how to be a more creative person?

I want to be creative. I love movies and anime and stuff but I wish I could create this stuff myself. Problem is I’m a massive consumer of otaku related media and art is not my strong suit. I want to write movie scripts or manga or scripts for VNs or maybe short stories. Problem is my sperg brain is too socially inept to write characters and my prose and dialogues are dull and predictably autistic. Usually, I end up writing soykafty fanfics or rewriting what someone else wrote and its a mess. It’s either unimaginative or total schizophrenic babble. So how do I get the creative juices flowing? How can I improve my general creativity overall? I’d like to try music production too but I have zero idea where to start with that. How do I improve my creativity? What should I do to practice and improve and learn new skills?

Well, this is a hard question, but I think this may help: Learn the basics, fundamentals, how things work and connect to each other. Then analyze the things you love based on what you learned, then try to apply on what you make (DON'T COPY FROM OTHERS, LEARN FROM THEM INSTEAD). Also, start small, yes it's going to an amateurish mess, but it's yours, you made this amateurish mess, so you should do it again and again. Training is important, not just repeating, but reviewing what you did and trying new things, see what works for you and what simply don't. If this sound vague, the question "How to be more creative" is just as vague, this is obviously more philosophycal in reality than technical, but maybe if you experience new things and build the balls to start apreciating all the avant garde from history, your horizons may expand, while they also get harder to reach.

If you really a hardcore consumer then you should know the market really well. All you have to do is look at trends and then invert them to be "innovative". For example everyone does "boy travels to another world" then the someone does " boy returns from another world" "demon/elf/... travels to our world" once you find a pattern its trivial to invert it. The better you know a field the easier it should be to stop untapped niches. the pen&paper model is also solid - create characters with traits and you only have to consider how they would react given a profile within a situation. Much easier than trying to reverse engineer a specific goal situation from blank characters.

Work on visualization skills. See an object, close your eyes and keep the image in your mind. Start with simple objects then more complex ones. Then in your mind imagine two objects combined.

>>83749 Hi Lainon, I've had the same type of concern for a long while now. When I was first getting into programming, I even felt lame copying and modifying code from the internet because it was not 100% my original conception. An okay thing when it comes to the big stuff, but I was worried about small stuff. I did not have the sense of scale, effort and uniqueness required to tell when something was an accomplishment or just boilerplate. Now I am interested in getting into music, and what I plan to do is to start by making music that is trite, but good enough that you can listen to it. Write a few practice songs like this, improving but not trying to be original. I'll use chords that sound good. I'll try out simple genres that just work like phonk. Once I get some basic competency, I'll have the perspective and span of experience to understand the bounds of creative expression in the medium. Then, I'll just wander around in that musical space and try to find parts that are underappreciated.

Garbage in garbage out (just kidding sort of). If you want to write better characters you may need to speak to more people around you, you might need to reframe the things that scare you about people or push you away from them as something to pay close attention to. Find someone youd normally have no interest talking to, just listen. Its hard to be creative when things are stagnant, and avoiding things out of fear or because you feel you are inept is a good way to stagnate. Force your body like a golem into the world even if you commit some grave social sin in the process, I dont want to feed into the trope that good art comes from suffering or something; but it does come from both the highs and lows of experiencing the world around you. If you could say people have some kind of inspiration drive it comes from that, this cauldron of interplay of negative and positive experiences. Sometimes for awhile its mostly negative, maybe your stories and worlds seem a bit dark because of the pain others cause you due to not being super social. Thats okay, thats true for a lot of people who write and draw or whatever, but you arent collecting new material for your internal world unless you go out there. There also is little hermit writers and artists, although I think most had some period of exploration before locking themselves away. But in any case, id reccomend broadening the media you watch and consume. I also consume a lot of otaku related media and I love it, id much rather watch an anime than a movie. But theres an issue in that otaku related media sphere of hermit artists influencing hermit artists and of manga tropes deriving from manga tropes of manga tropes, etc. So all the time I still watch movies from elsewhere, shows from elsewhere, and recently ive started reading books again. Whether you lock yourself away or not you need to regularly go beyond whats comfortable, ideally in a healthy sustained way, to keep creativity flowing. Maybe dont literally do what I said and force yourself into a social situation so uncomfortable you social suicide and are too traumitized to ever go out again, I was exaggerating. But you need new experiences in the world, of different kinds of media, of whatever you can find, and then to varying degrees these new experiences will fuel you. Sometimes something happens in my life and I can draw for months, other times I end up taking classes or something because I can tell ive overprocessed whatever has been going on up to this point and need a change of pace to keep drawing and keep it creative and fun. Sometimes il decide to watch a movie or listen to an album a friend reccomended that I previously had no intention or interest in watching. one final thing that I notice with people who do fall into these schizobabble type fanfic sort of things is theres a desire to tell their whole internal world at once. You dont have to do that, when you invite someone into your home for the first time you dont immediately let them go through all your drawers and use your kitchen and eat your food. They form ideas about you and get insight into you just from a look around, from how you rearranged the furniture since their last visit, new posters youve put up on the wall. We dont need to have them dig through our closet to feel seen.

