A lot of what passes as creativity is just combining things that aren't normally combined. For example, my parents are in town this week, at the same time the iPad was launched, which made me think a lot about the physical form that products take. And because of the iPad launch, there's a lot of talk about the iPhone too. At 6:30 AM, all of those ideas combined in my head, somewhat automatically, and I drew a comic in which Dilbert invents a cell phone in the form factor of an old man's head. You'll see it on March 23rd.
Comic characters work best when they have well-known mental flaws. Dilbert's flaw is that he sees the world in terms of function while being somewhat oblivious to things such as beauty and social convention. To Dilbert, a phone that looks like an old man's head has no obvious downside. Once I had the idea of a phone that looked like an old man's head, I imagined how each of the Dilbert characters would react to it, and I laughed to myself when I thought that Dilbert wouldn't see anything wrong with the idea. Creativity is the combining of wrong things. Art is recognizing the physical sensation that the wrong combination gives you. In this case, my own physical response to the idea told me it was a keeper. Your mileage might vary for this particular comic, as is always the case, but if I keep to the system, I'll get you sooner or later.
Someone asked me in a recent comment on this blog if I come up with the titles for my posts before I write them. Usually I do. If I can't capture the essence of my idea in a few words, it probably isn't worth writing. A title is a good first test of an idea's worthiness. (And more broadly, anything that can't be described briefly is probably a bad idea.)
But I often change my working title after I write a post. For example, my recent post titled "Like a Night Watchman" was originally titled "Into the Well." My first take at describing what it feels like to be a writer involved a well metaphor. I lower myself into the well, deeper and deeper, until all outside stimulation is gone. That's the best description of what it actually feels like to shut out the world. But the night watchman metaphor was more visual and seemed friendlier. Falling into a well is scary. I thought it would distract from the point. A big part of writing is removing distractions.
