the storyteller works without words, that doesn’t mean the the story suffers. In fact, telling the story without words forces the storyteller to create a new voice.
Words are conventional. You use them all the time, every day. But you may also take words for granted, and this can lead to lazy storytelling. The first rule of cinema is, “Show, don’t tell.” Showing how characters grow and change is so much more powerful than hearing the characters talk about growing and changing.
The messages of Marceau and Chaplin were shaped by their wordless delivery, and this propelled their messages across diverse regions and cultures and eras.
The next time you want to create something new, but you are not sure where to begin, a good first step is to take something away. You may find, denial is the spark of creation.