>>83749 best way is to find a hobby that interests you, I am not the greatest with talking about this stuff, but just find stuff, I guess.

i have felt what you felt. before. your only step to take is to sit down and attempt. otherwise you will sit in dissatisfaction. you are scared of failing so you never try. accept you are going to fail by trying. go and try. protection of ego wont get you anywhere

>>83749 I think the secret is to be a very keen observer of what is, and then to ask yourself: what if? Do not limit your experiences and observations to only one type of thing or people. Let yourself play; don't try so hard. Contrary to popular belief, nothing is ever a straight line; everything is a circle in the end.

>>83750 Doesn’t learning from others mean copying them? If I can’t draw a straight line someone has to show me how to do it. That’s copying. >>83754 Right but I feel every idea I get has been tried already, probably because it’s intuitive to make new spins of old tropes and structures. I also suck at writing character dialogues. I’m a socially inept autistic and every dialogue is just dull and flat. So even if I have an interesting concept for a story to play with I can’t write actual character conversations that come off as wooden and soulless. >>83766 Thanks for the advice lain. I try to observe normal people out in the world but they just seem so alien to me. I can’t understand them at all. Their small talk and the stuff they do is just incomprehensible and there are a lot of signals I’m not picking up and go over my head. I guess I could write characters who are inept and alienated from the world or people who’ve basically been isekai’d into another world they don’t understand but this gets dry quick. >>83771 Should I try out a bunch of stuff and see how I feel before choosing one or another thing to focus on?

>>83786 There is two kinds of dialogue. Just ordinary dialogue and heightened dialogue. The later is the characters as less realistic but more interesting, witty and funny. You can combine these technically where some characters are just dull chatter and others are more profound or just clever sounding. You could look up information on body language and micro expressions even if it is somewhat full of some bullshit, remember to add cultural different body language specific to a character if they have a different background to make them more believable to people who are like them.

>>83749 >Two men meet eachother in the street before the illustruous Carnegie Hall. One of them is a man in his 20's and an aspiring musician. The other, a pensioner who has seen the world and now spends most of his time wandering the streets of New York City. The two men strike up conversation and very soon they are talking about the violin that the younger man is carrying. The younger man, full of ambition, tells of his dream to perform in the best venues and on the greatest stages, one of them being Carnegie Hall. He asks the older man the following "How do I get into Carnegie Hall", to which the older man replies "Simple! Practice, Practice, Practice!" -- Anyone who's ever been good at anything, firstly was very bad at it and only got better at it by practicing _a lot_, and I do mean _A LOT_. Estimates are that it takes about 10.000 hours of practice to master an instrument. This goes for anything that someones wants to be good at (coding, soccer, writing, playing etc.). So if you ask how to get better at being creative? Do the thing you want to get better at, and do it .. a lot. Now specifically for the questions you asked: >So how do I get the creative juices flowing? Sometimes there's the spark, but most of the times the spark comes from working at it. >How can I improve my general creativity overall? Practice, practice, practice! >I’d like to try music production too but I have zero idea where to start with that. With real instruments or using software? With software there's many DAW's you can use. For me, with music production in the beginning I didn't know what I was doing, and only after .. 500 hours of messing around did I finally get somewhere. It took a whole lot more (unironically somewhere around the 7 / 8 thousand hour mark) to finally get it to a point where I was satisfied with the output

Mark Twain famously practiced the state of hypnagogia to get his creativity flowing. Supposedly, he'd sit on a chair and hold a metal spoon in his hand, and once he began to doze off the spoon would fall and keep him awake. By doing this over and over he could stay in a dream-like state of loose associations. I do an analogue of this with meditation, personally.

