Staying inside the Lines: Easy Breezy Creativity

I was really tired last night, like you’ll get. I’d had one long day of staying inside the lines. My opinion? It’s one of the best arrangements for getting really creative and it’s exhausting.
As long as you stay in side the lines, you can put a wealth of material to work in about nine million ways. I certainly didn’t invent the idea. Thank your local Age of Reason/Enlightenment Agents for that.

Here’s one little story of how it works:

I had an interview with a cool little company, but my online portfolio samples weren’t quite what they were looking for. So. I spent Thursday making a cd-rom of portfolio pieces (eventually, I’ll have to have ONE and leave it at that. Lol). It was an adventure in Super Fast Editing. A Flash stand alone cd-rom insists on some choices so that everything is in synch: the dimensions of your viewing screen, the play back speed. It all seems like it would be easy enough to change later, but it’s not. To fix it later needs a lot of time and a lot of adjustment of fiddly details and more patience than just about anyone I’ve ever met has.

Once you’ve set your boundaries, you either gnash some teeth or you think of it as a game. I’m soooo lucky, I guess, that I tend to do the latter.

Yesterday morning, I finished off the cd, whipped up a label and slapped that baby on (only to realize that it had mysteriously printed out backwards. How does that happen?!), and drove down the coast for a really long interview, drove back up the coat, edited and re-wrote a treatment for a client’s screenplay. It came in at 3 and I finished it at 4. Two pages. Total re-write. And it was really good. The kind of good that made us both sort of just stand there, admiring it. Ha!

He wanted to know how I’d managed to do it. It was an entirely different piece when I was through. I’d painted a picture, choosing ‘loaded’ words and editing out any distractions.

Essentially? I’d worked inside the lines.

Guidelines act as boundaries. Boundaries don’t have to PREVENT or repel ideas and their execution. In fact, they can actually permit ALL the stuff of the world, the wealth of material. A stray concept with no anchor might be kind of interesting, but give it a boundary and it gets a little more concentrated. Invisible vapors become … visible.

Yah. I think boundaries are really exciting.

Probably accounts for why I'll change channels from PBS Newshour for the Final Jeopardy question. Last night, the answer was in the category of Africa and was something like 'Both Spain and France attended this country's 50th anniversary of independence last year. ' All those super smart panelists got it wrong, but me me me me! I got it right: Morocco.

Here's how I figured. I spent a bit of time in Spain as a child, right before Franco died. Don't know Franco? Oooooh. Look him up. Any way, Franco launched his revolt to restore republican rule from Morocco. It's just across from the Rock of Gibraltar.

And then, I added France to the equation only because I know a few people from Morocco and the only language we had in common was French. (okay. My itsy bitsy bit of French).

The point is, Jeopardy offers boundaries that make all that otherwise kind of useless information valuable. And exciting to give up.

The trick with boundaries– and it’s a big one – is making sure you’ve got the material to use.