Today I was flashing back to a TV show idea that I’d gotten a few years back. It was about a single dad (I’m a dad) of a young girl, who has to get back into the workforce after years at home raising the kid (as I did), who in a bit of desperation for work gets a job at a liquor store (I’d just gotten a job at a liquor store — “Write what you know” doesn’t often work for me, but clearly here it was inspiration for A Thing).
Turns out, the idea went, that he and his manager are quietly attracted to each other, and as the episodes progress, their relationship grows and changes and has drawbacks and potential and complexities and promising developments, all while he adjusts to this offbeat collection of the store’s other staff members, and it was at about that point that I realized I had basically reframed and altered the location of the show Superstore.
Yeah. So. Putting a pin in that one for a bit.
Decades ago, I thought for a short while that exposing myself to creative content may risk the integrity of my own creative content. By which I mean, the more I read (for instance), the more I may rehash what I’d read, and thus what I made wouldn’t be as intrinsically of my own devising. That brief phase passed, thankfully, and I’ve long-since learned that quite the opposite is true, in a number of ways.
The more creativity of others you expose yourself to, the more inspired you’ll become. This takes on a lot of forms for me, but whether it’s visual art or TV or movies or music or books, it introduces me to something I hadn’t thought of before, which can get the creative juices flowing.
With fiction, I find that I’ll sometimes be inspired by a storyline (or characters or setting, etc.) but then it’ll take the story in a different direction than I’d thought it would. In which case, Hey, new idea: What if A, then B, then D instead?
I’ll sometimes get inspired by turns of phrase or unusual/unique wording. I once had an entire movie, front to back including characters and events, spontaneously pop into my head because of three words in a sentence that I read in a book I’d borrowed from a friend. All I had to do to write the screenplay was to type out everything that had already been completed in my head. (And wow, I’d take more of that any time.)
But one of the most important aspects of exposing myself to as much creative input as I can is that I then have an ever-increasing collection of concepts to compare my own ideas to in order to better gauge what’s already been done. I’ll put it to you: Which is better, to have come up with the dad-and-manager-meet-and-fall-for-each-other idea above and spent months, maybe years, developing it, only to have finally, maybe managed a pitch session with TV producers somewhere, which is where I’d finally hear for the first time that it’s too similar to Superstore… or to have already known Superstore from watching it and so been able to come to that conclusion myself, thereby allowing me to either change it where needed to make it a more distinct idea, or drop it entirely if that doesn’t work well?
Creativity primes the pump for creativity. That’s true whether it’s from your own creativity or the creativity of others, it all fuels more.
Exposing yourself to whatever creativity you can will give you more ideas to mull over and mash together and create new ideas from, once they’re filtered through your entirely unique experiences and opinions and voice. And if those ideas too closely resemble something that’s already been done, the regular exercising of your creative muscles can also help you change it until it’s something of your own. That can go on to inspire yourself all over again, or to inspire a world of other creatives.
Wins all around.