>>83786 Its okay if people seem alien, I actually think a solid handful of artists and directors and stuff kind of see people as alien. What comes to mind is the small talk that goes on in a show like twin peaks where the nature of the conversation can be something totally normal but everything is being talked about in such an odd way with such odd pacing it becomes just weirdly fascinating. It borders on feeling unintentional like as if this is just how people having small talk appears to david lynch.

>>83749 I am also too autistic for character writing. My wife is too ADHD and people-focused to write coherent plots. So we collaborate, where I do all the structural stuff and big ideas, and she fleshes out the character dynamics, dialogue, body language, aesthetics, etc.

>>83787 I’m struggling to write the dull chatter very well. I suck at small talk so writing it is like kicking dead whales down the beach too. >>83792 I’lll try this. Just need to figure out a good technique for getting into that state. >>83793 I guess if I write from the perspective of weird and alien characters that could be a work around.

>>83791 >How do I get into Carnegie Hall Your version of the joke is mangled by the extra context and you've subtly screwed up the wording of the question. The typical telling of the joke is just, "a man is lost on the way to watch a concert at Carnegie Hall, so he stops a local and asks, 'how do I get to Carnegie Hall?' The local replies, 'practice, practice, practice!'" The joke is that the man is asking for directions, not career advice, so there's a recontextualization of the question and a subversion of expectation when the response is "practice" instead of "just keeping walking down 57th street, you'll see it" (although as ubiquitous as that joke is now, replacing the punchline with sincere directions could be funny, but I digress) When you changed the context to a young musician asking how to get *into* Carnegie Hall, you turned it into a story of a guy asking for career advice and getting it and lost the foundation of the original joke.

>>83879 A young man is sitting on a bench practicing his violin when an old man walks by. The young man asks him in passing, "How do I get to Carnegie Hall?," to which the old man replies, "Just keep walking down 57th Street. You'll see it."

>>83879 It was never intended to be told as a joke, just a story in order to get the poster I replied to understand that in order to be good at something, you have to practice at it. And yes, I took the Carnegie Hall story, which I evidently misremembered. >>83885 How do I get to the Apollo?

I've had this kind of feeling since I was a kid. An innate habit to look at media and desire something like that made by myself. I think I was a pretty creative kid, but I know that one outside influence has fed me more ideas and concepts than anything else: music. I was also a weird otaku kid, and I loved vocaloid songs. They always had some sort of story or feeling that the character tried to convey. Listening to the music made me vividly imagine characters singing these lyrics, and therefore new ideas would come flowing in. The whole visions while listening might just be an autist thing but I'd reccomend it if you like listening to music, I've got some pretty complex characters and fairly interesting plots out of it.

How to write, how to draw, how to cartoon, how to animate, how to dev a game, how to create music, these are all actual literary genres and also the subject of innumerable how to videos going back to the VHS age into Youtube, and often actual scholastic courses. The real issue is that you think that there is something stopping you. There isn't. The only thing stopping you is experience, but if you won't take the first step and produce your cringey sophomore undergraduate outsider juvenilia like the rest of us have, you will never accrue experience. The world is full of never-was's, people who never started. And every productive artist is swamped with them, begging and begging for the secret to creativity. THERE ISN'T ONE. Only productivity, everything else comes with practice. TL;DR: Just do it. It's going to suck until it doesn't, do it anyway.

typically people say that god created the world out of love. i think that is it. the answer. you can only create when you love something more you can love something more or better you can create. i think this is the reason why we have so many anime girls and why americans suck at anything artistic.

