David Lynch on How to Capture the Flow of Creativity

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MindFullyAlive

3 min readOct 5, 2016

The Atlantic captured David Lynch’s insights about the nature of inspiration and how to harness creativity in this beautiful animation.

“Everything that we do starts with an idea. We don’t know what to do unless we have an idea. Ideas are like fish — and you don’t make the fish, you catch the fish.
Desiring an idea is like putting a bait on a hook and lowering it in the water. You can catch ideas from daydreaming, or you can catch ideas from places. If you think that maybe a place could conjure ideas, then you have to go out of the house and go traveling.
You can be going down the street, see a reflection on a little pot of pool and the gutter — and *BANG* an idea will come. Who knows how it happens?
I always say it’s like there’s a man in another room with the whole film together, but they’re in puzzle parts. And he’s flipping one piece at a time into me. And, at first it’s very abstract. I don’t know have a clue. More pieces come, more ideas are caught. It starts forming a thing. And then one day, there it is. So… in a way, there’s no original ideas. It’s just the ideas that you caught. The thing is to be true to the idea
A lot of artists think that suffering is necessary, but in reality, any kind of suffering cramps the flow of creativity. Let’s say that with Van Gogh, every time he went out and painted got diarrhea. It wouldn’t be so good for him to go out. You’d have to be really crazy.
Happiness “in the doing” is so important. I always say it’s our life going by…. [With creativity flowing], ideas are easier to catch — and ideas that could take you out of “drudgery work” and lead you to some… fantastic things.
Trillions and zillions of ideas and they’re all there bubbling and ready to be caught.

— David Lynch