It’s always good to work at the top of your intelligence and do research when you need to, but doesn’t ignorance spur creativity?

Doesn’t some of your best stuff come from trying to figure things out?

Explore what you don’t know, what you don’t understand and don’t be afraid to make things up.

Emotional complexity is interesting. Not knowing how you feel about something before you start is riskier, but also potentially richer.

At its best, creative stuff creates a map to uncharted territory – an attempt to describe ignorance. Whether its finding a new solution to a problem at work or painting a masterpiece, it’s at once totally new but it also makes complete sense.

Most people are scared of ignorance. Think about old maps, whenever there was an unexplored area of the map it would be labelled “here be dragons.” They just projected all the fear and anger and everything terrifying projected onto the unknown. That’s how people treat the unexplored territories in their own heads. Dragons are lurking around every corner.

It’s the artists job to brave the dragons and try and describe what is actually there. Instead of fearing your own ignorance, get excited every time you find one of these areas. Move boldly into it and explore.

That doesn’t mean what you’ll produce is scary, a comic strip like Calvin and Hobbes and Peanuts (at its height) faced the unknown as squarely as Death of a Salesman or Hamlet.

Ignorance may be bliss to some, but to us, it’s just potential genius!

I remember the first time I heard about reversing an idea as a conscious act. I was young, maybe 9 or 10, and my dad had kept me up late to watch Monty Python during a pledge drive on our local PBS station. The sketch that had just played was Hell’s Grannies, in which a grandma bicycle gang terrorizes the young people of a small town. They cut to the studio and some of Python was there, the announcer said that was his favorite Monty Python sketch. John Cleese dismissed it as “a simple reversal sketch” not worthy of praise. And I’ve found that in general comedians consider those types of jokes to be hacky and base.

However, since then, I’ve found reversing ideas to be a useful habit that can actually invigorate an old tired cliché. In fact, the way journalists describe interesting stories is a reversal. Dog bites man is not an interesting story, but man bites dog is an interesting story. It is also used as a humorous tool in Zen koans.

As an example of how this can work successfully, two of my favorite Coen brothers’ movies are based on brilliant using the opposite of the usual main character in a hackneyed plot and genre. The Big Lebowski is a film noir style detective film that stars, instead of the traditional tough guy war vet turned shamus, a war protesting hippie. Fargo is a police procedural that with a main character that isn’t a rule breaking tough guy, but a pregnant female cop that solves the crime by the book.

The next time your stuck or it feels like your just repeating an old idea, try reversing the idea or an element of it.  Many times this will take you down a new path and increase your interest in it.

I posted before about making a magic object to help you with your creativity and work, but today I was thinking about all the magic in the objects already around us. Not every object has the same amount of magic, but you know the ones that are meaningful to you. Maybe it’s something an old friend gave you to remember them by or a trophy of a great success in your life or a picture of you with a famous person. You know the kinds of things I’m talking about. Generally they have a low dollar value, but you’d miss them the most if they were gone.

What if these things had real Harry-Potter-Lord -of-the-Rings magic powers? That handkerchief you took from your grandmother’s house the day she died. Would it have healing powers? Would it protect you from demons? Would it make cookies appear whenever you wanted one?

The connection between the magic of these items and their powers is the root of the energy of metaphor that powers everything you create. Their meaning is part of you and examining them is like being able to look at yourself from the outside.

So, find that cigar box of mementos you keep or dust off your nick knack shelf and go through them one by one. Hold them in your hand and ask yourself what spell it would cast if it could? What power does it contain?

This is the raw force of creativity at work, the discovery of connections between seemingly disconnected objects and yourself. You’ll get a better understanding of your needs and wants and emotional underpinnings.

What do you keep? What does it mean?

In fact, why limit it to what you own? Look at other objects in the world and ask what magic powers they would have. A pair of Houdini’s handcuffs or a handwritten page from one of Shakespeare’s plays or a piece of the Berlin wall?  It all has power inside and recognizing it will allow you to control it.

Plus it’s fun. So, even if you get nothing from it, you’ll have a good time. Oh, and they don’t really have magic powers, so don’t get any bright ideas that your grandfather’s walking cane can really make you invisible. It’s just that your grandfather made you feel invisible when you were around him because he was such a powerful man. You can’t walk around naked in public just because you’re holding a cane.