Building Your Creative Muscle

While you can’t work out your creative muscle at the gym or physically see it grow over time, creativity is still a muscle. The more that you use it, the stronger it gets. The stronger it gets, the easier it can be to come up with ideas for your writing, whether that be ideas for scenes or ideas for full length novels. And the best part? There really is no downside to practicing your creativity! You can never be too creative.

Today, I want to provide some suggestions on how to practice flexing your creative muscle so it can get easier for you over time. 

Suggestion One: Book of Ideas.

A common tip in the writing community is to keep a book of things that inspire you. If you see a quote, write it down! A picture in a magazine? Cut it out and paste it in your book of inspiration! A bit less common, however, is a book of ideas. These are not things that inspire you, but rather a list of things you came up, even if they were inspired by specific things. For example, I recently listened to the Rusty Quill podcast “Stellar Filma”, and it gave me a lot of ideas for future stories. None of my notes in my idea journal are quotes from the show, though. That would be for an inspiration journal. All of the notes in my idea journal are all concepts in my own words that I would like to explore one day.

For example, the plot of Stellar Firma follows an egotistical, alcoholic named Trexel, and his clone assistant at work, David 7. David 7 is not a clone of Trexel, he is a clone of a man named David. However, the note that I added to my idea journal, was the following: “A story about a narcissistic and his complicated relationship with a clone of himself.” You can see where I was inspired by Stellar Firma, but wrote down an idea for the journal.

Not only does having a book of ideas help you work out your creative muscle, but it also gives you a place to store all your ideas that you don’t know what to do with yet in a place you can look through later when in need of ideas. You never know when an idea intended for a romance novel is the last piece you're gonna need for your next sci-fi.

Suggestion Two: Fanfiction & Roleplay.

I know, I know, a lot of people look at fanfiction and roleplay as cringy. However, it’s a fantastic tool for helping come up with creative ideas for your original work. 

Fanfiction can be a great creativity exercise because it allows you to use another piece of media as the foundation for your creativity. Sometimes as writers, we have ideas that we want to explore, but we don’t have enough information about the universe to explore it. For example, a writer may have a great plot in her head about two brothers who land themselves in a predicament where one and only one of them must be granted immortality. The writer might have a thousand ideas of things that happen in this plot, how we get into the situation, how they get out, but they don’t have any ideas for developing the characters. If they use Sam and Dean from Supernatural to kill in those missing brothers for their plot, it will help them work on the story they want to tell, as well as help them find things about their personalities and backstories that they want to keep or tweak for the next version of the brothers in the story, when they can be original characters.

Roleplay is another way to help practice being creative. Whether it be in Tabletop Roleplaying Games or in a text based medium, roleplay allows you to develop a character you are interested in, while letting the people you are roleplaying with help you come up with a story and events to happen to that character. In addition, roleplaying can help you develop your characters much further than you had in your head as you learn how they react to different things. Once you know your character and have some possible plot lines to follow thanks to your roleplay partners, it’ll be much easier to come up with even more ideas!

Suggestion Three: Cause & Effect.

A personal favorite way to encourage my creativity is to think through causes and effects. Start with a story, whether that’s one that you’ve already created, one that you are a fan of, or even a myth you’ve always been fascinated by. Pick a detail to change, and think through how cause and effect may change the story just from that detail. 

For example, I’ll take the story of Oedipus. Let’s do a switch. What if Oedipus killed his mother, and slept with his father? Now we have a few things to think through in cause and effect. The first one I would start with is the new sexuality of the character. I’d decide if bigotry would have to play a part in his story now, whether it’s internal or external. I’d think about whether or not secrecy for the relationship would play a part in the story. Then I’d look towards the death of Oedipus’ mother, and I’d explore how the father may have a different reaction to his wife’s death than the mother had in the original story. 

You’ll be amazed by how many things you’ll find can change by modifying a single detail.

Suggestion Four: Hundred Ideas Challenge.

This next suggestion is one of the hardest creativity exercises that I subject myself to. The One Hundred Ideas Challenge is an exercise that you can try alone or with people, and will get much easier the more brains you have working on it. The goal of the challenge is simple: pick a topic, whether it’s as vague as “book ideas” or as specific as “scene ideas for the next chapter of my current romance novel”. Then sit down and try to come up with one hundred possible ideas for the topic of your choice. The ideas do not have to be good and they do not need to be well thought out. The only goal is to try to get a hundred ideas. If you can hit that magic number, it’s extremely unlikely that you won’t have at least one idea written down that can at least inspire something good.

The Only Requirement.

The only requirement in order to grow your creativity is to use it. It doesn’t matter if you follow my suggestions on how to practice being creative or if you come up with your own methods. The more you practice being creative, the better you’ll get. It will become easier to come up with ideas faster, and with more ideas, the more likely one will be good.