Dear teen friend, I am glad that last week’s column saw you boost up your confidence. At least now you know you are creative, but you don’t know where to go from here. Well, listen up.
The first half of creativity belongs to the right brain. Here you learn to open your inner eye to observe the ideas that are being churned up below the surface, and learn to take note of those ideas before they disappear. And disappear they do — in a fraction of a second. If we all had the capability of retaining whatever flashes past our inner eye, we would all become creative geniuses.
Know you have a fantastic unconscious (everyone does) that listens, responds and can instantly come to your rescue — but you need to get a good working relationship with it first. Consider your relationship with your creative unconscious as a friendship that can be nurtured into a bond of faith, so get started on that track today.
The second half of creativity belongs to the left brain. This is the clever side of you. Learn to use whatever creative idea you just received in conjunction with all you already know. That’s because pure creativity, by itself, doesn’t have much commercial value. I’m using the word “commercial” here deliberately, to drive home the point that unless you are able to present that idea in a form which people can appreciate, it’s not going to be much fun.
So learn the art of association. Take that pure idea and edit it with other ideas and create something which people can understand and enjoy.
As you keep doing this, after a while your mind will settle down into a special kind of rhythm, where you enjoy the whole process of discovering something unique and presenting it in a delightful manner. Know that rhythm to be your signature style. All creators have it — and it defines their art and their inner being.