A Tale of Storms

In the full tradition of the troubled writer, here I am. Having found a way to focus and effectively write more (shouldn't I be celebrating this?), I now ask myself - and the heavens, if they are willing to listen - why on Earth my mind only works as it should with assisted guidance.

As someone who is "creative" for a living, I dread the inevitable days when inspiration is out of reach. A colleague asked me recently how do I come up with ideas. "I mean, yes, that's your job description", he said, "But how can you give people ideas on cue, within a given deadline?". "Like a trained dog", I joked - not much of a joke really, more enough stalling while I tried to grasp the words to answer his honest query.

The best I could come up with was a quick overview of the process of enabling. People - well, at least this human right here who counts as part of the people - thrive within constraints. So, step number 1 is to gather all the knowledge I can on requirements and limitations. What's this idea for? If you could say it is trying to solve a problem, how would you phrase such problem statement? Etc etc.

This is a personal method to find creativity under defined deadlines that in summary sticks fence posts to the ground; build your boundaries, but don't raise any walls (think Dogville, not The Cube). This is a possibilities space where ideas can play, and some ideas may roam free, dancing over the invisible foundations.After that, I brainstorm. With a blank page, a whiteboard, alone or with others. I don't know how to explain the way to come up with ideas, except that the more knowledge I have of my sources, the wells of lore and game mechanics to drink from, the more a brainstorm feels like a playground. The only rule is there are no rules. The twist is - most of the ideas that I land on are in fact born of previous sparks that came in brainstorming, or shower thoughts and bolts of inspiration. The idea delivered on a deadline is a molded mass of material gathered through days, if not weeks or months, of mentally exploring the boundaries I built.Granted, that's not a transcript of what I said to my colleague. To be fair, I mentioned gathering requirements, giving it a few days and some sticky notes, and BOOM. Idea. Sort of like magic, except not.

This pressure of delivering creativity within a given time window is, let's face it, a very good definition of capitalism in terms of human creativity. And the cruelty of it is that this is how creative work functions, period. You want money to buy shiny things? You get constraints, you get a time limit; do your worst. And we, the people, adapted to this reality.

Yet, I confess, I always have to force myself to imagine what I could do with free time, no boundaries, no pressure. My gut feeling is: nothing. In all honesty, I am not sure I even know how to come up with ideas in this completely free, Windows-wallpaper-green-valley land of possibilities. And that's scary, isn't it?

-Maíra

This week's recommendations:

• (Read) Nothing like learning about weird humans in history, like 17th century serial poisoner Giulia Tofana.

• (in all honesty most of my links come from things I see on Twitter, so since I'm away from there let's take this breather together and enjoy a FOMO-free week)