This book is for anyone looking to expand their thought process and tap into a more observant and creative self.
Pairs With: Chocolate Peanut Clusters – yes, from Fleet Farm!
Overview:
The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life is a practical guide for improving your creativity. Twyla Tharp takes you through her creative process and provides exercises to help you hone your own craft. Although Tharp’s background is in choreography, her concepts can be applied to any creative task.
The Box
Before Tharp dives into creating any project, she will gather materials that may be relevant to that project and put them in a box. It could be notebooks, CDs, tapes, newspaper clippings, etc. – anything that relates to the project and that may be helpful to reference when she starts creating. The box is the first step to making her ideas come to life and it gives the idea a home base.
My job is not related to the arts AT ALL. However, I applied this concept to my job by creating a special folder on my computer for any complex problem I was trying to solve. I wasn’t expecting it but creating a folder instantly excited me – I felt like I was well on my way to solving the problem.
Creating a box (or folder) helps organize the task and makes it feel less intimidating.
A Rut
Tharp also addresses creative ruts and shares her practices on how to get yourself out of them.
If you’re in a little rut, Tharp explains, you can get yourself out by changing your scenery, taking a walk (hello Stillness), talking to a friend, or by just calling it a day.
BUT if you’re in a big rut, then Tharp explains, what you really need is a new idea. To help spark new ideas, Tharp takes the readers through a creative exercise she use to do with college students. She would challenge the students to come up with 60 uses for a random object in 2 minutes. In her example, she recalled a time where the random object was a wooden stool.
Tharp points out that almost everyone lists the most practical uses at the beginning. However, by use 60 the students start thinking differently and more creatively. “The closer they get to the 60th idea, the more imaginative they become” (191).
Conclusion
Throughout The Creative Habit, Tharp provides many exercises to help nourish your creativity and challenge your normal thought patterns. If you want to work on expanding your thoughts and creativity – The Creative Habit is for you.
Let us know if you’ve read it! Do you have a different book on creativity you love?
