Being creative is easy when you’re a preschool-aged child. Slowly but surely, the need for the “right” answers and approval grows, and creativity shrinks. When your entire world is more and more predictable: you expect to know the weather, the time you go to work and come home, when dinner is, what days of the week you expect trash pickup, etc. When things mis-align or what you expect doesn’t happen, you get uncertain. Uncertain, you grow afraid of the chaos. But chaos is often part of the creative process. Stop being afraid. Get cozy with the mess. Turn it into your creative superpower.
Why is Creative Chaos Important?
When everything is predictable, controlled, our thinking becomes routine. You stop questioning or examining yourself, your surroundings, your world. Routine stifles creativity.
Chaos is unpredictable. It’s uncomfortable. But when the usual rules don’t apply, your imagination fills the gap. At these times of uncertainty, imagination helps you make sense of the mess.
According to Loop and Hook, Swiss engineer George de Mestral took his dog for a walk in 1941 and returned with burrs sticking to his clothing and his dog’s fur. He got curious. Examining the burrs under a microscope, he discovered their tiny hooks and subsequently designed Velcro.
In 1839, Charles Goodyear had been working to make rubber lose its adhesiveness and susceptibility to extremes of heat and cold. He accidentally dropped some India rubber mixed with sulfur on a hot stove and discovered that the rubber hardened without melting, making it durable and elastic. That accidental discovery, according to Brittanica.org, became the vulcanized rubber that we still use in tires and many other products today.
Ways to Make Chaos Work for you
Creatives need to harness the energy of unpredictability. To get you started, below are six ways to making disorderliness of the world work for you.
Count to Five and Start
Starting is often the hardest part; facing a blank page or canvas or lump of clay, you balk. Your brain wants to find order. There’s safety and security in order. But creativity is not a straight line from concept to idea to execution to product.
There are many ways to trick your brain into cooperation.
- Count to Five and Start. Set a timer with the self-imposed rule that you must work on your art until the timer goes off. Then do it. Even if you must write the same sentence, re-do the same knit-one, purl-two, or brush stroke over and over.
- Sit and do nothing. Don’t scroll the internet, read anything else, or listen to music. Do absolutely nothing at all for ten to fifteen minutes. Let your frustration with the boredom grow until you know how to start or the time is up. If the time is up and you haven’t started, don’t judge. Just call it quits for this session. Next session, begin again.
- Create a ritual that signals your brain you’re switching to creative mode. Repeat an inspirational phrase, light a scented candle, or set all your tools out as a signal. It may be rough starting at first, but the more often you repeat the ritual, the quicker your creative brain will respond.
One method of starting may work for you and not for someone else. Or it may work for you for a while, then you’ll need a new ritual. Best of all, over time you may find your ritual is so ingrained that the mere act of sitting in your creative space triggers your imagination.
Allow Failure
Part of life is failure. Even the most gifted creatives fail more often than they like. Unfortunately, failure often sets off alarms in your brain. It triggers the fight-or-flight response.
But there are no right or wrong answers in art. Does that make you uncomfortable? Good. You can’t create without some discomfort and a maelstrom of ideas.
If it’s too uncomfortable for you, take a moment. Breathe. Give your body and brain time to process your emotions. Name your emotions. Often, simply naming our emotions helps us reduce the overwhelm.
Another way to overcome failure is to reframe it. Recognize that your discomfort means you are pushing your boundaries and growing. Change how you frame it from a failure to an experiment that didn’t work. Look at the experiment for takeaway information you can use to do the next experiment.
Plan for failure. Your yarn will have knots, or you’ll skip stitches. Your paint might bleed and turn your planned art into chaos. For writers, that means writing a crappy first draft. Plan for the chaos. Editing and revising, and re-doing will turn your work into a polished piece.
Increase Your Input
Feed your creativity the images, words, sounds, rhythms it needs to replenish. Gathering lots of ideas is critical to creativity. Use all the arts, all the media you can get your hands on. But don’t stop there. Use in-real-life opportunities. Visit museums, art galleries, attend plays and concerts, or take walks in nature.
The things you feed your creativity mix and meld and mash together so your imagination will create something new.
Processing Time
You sit down at your creative station, your desk, and…nothing happens. Your mind is a blank. Most likely you’ve not given your brain the processing time it needs. Do something else.
Sometimes you might find a different creative outlet to be useful. Madeline L’Engle, author of the Caldecott Award-winning book, A Wrinkle in Time, said she played the piano to overcome writer’s block.
Often doing something repetitive, like washing dishes or the car, is helpful. Even taking a bath or shower may be useful. Doing something you don’t have to think about doing allows your brain to finish processing and come up with new ideas.
Allow yourself to procrastinate (for a while). Your ideas need time in the primordial ooze to reshape them into something new.
Be Open
The first idea you come up with is usually predictable, trite, or blah. Be open to lots of ideas, even the ones that seem crazy.
Keep track of all your ideas. Play with each of them a little. Make different combinations of ideas. Have fun with it!
Be on the lookout for ideas. Consider setting aside some of your time for idea-generating activities. Look for ideas in what you read, you listen to, you overhear, and even what you watch. Everyday life has lots of opportunities for the unexpected. Get curious about whatever happens. Who knows, you might accidentally discover a new technique or invent something.
Be Ready
Creativity often comes in the middle of something else. Be prepared. Keep a notebook and pen or electronic device by your bed, in your pocket or purse, everywhere. Prepare your family/friends. That blank stare in the middle of a conversation isn’t about them; it’s your brain finally pulling something out of the murk and reshaping it.
Embrace the Unpredictable
Many adults have stifled that creativity for so long that they believe they have no creativity. Undo the brainwashing. Build up your creativity muscles with ways you can be more creative and what you should know about creativity. Creativity isn’t a straight line. It isn’t neat. But it is mighty rewarding.
Throw off your school-grown fear of the unpredictable. Embrace it and open the door to your creativity.
How do you use chaos in your creative life?
Resources
“Creativity and Chaos,” Psychology Today
Image credits:
Featured image purchased from DepositPhotos
Wildflowers Image by Katarzyna from Pixabay
Final image purchased from DepositPhotos
