As a writer, the most common question people ask me is, “Where do you get your ideas?” Frankly, I wish I knew the answer because then I could go get more of them.
Like everyone, I often feel stumped. Lately, I’ve seen a number of articles on ways to increase creativity, and I’ve begun to wonder if there were things I could do to make myself more creative. What’s the prescription?
I wanted to understand the nature and nurture of creativity, so I spoke with Sally Campbell, who is both a visual artist and a professor in the Children, Families, & Schools Program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “If I walked into a typical preschool classroom, what percentage of those students would be creative?” I asked.
“They’re all creative,” she replied. “Anyone can be creative if they’re willing to fail.” I asked if creativity is measurable, in the way that physical strength or mental intelligence is measurable. “I don’t think so,” she said. “As soon as you measure it, you want to quantify it, and that’s exactly contrary to the spirit of creativity” because it introduces a win-lose mentality.
So, if anyone can be creative, are there ways for people to increase their creativity? “One of the most important things in fostering creativity is boredom,” she explained. “In order for people to be creative, they need long periods of downtime to fiddle.”
The idea of increasing creativity by decreasing mental stimulation felt counterintuitive. But it also seemed pretty easy to test, because getting bored is utterly achievable. I decided to go for a walk without looking at my phone. I kept the phone in my pocket (I’m a mom, after all) and went for a “boring” walk along the bike path from Florence center to Look Park.
The first thing that struck me on my walk was that it was very difficult to get bored because there were so many birds tweeting their little hearts out. It was distracting, but also interesting. I wondered what kinds of birds they were. I managed to count 12 different songs before I gave up. Then I thought about an infographic I had seen the day before that stated that over a billion birds are killed by cats in the United States annually, which begs the question: Just how many birds are there, anyway? I reached for my phone to Google it and remembered NO PHONE just in time.
The birds kept singing, interrupting my boredom, so I thought about them some more. I remembered that birds are descended from dinosaurs, and I wondered why we always assume that dinosaurs roared like lions. What if they were all tweeting and whistling? From there, I had a lot of thoughts about dinosaurs. I noticed that every time someone greeted me or warned that they were passing on my left, the interruption would cause me to reach for my phone; it happened five times. But the funny thing was that my actual thoughts were much more interesting and entertaining than my phone would have been, anyway.
The experience of walking aimlessly, allowing myself to observe and reflect, reminded me of Baudelaire’s concept of the flâneur — a gentleman-artist who moves around town, mingling with the crowd in order to observe humanity. I realized how rarely I simply observe the world, allowing myself to form a thought about it. Perhaps this is where you get ideas, by not trying to “get” them at all. You simply sit quietly and keep a lookout. The way you would if you were watching for, you know, birds.
When I got home, I allowed myself to look up the number of birds in the U.S. The estimate is as high as 20 billion, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. I’m currently working on a novel, and one of my characters needs a hobby. I had toyed with the idea of quilting or perhaps stargazing. But now, the subject of birds struck me as so interesting that I decided this character would be an amateur bird nerd.
So, had allowing myself to “get bored” actually improved my creativity? Well, the outcome was strangely quantifiable: yes. I had actually come up with a usable idea for my novel. However, even if I hadn’t been able to use any of those ideas — or use them right away — the walk would still have been a success because my thoughts and ideas had definitely cast a wider net than usual. So perhaps I’ll have to add “Get Bored More Often” to my to-do list.
At least it’s achievable.
Lisa Papademetriou is a writer and the founder of Bookflow.pub, a tool designed to help writers improve motivation and organization.