5 Ways To Be A More Creative Person
How to show up in the world as a more authentic communicator of truth and relayer of the beautiful
Art is hard. Being creative is hard. But we do it because it’s important — and because it fills an unmet need in our soul that’s dying to be satisfied and taken care of. For so many people, art is a necessary act, something that we cannot go through in life without doing in some way. I’m one of those people.
I’m empty and lonely in this world if I’m not creating or making something in some way, solving a problem, or telling a story to illustrate a point and share a truth. But oftentimes I feel stagnant — stuck in the process of doing the same thing again and again with no benefit or change.
If that’s true for you, hopefully, the art that I’ve created below of my own tips and tricks I’ve found and stolen along the way will help you out a little:
🎨 #1: Consume good art
Recently, I’ve been listening to the Steal Like An Artist trilogy on Audible, and let me just say, it has been exceeding my expectations and blowing my mind. It’s an incredibly written series of books that is already turning me into a much better creative and pushing me back into the process of writing my novel that has been slowly worked or for years in my small amount of free time.
“Be curious about the world in which you live. Look things up. Chase down every reference. Go deeper than anybody else — that’s how you’ll get ahead.”
― Austin Kleon, Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative
Steal Like An Artist points its readers to an essential practice of a successful artist — stealing. While this doesn’t mean plagiarism or intellectual property theft as Austin Kleon explains in the book, it means looking for strokes of genius and ideas in other people’s work. Solomon was right, there really is nothing new under the sun, only new ways of showing it and looking at it.
In order to make good art, pay attention to what’s been done. Look deeply into your soul and find what sits well with you. What makes you feel seen? What makes your eyes light up and your heart swell with pride and humanity? Consume good art, pick it apart, then apply the lessons that you learn to your own work.
(I’d also recommend collecting it somewhere — whether that be a note on your phone, a GoogleDoc, or a journal, some kind of Commonplace book where you can keep all of your good stolen and borrowed ideas together.)
📐 #2: Push yourself into new formats and different angles
I used to think that my creativity was limited to one realm. My brother could paint, my other brother could play piano, and I could write. I perceived our creativity as being limited to our own little sector, unable to break out into other categories or genres. It was when I started enjoying painting and thought back on my high school improv experience that I realized this couldn’t be the case.
“Everything has its beauty, but not everyone sees it.” — Andy Warhol
My passion and growing skill for writing fiction could be and can still be applied to other areas because they come from a place of intrigue and creativity, an intrinsic curiosity about the world, and an intuition for finding patterns and truths that I want to share in various domains.
Once I was able to break out of my “writing only” box, I started seeing how much I loved things like musicals, theater, acting, videography and photography, and painting. While writing is the way I make my money and my preferred way of being creative, I still occasionally let my curiosities show up in other areas that not only make me happy but inform my written creativity, deepening my understanding of the world and my appreciation for my own chosen craft.
🔎 #3: Look for the details and figure out why they matter
Good art pays attention to crucial details. Bad art doesn’t pay attention to crucial details. Some projects are won or lost by simple things that amateurs might not even notice they’re being turned off by. While my ADHD can sometimes prevent me from sitting still long enough to notice the details, every once and a while I spot something beautiful I want to learn more about.
It might be something like the shot at the end of the film Short Term 12, where Brie Larson’s character and others chase after a kid with a camera angle that makes you feel disoriented, settled, and enmeshed in the beautiful yet heartbreaking scene you’re watching all at once. It might be the way that the actor says the line in an important scene in your favorite TV show, or the shot of Captain America’s shield and face in Avengers: Endgame.
Whatever details speak out to you, notice them and figure out what their significance is. These details can even be the things you see in advertisements or commercials, the beat of the music or the way the artist sings the intro to the first song on the album. These details, when included in work by good artists, are almost always intentional and calculated, a final draft carefully crafted to make you feel a certain way. Appreciate that, learn from it, and use it in your own work if you can.
“I think structure is so deep in us. We put it in stories we tell our friends or in emails we write. We want it. It’s how we create meaning.” — Greta Gerwig
Just today I was watching an advertisement for the CASA organization, a volunteer child advocates program in one of my classes. It was a tear-jerker and a beautiful presentation about the importance of advocates and their impact on a child’s life. Several hours later I played it for a couple of my friends and got unreasonably excited at a certain camera angle employed in a court scene.
This young girl turns upward, and then we’re shown the actress playing her CASA from a lower angle, making the woman seem like she’s towering above us as the audience and certainly above the young girl. I got excited at that moment because I could see exactly what the director wanted me to see — this was not a threatening, towering presence of a woman, but a caring, dominant, and protective woman serving in this role, exactly what the young girl needed.
A small detail such as a camera angle allowed me to see exactly what the creators of the video wanted me to see — and my heart and mind were both touched by it. Now, not only am I positively influenced by their art and their message, but I have that technique and that detail tucked in my back pocket for the next time I want my audience to see something specific.
👩🏽💻 #4: Force yourself to create
This is one of the most basic rules of creating art, and I include it here because it’s a cliche for a reason. You won’t always want to be creative. Some days, the art will simply not flow through your fingers the way you want it to. But on those days, you have to press on and force yourself to do the work, because who knows what masterpiece is waiting behind your writer’s block, or what incredible video you’ll shoot with the way the lighting is today and the way your actors are feeling right now.
Creativity and art-making are habits that you have to build up, and even allowing yourself to slip and pause the work flippantly from time to time will diminish the impact you’re able to have, giving yourself enough time to forget why you do this in the first place.
“Don’t wait for inspiration. It comes while working.” — Henri Matisse
It won’t always be easy, but it will always be worth it. Even if you do nothing incredibly genius today, you’re laying the framework to do great things tomorrow and the day after that. Maybe you’re in the boring but essential part of the story. Maybe you’re blocking and storyboarding what will be the next great film that will change lives and promote important messaging about a certain issue to the world. Don’t give up. Keep trying. Go at it every day — even when it’s hard and it feels like you aren’t getting there.
Some days we make leaps and bounds, other times we crawl, and that’s okay.
🌎 #5: Expand your understanding of the world
This goes beyond consuming good art. Consume good art that’s beyond the world of film and television and books you grew up with. Consume things from other countries, from other regions, from people unlike yourself. Experience different worldviews and perspectives in an intentional way.
“Go and make interesting mistakes, make amazing mistakes, make glorious and fantastic mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here.”― Neil Gaiman, Make Good Art
This can look like new films, scrolling down different genres of Netflix than are typically recommended to you, watching a film you might not have seen without going out of your way to see it, or picking up a book in a section of Barnes and Noble you don’t usually visit. This can also look like meeting new people, taking a class outside of your realm of expertise, exploring crevices of Reddit you’ve never explored before, or watching a YouTube video from a creator with a perspective you’ve never heard before.
Good creators don’t just write or create what they know — they create art that talks about what they’ve learned, whether their conveying of that knowledge is obvious or not.
Wherever you are on your creative journey, I hope it’s going well. I hope it’s fulfilling and helping you answer life’s big questions and find even better questions to ask in the process. I hope your art is filling you up and that you’re able to share it with others in a way that fills them up to.
I also hope that these recommendations for being a better creative have been helpful — and that you’re able to implement them and others creatively into your life. Best of luck! And happy creating.
Kindly, Katie
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