I’ve had a creative urge for as long as I can remember.
A creative ability, though…?
I remember first discovering ambigrams – words that have rotational symmetry (they look the same when you flip the page upside-down), popularised in Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons. I became obsessed with creating them, mostly because they were quick enough and simple enough for me to make them without getting bored, but complex enough for it to be impressive.
No, I don’t have any samples to share with you. This was a while ago. They were probably terrible anyway.
But I made dozens of these things because, finally, my raw, raging creativity had an outlet.
My point?
I know what it’s like to have the urge to be creative but without any way to express it.
It should be obvious that’s no longer the case. This email is a creative expression – an artistic link between a story I have and a goal, shared through the art of written text.
And emails are just one thing out of many that I create.
My goal is to convince you that it’s possible to learn how to be creative in a productive way. If you’re satisfied with only daydreaming rich, vivid characters, stories, business ideas, marketing plans, video series and movies, then that’s fine. That’s barely creative though. The real art lies in the intersection between your vision and practical reality.
If you’d like to get whatever’s in your head out into the world so you can share it – or even just admire it in private – then there’s good news.
Every Creative Way outlines a few different approaches to creative thinking.
Some are dramatic and intensely original.
Others are more likely to be popular with a wide audience than others.
And some are simply good at getting the job done.
If you’re good at daydreaming but you struggle to create, then you probably need more of the latter.
Good news! You can learn these styles with a few simple exercises that I outline in Every Creative Way: