Random start: The best way to start the creative process

In creative work, the most difficult part is knowing where to start. 

Many are terrified writing the first line of song, or  painting the first stroke on a canvas. The inability to start immediately or even decide on a topic causes so much frustration.

My 7-year-old granddaughter used to come to my study room complaining “I don’t know what to paint!I don't have an inspiration.” After a few minutes, she would give up. So, I created for her an “Inspiration Generator” box. She only needed to blind-pick a card that would tell her what to paint. As of now, she has finished lots of impressive creations!

I would liken it to skydiving for the first time. If you stand on the plane’s door for too long, your mind would go back and forth between going ahead and chickening out. But if the instructor kicked you out of the plane as soon as you stood in the doorway, you’d be enjoying the exhilaration right away. Just skip the overthinking.

Roger Von Oech is the author of A Whack on the Side of the Head, my bible in creative thinking. Von Oech explained that the tribe’s men would often approach the shaman to tell them where to hunt. The shaman would in turn crumple a piece of sun-dried leather. The resulting creases would look like lines on a map. The shaman would point them to a spot where buffalos are supposed to be in great numbers. The secret: the shaman only pretended to be sure. It was a random guess. But because the hunters haven’t been in those spots before, they always found new hunting grounds! Now you know, all the shaman did was "shamanship!"

Fresh from college, I always joined play and scriptwriting competitions. I remember that I used to spend many days just deciding on what to write about. My process changed when, in 1981, I joined the first batch of Ricky Lee’s free screenwriting workshops. For our “entrance test,” Ricky asked us to read the day’s tabloid and get inspired by the headlines. The technique perked my brain up like a double espresso would!

I use the randomizer technique a lot when conducting team-building sessions. I ask people to introduce themselves or introduce other people jumpstarted by words they blind-pick from a box. Even people who don’t consider themselves creative are able to come up with surprising metaphors in a matter of seconds. For example, my loyal secretary randomly picked the word “sexy dancer.” She introduced herself this way, “I’m Del, sexy dancer. What I do is just work, nothing personal.”

I once conducted a songwriting workshop. In the exercise, I said we would write a  love song on-the-spot and our inspiration would be anywhere a tossed coin would land. The coin landed on a shoe. So we immediately came up with lines like “I’m happy to journey through life with you,” “I will go to the moon and back with you,” “this love is not just for kicks, etc.” Without this kind of process, a writer might need to fall in and out of love before being able to write a song.

Do you want to create something? Go! Don’t think too much.