Keep Your Inspirations – Collect What Inspires You and Keep it Safe. Seedbops are fleeting, capture them, plant them, then fertilize them.
Seedbops arrive unexpectedly. They are sudden insights, creative blasts, and sparks of innovation. You won’t know the source or cause. They are mysterious. When they arrive, you have a sense of knowing this is it; you are on to something.
• You see something that says; there is something for you here.
• Someone says something that creates sparks in your brain.
• You read something in a book you want to imprint on your life.
• You snap a photo or see an image that holds your interest.
• You know, something great just popped into your brain.
Acknowledge it and write it down! Then put those notes, photos, objects, and whatever else you can collect that inspires something in you in an organized system.
Tip: When they come to me while I’m driving, I keep my iPhone notes open and dictate.
Twyla Tharp puts her project inspirations in inexpensive cardboard file boxes – one box for each idea. “I fill it up with every item that went into the making of the dance. This means notebooks, news clippings, CDs, videotapes of me working alone in my studio, videos of dancers rehearsing, books and photographs, and pieces of art that may have inspired me.” Beethoven kept a complicated system of notebooks.1
I follow artists and museums I love on Instagram and save every image that inspires me. Then I can look at my images, and creative sparks fly. In my day job, I keep subject notebooks of research, articles, and news clips to use when I need to tackle a problem in that particular area.
Tharp uses the no-nonsense approach of assigning a box to every project. Into the box, she tosses notes, videos, theater programs, books, magazine cuttings, physical objects, and anything else that has been a source of inspiration. “this box makes me feel connected to the project. It is my soil. Most important, though, the box means I never have to worry about forgetting. One of the biggest fears for a creative person is that some brilliant idea will get lost because you didn’t write it down and put it in a safe place. I don’t worry about that because I know where to find it. It’s all in a box.”
Think about what inspires you and how you can best capture it and store it for future use. Our minds have to take in a lot just with daily life. Keeping those files in whatever way works best for you is a valuable tool to bring that fresh inspiration back into the process.2
Don’t stop at the saving inspiration stage. You must take out those memories and let them inspire you into a strategy to bring your inspiration into the world and make something real.
“Above all, learn to respect your box’s strange and disorderly ways. As a repository of half-baked inspirations and unformed aides, the box can seem to be a haphazard tool while you’re filling it. But when you want to go back and make sense of your path, every step can be found, and the order merges, if only in hindsight. Your box is proof that you have prepared well.”3
Photo by Sindre Aalberg on Unsplash
1, 2 & 3 Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It For Life
