Sometimes a lack of limitations on your art is stifling. Faced with an infinite number of possibilities, your brain refuses to make any decisions. Define down what you’re doing with a manifesto!

At its most base level, a manifesto is a written declaration of your principles and intentions. However, they can be a blast! Not only do you get to set forth what you believe without justifying it, you can also denounce everything you don’t like! You can use it focus your passion and fill yourself with a sense of purpose.

While you are writing it use the strongest possible language. Take a look at this bit from Manifesto of the Futurist Painters:

We will fight with all our might the fanatical, senseless and snobbish religion of the past, a religion encouraged by the vicious existence of museums. We rebel against that spineless worshipping of old canvases, old statues and old bric-a-brac, against everything which is filthy and worm-ridden and corroded by time. We consider the habitual contempt for everything which is young, new and burning with life to be unjust and even criminal.

We are sickened by the foul laziness of artists, who, ever since the sixteenth century, have endlessly exploited the glories of the ancient Romans.

It doesn’t mean you have to start your own artistic movement, you can use that kind of strong language whether you are knitting, styling hair or tracing your hand on a paper plate to make Thanksgiving turkeys.

Something like:

We violently reject the mass-produced Thanksgiving turkey tchotskies available at Hallmark stores. They exist as stagnant nothings without souls. At a time when thankfulness is supposed to be at the forefront of our very beings, instead we find ourselves faced with a tiny feathered tryptophan drenched disappointments. The answer is the power and cosmic beauty of a hand traced turkey! Is not the hand an avenue into the self? Is not coloring in that hand an expression of all the is good? Making a hand turkey is a celebration of thankfulness that will resound across the universe.

And so on…

Here are a couple more examples:

The Surrealist Manifesto

DADA Manifesto

If you need any help, just comment and I’ll be happy to contribute to your manifesto.

The word “obsession” has taken on taken on a negative spin in the last decade. It used to be that if you were obsessed with something it meant you were good at it and knew all about it. Well, drug companies and stalking laws have redefined being obsessed, to any degree, as abnormal.

Think about all the great artists in the world that were obsessed with something. Painters that painted the same subjects over and over again. Writers that dealt with the same situations or topics in everything they wrote. It’s funny, but it’s usually because of these obsessions that we enjoy the artist in the first place. It’s like a hook or a doorway into what they do.

To super-charge your creativity, take a topic you are interested in but haven’t studied and developed a short-term obsession. How short? That’s up to you. It could be a day, a week or a month. Read a book on it. Google up all the best websites on the topic. Talk to other people about it. No topic is too high or too low. If you like  Christopher Walken, use him. The possibilities are endless, cowboy poetry, unicorns or squirrel recipes, whatever you find yourself wanting to obsess on, do it!

When you sit down to create you won’t be short on ideas. In fact, the idea will be right in front of you. Make sure you create more than one thing based on your obsession or it really doesn’t qualify.

Eventually, you’ll get tired of your obsession. Just drop it. You can always go back to it. In the meantime, pick something else to be obsessed with.

Being obsessed frees you from having to worry about being “creative” in the sense that most people use the word. You don’t have to come up with a big idea or topic, you just use what is right in front of you.

I’m off to research the use of surgically implanted monkey glands used to keep rich people young in the 1920s.