LIVE FAST, WRITE OFTEN.

How to be more curious (and how curiosity can inform your creativity).

Written by Cole Schafer

                   

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 Curiosity informs creativity.

In fact, I’d argue it’s nearly impossible to achieve the latter without possessing some degree of the former.

Nearly all great creatives have lived lives that support this sentiment.

David Bowie was a voracious reader of fiction.

So was Stephen King.

And, while there isn’t much information surrounding Ernest Hemingway’s and Charles Bukowski’s reading habits, it’s quite obvious the pair were considerably curious by the way in which they lived their lives.

Hemingway was a big game hunter, a fisherman, a world traveler, a medic and a wildly enthusiastic cook.

While Bukowski, on the other hand, practiced his curiosity in his ceaseless drinking and self-destruction and the countless legs he found himself intertwined in.

And, of course, I’d be remiss not to mention John Steinbeck, whose work I’ve been ripping through lately.

He put this idea into words beautifully in his book, Travel with Charley

*John Steinbeck is writing now*

“…I am not shy about admitting that I am an incorrigible Peeping Tom.

I have never passed an unshaded window without looking in, have never closed my ears to a conversation that was none of my business.

I can justify or even dignify this by protesting that in my trade I must know about people, but I suspect I am simply curious.”

*Cole Schafer just stole his pen back*

Like Steinbeck, I have line; a line I’m sure I absorbed from something I read (because like Bowie and King, I am voracious)…

em>It’s all material.”

It’s a line that serves dual purposes reminding me to:

1. Stay curious –– reading books, devouring conversations and mopping up life experiences like sourdough in tomato soup.

2. Stay optimistic –– because not only the good, but the bad and the very ugly will serve as valuable writing material down the road.

Let’s place a pin in that.

In closing, creativity is more or less this process of us finding metaphors and connections between two or more unrelated ideas or concepts or frameworks or philosophies or feelings or experiences. This requires a great deal of curiosity.

In this way, we creatives are like balls of putty rolling around, taking in and curating a lot of good, bad and ugly and becoming something new entirely.

So, if you want to be more creative… read more, converse more, live more. And, if that fails miserably, follow in Bukowski’s footsteps and hit the self-destruct button.

But, I digress.

By Cole Schafer.