The Creativity Pantry

There are few ways to excite and terrify an artist as much as presenting them with a blank canvas. The blank canvas implies possibility and potential, but also unconstrained decision. The space promises to bring any one vision to life at the cost of all others.

While I love starting new projects, I hate staring at blank pages and trying to conjure up ideas from scratch. Instead, I lean on a tool I like to call my Creativity Pantry. My Creativity Pantry stores notes that I take throughout my day, from ideas that I glean through content to ideas that I come up with through personal reflection. Keeping my Creativity Pantry full increases motivation to create while decreasing friction, helping to nudge me across the starting line when it comes to making new shit exist.

While you can use basically any note-taking mechanism for your own Creativity Pantry, I like to keep things simple and store my notes in either a notebook or in Apple notes so as to keep the friction between myself and my notes as low as physically possible.

Actually stocking the creative pantry happens in two steps for me:

1. Consumption:

The consumption period happens throughout my day in the form of tweets, podcasts, books, and videos. You should consume content that excites or educates you and ideally that mimics the kind of content or art that you want to create yourself. During this phase, you should take notes about anything that stands out as relevant, important, or useful. If you have a specific idea of something you want to create, ingestion might also take the form of more deliberate research.

2. Ideation and self-reflection:

While it can be helpful to proactively create space to ideate, ideation and self-reflection can happen passively with enough space. Ideation can happen at any time you take space away from others’ content so that you can let your own thoughts breathe. This can take the form of meditation, going for a walk, going to the gym, whatever it takes to allow the ideas from the content sink into your existing worldview while giving your own thoughts, opinions, and experiences to bubble up. Inevitably, you will either find ways to apply the content you consumed or generate ideas of your own to refute or support the content. Take notes on these thoughts too.

While taking notes is cool and all, the magic really happens when I sit down to start a new piece. Now that my Creative Pantry is stocked, I don’t have to sit down and write something from scratch but can instead just reach into the pantry and fish for whichever notes sound the most exciting, plop ‘em on the page, and start pulling on these threads a bit. Typically, this means answering some or all of the following questions about whatever notes i’m using as my starting point:

1. What does this idea mean?

2. Why is it interesting?

3. Where else have I seen this idea?

4. How can others apply this idea to their lives?

Once you expand on your notes in brain-dumpy fashion, you can proceed to chop them up, rearrange them, roll ‘em out, season them, bake them, fry them, whatever. Just get playful and see what you can cook up. You’ll start to develop taste over time. Knowing I have access to my Creative Pantry helps me cut down the Blank Page Scaries, which reduces the friction enough to overcome inertia and start to build momentum.