How to get ideas

Writers have this thing, that the best way to understand something for them is to write about them. Ideas and creativity is a subject I have thought a lot about. So a few years back, I thought I would write about it to be able to think better about it. Now I have written and discarded so many drafts of it that I have lost track of the number of lakhs of words written on this subject by me. In many ways, the quality of writing on this subject is like a biography of my writing skills as well, at least for the last 4 years.
In 2016, I started and finished writing the first version of a book titled ‘How to get ideas’. I collected 100 short thoughts I had about creativity, each about 2 pages long and put together 200 pages like that. Each thought had a story, followed by the learning from the story, which is what I wanted to say. I will look up some examples of these stories whenever I have some time. Some of the questions which I wanted to explore were:
1 — What does creativity mean? Where does it come from and what does it look like? Can someone become more creative by exercising the creativity muscle?
2 — Why are some people more creative than others? Out of the following factors which ones play an important role in making some creative:
a — intelligence — is it directly co-related with intelligence?
b — life experiences — does leading an experience rich life make someone more creative?
c —immediate environment — it is said that we are the average of 5 people we spend most of our time with. Does hanging out with creative people make us creative?
3 — What can we do to become more creative?
I wasn’t really looking for answers to these questions. There are some questions which don’t have answers. They just have opinions. In some people’s opinion, these questions have definitive answers. At least for me, these were open ended questions which can be debated but not solved.
But when I shared the first draft of what I had written with people around me, everybody told me that nobody should read it because it made no sense. When I look back, I still don’t know what was wrong with that concept but I do believe that if 10 out of 10 knowledgeable people thought I should drop it, they must have been right.
This rejection didn’t discourage me from the subject though. In 2017, I took a fresh approach for this subject. I organized my 100 thoughts into 4 themes and tried to write a book with 4 sections. For each section, I decided to interview one creative person related to that theme. I interviewed 3 out of the 4 people and started showing this version to people. Yet again, nobody saw any value in it, even though the people I had interviewed were substantially big names. Much to my anguish, I had to drop the book once again.
It’s been almost two years since all this happened. The subject of ideas has still been on my mind and I’ve been conducting my own share of experiments on this subject. Most of them have ended up with nil results with the only positive outcome being the learning I have had in the process.
So I thought, why not just write about it on Medium and see if enough people are interested in my thoughts on this subject. I have divided this study into x sections —
1 — Discovering torrents —
2 — The year 2017 — experimenting
3 — Meditation
4 — Moore’s law of thoughts
5 — History of ideas
6 — Experiments with reading
7 — Doing things slowly
8 — Future of ideas
9 — Lifestyle — working out+ dietitian
10 — Journaling+ Cleaning
Over the next few weeks, I would be delving deeper into each one of these point and see where it goes. The idea is to document my thoughts and share it with some friends. I’m not looking for any virality or visibility through this. Just putting my thoughts on paper.
