Improve your Creativity
Creativity Management can seriously improve the quality and quantity of your creative output. Ironically, this topic is best understood in the senior business community - businesses continually need to be creative and innovative to maintain competitive advantage and solve a host of other issues. This topic is taken seriously by Harvard, Yale, Princeton et al and studied at the highest academic levels. Critical insights will help you write better screenplays, for example:
a) The relationship between production and quality: it can be concluded with great confidence that quality of output is closely connected to sheer quantity. Moreover, the single best creative product tends to appear at that point in the career when the creator is being most prolific.
b) Separating creative from critical thinking: writing and editing are separate and distinct processes.
c) Forcing inspiration: screenwriters will often find that their best ideas occur while they are engaged in other projects.
d) Manipulating organisational culture and organisational structure to overcome blocks.
e) Achieving radical leaps through incremental productivity.
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The Value of Structure
Structure, in its many forms, increases the quantity and quality of creative output. The golden rule is that originality emerges from structure:
a) Short term goals (incremental productivity) produce more output than a "do your best" approach. With specific regard to creative writing, writing four pages a day completes a words-on-paper first draft screenplay in one month. A "do your best" or "waiting for inspiration" approach can take months or years. Witness the untold number of people with unfinished manuscripts under their beds.
b) Work processes help to i) unblock the mind, ii) tap into tacit knowledge, iii) trigger the mind into working at various cognitive levels and iv) apply i) and ii) and iii) to the areas of problem identification, idea generation, idea selection, development and commercialisation.
c) Frameworks reduce complex problems into their component intellectual parts. Frameworks increase output by reducing complex problems into smaller, more manageable problem solving exercises. A similar idea is that problems, no matter how daunting, can be solved by breaking them into their constituent parts.
d) Templates, with specific regard to creative writing, are valuable as they are step-outlines. They are ready-made analyses of story structure; by using them writers can quickly expand an idea into a story. Past a critical threshold, the story then begins to dictate its own structure: thus originality emerges from structure.
e) Simply being prolific improves performance and quality. The single best creative product tends to appear at that point in the career when the creator is being most prolific.
f) Simply engaging in the tasks improves performance. Experience refines knowledge and methodology towards optimal levels.
g) Engagement stimulates the mind into working on problems at various cognitive levels and results in inspiration. Screenwriters often find that their best ideas come to them when they are in the middle of writing a screenplay.
h) Structure helps clearly identify complex problems and triggers incubation. Problems incubate until answers become apparent. Incubation tends to result in richer insights.
i) Engagement increases the incidence and frequency of problem identification and thus the incidence and frequency of insight.
j) Engagement (coupled with motivation) increases solution seeking, through active search for stimuli and intellectual cross-pollination through networks, bridging and collaboration.
k) Repeated engagement (coupled with motivation) triggers frame breaking; helps identify path dependencies and parochialism.
l) Radical shifts (novelty, originality) occur through sustained incremental change. By incrementally modifying output, the distance between the original and final versions increases. Radical shifts sometimes result from dramatic events or conditions but the vast number of gains accrue from continuous incremental improvement.
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Creativity and Time Pressure
There are two contrary arguments: a) time pressure stimulates creativity and b) time pressure reduces creativity. Both are true. There are a number of forces at work:
Time pressure increases creative output. By forcing idea production, setting goals and incremental deadlines, a greater number of ideas are produced than if a “do your best” approach is taken. If a leader asks participants in an idea generating session to address a problem and think of at least 5 ideas every half an hour, then 80 ideas are produced by one individual and 1600 are produced by 20 individuals at the end of an average working day. This level of output is conscious and would not be produced normally.
Time pressure encourages prolific production and therefore the probability of generating good ideas increases. It can be said with great confidence that quality of output is closely related to quantity. The best single creative product tends to appear at that point in the career when the creator is being most prolific.
Forcing output pushes individuals along the experience curve, refines their methodology, builds competencies and knowledge and improves performance. Screenwriters know that they are likely to produce more, better quality work faster if they set themselves a schedule of a certain number of pages per day.
Motivation is critical to creativity. If a person is intrinsically motivated, time pressure may be a synergistic extrinsic motivator. If the person is not intrinsically motivated then it may turn out to be a non-synergistic extrinsic motivator, which reduces the level of engagement in the endeavour.
Short-term time pressure can be negative in that it does not allow the mind to engage in the endeavour at various cognitive levels. It does not allow rich ideas to formulate through the process of incubation . Intrinsically motivated individuals will benefit from short term time pressure and goals (sets cognitive forces in motion) and will generate richer ideas through incubation over the longer term.
Buy the 2000+ stage Hero's Journey And Transformation Through A New World / State
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by Kal Bashir