Creativity: Comes from many places

I recently read a post called "61 Online and Social Media Resources for Motivating People to Create" on Brainzooming's site. I won't rehash all of them here as you can read them for your self, but it did get me thinking about where I get creative thoughts from.

When I was younger, I was able to write a lot more creative thoughts and stories. As I made the choice to go into Public Relations I ended up following more of a path of news writing. Put in all the facts and leave the "fluff" to a minimum. Reporters don't want to read flowery language in press releases. So my creativity waned. This led to difficulties in a previous job where they determined after I started that they wanted more of a marketing style of writing (think catchy advertisements). I struggled to do so and in my focusing on the type of writing made errors in other areas that I had never had trouble with before.

So, fast forward a couple years to when I started working on my Master's degree. Several of my classes relied on storytelling as part of the projects. Thankfully we were able to submit drafts and I was able to obtain generous feedback from peers and instructors to help me learn to add the "fluff" in order to make writing more conversational.

Having the skills of both styles of writing has been and continues to be beneficial. But back to the idea of where creativity comes from. I have found that many of my ideas come when I am not sitting in front of the computer. Unfortunately it is typically when I am not in a position to write them down (driving to work, in the shower, as I am falling asleep). No matter how many times I have tried to remember a thought, phrase or idea to be able to write it down when I get paper and pen, I never get to it in time or remember bits and pieces but not enough to make it sound good.

Do you ever have this problem? What do you do to combat it? I have taken to using the voice record feature on my MP3 player to record while driving and keeping a pad of paper in my nightstand to record those evening thoughts. However, and wherever you get your creative thoughts, make sure to write them down. You never know where they might lead you.