How to brainstorm ideas

When you do not have any ideas it can seem to be catastrophic, some people even get depressed by this. Children who get bored seem to have run out of ideas of what to do with their time, writers have writers block, salesmen run out of words.

The muse is a fickle companion, this has been the subject of poetry, movies and books. There is even a Star Trek episode that revolves around a people who need to inspire their leaders by telling a good and original story, an idea inspired straight from Sherazade, one of the oldest stories in the world.

Yet, coming up with ideas is nothing but being in the right frame of mind and being organized about it. Do you know how David Bowie does it? He explained it during an interview that was aired on many television stations. He starts writing down whatever comes through his mind at different times during any day. Then he takes a local newspaper or a magazine or both, usually picked at random and he starts cutting out snippets of phrases or sentences that catch his eye.

He then cuts out snippets from the material he wrote down. Then he takes all the snippets and he mixes them in a hat or any convenient tool that can be substituted for it and he starts neatly arranging the snippets one underneath the other.

If it doesn’t make any sense, he will change the order of the snippets untill a pattern starts emerging. Before too long, he will have the lyrics for a new song. By taking cue from the content of the text snippets in random order, he creates inspiration to fire his mind into creative thinking. He litterally creates order from chaos.

If that is not a great way to be creative, what is? This world renown artist even gave away the secret of his trade for all to see, literally formulating his recipe for creating new ideas to write lyrics while demonstrating it.