How to Focus Your Ideas: Series Introduction

photo by pacificit

How to Focus Your Ideas series:
1. Series Introduction
2. Idea Dumps: Letting It All Hang Out
3. Navigating the Idea Dump
4. A Hefty Dose of Moxie
We creative types just love ideas. We want to be original, imaginative, and exciting. We want to write groundbreaking stories, paint mind-shattering canvases, and compose inconceivable verses.

But creativity these days isn’t limited to the novelists, the painters, and the poets. We’ve come to the so-called “Information Age,” when everyone’s going into raptures about creative thinking, to the point that it starts to sound like a boring cliché. But as tired as it may sound, it’s true — creative thinking is a most valuable asset in the unpredictable, ever-changing world we inhabit. Marketers have to be creative. Programmers have to be creative. Journalists, teachers, and chefs? They won’t stand out either unless they’ve got creative ideas.

We’ve barreled past the Industrial Revolution, when learning techniques and following set procedures were the required skills. Back then, creative people like the weavers and the silversmiths were completely squashed by the arrival of factories and machines. But they are now redeemed, as those big company owners are currently scrambling about howling that they need more creative minds so their company can survive.

Yet conflict arises. Creativity, it so happens, is also traditionally associated with disorder. If you search for “creative genius” on Google Images, Albert Einstein and his legendary wild ‘do shows up on the first line. Homer Simpson shows up on the second (I’m not joking). Two very different manifestations of disarray, no doubt, but very telling indeed.

But creativity doesn’t have to be a chaotic mess. For some people it will be, but for other people, that mess actually holds them back. This series is about wading through the mess to find the nuggets of gold.

If you’ve read my other posts, you’ve probably noticed that I’m big on figuring things out as I go along — jumping in and starting to act. What you probably don’t know is that I have a huge pile of ideas milling around my mind, ideas that have not dared to venture outside the warm corners of my mind. The problem with these ideas isn’t that they got paralyzed by over-planning, or that I threw them out into the world cold and unprepared. The problem is that there are just too many of them. I get overwhelmed, and brush them to the side.

How to Find Those Nuggets

That said, I’m presenting you all with a series on how to focus your ideas. Preposterous!, you may be thinking. Why would we want to hear it from someone who’s struggling herself? Well, hear me out. My idea is that as I’m figuring out how to focus my ideas (since I just love that “figuring out” business), I can let you know how it’s going for me — let you know what works. Ideally, you folks then join in the discussion and tell me if it works for you, or if you have a completely different and brilliant method for us to try out.

The impending first post, elegantly titled “Idea Dumps: Letting It All Hang Out,” will discuss the painfully obvious, yet extremely effective method of writing it down. I promise, it will be more exciting than it sounds. I’ll use a spellbinding example to demonstrate different ways to collect your ideas, whether you like scribbling words or making pretty pictures.

The second post, “Navigating the Idea Dump,” will discuss how to organize those ideas that you’ve written down, so you don’t look at that illegible piece of paper and end up tossing it in the trash. Once more, we’ll follow an example through various methods.

The third post, which is currently unnamed in order to keep you in dreadful suspense, will talk about actually starting your creative project. Again, whether it’s a collaborative writing project you want to launch, or a marketing workshop on building your brand, we’ll talk about what it means to open the floodgates.

I warn you that all post titles and content are subject to change without notice, especially if some of you savvy readers comment below or e-mail me with suggestions.

And because I like picking your brains, here’s another question I’d like to throw out there: What is creativity to you? Where does it fit in your life?

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Tagged as: brainstorm, creative, ideas, mind map, Writing