Welcome to this weeks installation of Fred&Dan Blog. Coming at you live from Fred and Dan, we’re so excited to start your weekend off with some creative sprinkles.

Dan, how do you spark your creativity?

At times when I'm stuck in a creative rut, it feels like I've never been creative once in my life (even though that is undeniably false). Sometimes, as a writer, you can't necessarily wait for the bolt of creativity to strike you - if you have a deadline or pages due you just have to rely on your instincts and muscle memory to churn out something. But when I do want to supercharge my writing I turn to other creative pursuits to get there. My current favorite is collaging. I have a plethora of film photos, magazine cut outs, stickers, and other ephemera that have been sitting around on my desk. Now to get in a creative mood, I'll collage these together in a journal. It's a great way for me to stop thinking about what I have to do and instead focus on what's in front of me and how to match these things together to create an image. I keep it incredibly low stakes for myself, it's only for me in my journal and I usually surround these images with a normal journal entry. Sparking creativity is going to look different for everyone, but sometimes switching gears and doing a different creative activity without any pressure is just what I need to unlock the writing part of my brain. 

And Fred, how do you spark your creativity?

Believe it or not I decided to go to college and pretty much major in creativity, I know, a great way to spend my money. But all jokes aside, I loved majoring in Theatre because one of the many wonderful things I learned was to think different creatively. I learned how to conjure up creativity at the drop of a hat, and to see it as one of the most useful tools in my arsenal when going through life. Creativity has served me in so many ways. It continually feels like a well I pull from that only goes deeper the more I cultivate it. My shortcut to sparking creativity for myself is simple: talking it out. When I want to do something creative I’ve found that if I can get to the root of “why it is important to me” and/or “what feeling am I trying to emote/evoke,” I open the flood gates. I find a safe person who allows me to be myself, no judgment, and I bounce ideas off them. When I don’t have someone to physically talk to, I talk it out by making a mood board with picture or words. It’s so fun because through my writing or pictures I talk about it as if it’s already happened and my creativity takes the wheel showing me what the end result will curate.

Creativity is not just for the artist, it’s for anyone looking to be the change they want to see, to see behind closed doors, and all those other really inspirational quotes about changing your life. Truth be told, to me, creativity is the little bit of magic crackling in the air all around just waiting for you to see it so it can flip your perspective of the world around you. 

This is just how Fred&Dan spark their creativity so we’d like to know:

How do you spark your creativity?