You have to realize that most of everything - these man-made physical structures you see in a city and media like music or movies along the lines all were once a thought (or vision/disclosure in some cases). Now with that in mind the core essential key in creativity is self-exploration. If you're consuming works of others and taking note what aligned or "spoke" with you the most on that work (think of it as like a language) sometimes trying to dissect the "grammar/syntax" of those works - that is good. Today most of people just do mindless media consumption and get controlled by the "media" due to dark patterns and algorithm-revenue "attention" farming practices which I can't blame them for (as future will get worse with more interactive and higher depth media). Now there's many ways to do self-exploration and hone this key skill - one (1) is through writing your thoughts down (/hum/ is a good one but practice writing essays or just your thought or opinion - your very own so to be original). Some look within their subconscious mind, in fact many of important discoveries came up to them through dreams (2). Others may seek the external, this is more what you'd call the inspirare or "to breathe" (in literal sense like air) (3) this you can achieve through nature meditation - most of the sacred texts all of them secluded in some place nature and then started getting "ideas" or disclosure, most naturist tribes found cure to certain diseases and illnesses through "speaking with nature" they claim the plant told them so. So in summary, write your thoughts, keep a dream journal, meditate in nature. All these just hones the skill or the foundation to be creative but being creative also requires the execution of work (this includes like I said before the "syntax" or the language, you try and try until you can speak it fluently - in similar concept, improv jazz, freestyle rap, breaking <and many other disciplines> is almost like language). Understand that it is like a language, as what you create will speak to others (as I've said before seek what media "spoke" to you as this is an area of interest which is what will make up your Creative Style). The more you indulge media consumption the less you will be creative. I have the habit of avoiding media when I start to feel like "I've become less creative lately". You see I do create new music 2-8 times a week, I keep a lot of notes with ideas on games, novel plots, apps features - most of these come up to me at random sometimes the music part I take from dreams but I noticed that when I expose myself to mundane labor (lack of freedom) or take too much media (like watching a lot of shows) I end up breaking my creative streak. So that said today's hyper-stimulated era of children will be less creative than the previous generation which isn't even that creative (their actions even unoriginal dictated by cultural or collective trends on platforms like tiktok or whatever app they consume). I noticed a lot of my niece/nephews all fall for similar pitfalls even though they're lucky that they grew up with all these convenient devices and the age of internet - it has become their ruin (so if you're say like Gen Z+ then you should tone down on your media-overload as it will fatigue your creativeness). Other key points: originality and style == focus on the balance between originality and your own (creative) style (based on things you liked e.g, genre or favorite works/shows) syntax and patterns == are essential and may counter the former but it's what we call "cookie-cutter" sometimes there's no need to reinvent the wheel. say Isekai works well, it's unoriginal but it works, architecture and engineering most of these have core principles that don't really challenge norms. experimentation and exploration == try looking for something "novel" and break the limits. look for hidden variables, missing pieces, untrodden path. observation == this part is the most important, have the discerning eye when watching or listening or reading or etc. some disciplines can only be taught by observation and some of these techniques are only passed through the right observer. they do that a lot in drawn media. it's like unspoken rules or untaught techniques. Also, not all skills are creative. most Skills are something you develop through muscle memory, discipline, and execution. Creativity is another discipline though not very different from above it is more focused on the process and how the output fares (either a product, idea, or a solution - mostly having originality or parts of it being unique/twisted). You can have the "skill" qualification but not the creativity (e.g, people who play instruments but cannot create any piece ever)

try doing things actively with other people, its more of a unison rather than completely aloness

studying neuroscience and formulating drugs to boost creativity

I frankly don't think you can be more creative, but you can find more ideas to explore and combine by being curious and increasing your knowledge and cultural horizon. You also are too passive to be able to produce anything. You "consume" as you say, you're more like a pig right now. You need to distanciate yourself from this, and once you stand there you can begin to enjoy the quietness and let your mind roam free. One aspect of creativity often stems from odd observations and rather inocuous questions at first but which can quickly branch out into many other directions once fully explored. And again, read more. You can even read totally random material and other people's opinions, sometimes this will trigger some new train of thought. Pictures help a lot. Not full videos, mere pictures.

>>83966 >typically people say that god created the world out of love. Out of love for what though? >i think that is it. the answer. you can only create when you love something more you can love something more or better you can create. There is definitely a truth here in that you need to nurture some form of positive mindset, an excitement of some sort over even the silliest of ideas to begin to have your brain's cogs get into motion.

>>85143 >Out of love for what though? Himself, of course lmao: the universe's biggest narcissist wanting to get off on autoerotic self-satisfaction of himself.