Creativity: A Short and Cheerful Guide

if you have zero expectations at the start, you can hardly fail. And you’re already priming your unconscious…

If you are an experienced writer, and you show people your work, there are four questions you need to ask: Where were you bored? Where could you not understand what was going on? Where did you not find things credible? Was there anything that you found emotionally confusing?

When you’re being creative there is no such thing as a mistake.

That’s the great thing about working in comedy. If the audience doesn’t laugh, you know you’ve got it wrong.

So you just sit there and, eventually, as the mind quietens, odd ideas and notions relevant to your puzzle start popping in your mind. But they are … odd! And the reason they seem odd is that they’re not what our usual logical, critical, analytical mind is used to. They don’t arrive in the form of words, in neatly typed little sentences. Because th

the longer you sit there, the more your mind slows and calms down and settles. Once that starts to happen you can begin to focus on the problem you’ve chosen to think about.

Once you’ve come up with a new idea, there are two ways to test it. First, there is the one I described earlier, when you bring the critical faculties you suspended during the playful stage to bear on whatever it is that you have thought of. You’re now sufficiently clear about your idea to be in a position to evaluate it. If you decide it can be im

the language of the unconscious is not verbal. It’s like the language of dreams.

when you first have a new idea, you don’t get critical too soon.

creative people are much better at tolerating the vague sense of worry that we all get when we leave something unresolved.