Can creativity be jump-started? How do you infuse a creative project with new energy? If you’ve hit a wall and feel stuck, how do you get unstuck?
A couple of years ago, Florence graphic designer Carolyn Eckert kept getting asked these kinds of questions. Two young designers she was mentoring as part of her job at Storey Publishing in North Adams, and eight students in a photography and book arts class at Amherst College, wanted to know how to move their creative projects to the next level.
“I was helping my friend Justin (Kimball) with his class at Amherst College and everything sort of coalesced,” Eckert said.
On the roughly hour-and-a-half drive from the college back to work in North Adams, Eckert found herself pulling over to jot down responses to the questions she was being asked at both ends of the commute. Eckert’s mind was awhirl with often conflicting answers.
She scribbled her thoughts on Post-It notes and magazine insert cards and typed them into the notes app on her iPhone.
“Think like a minimalist,” Eckert might think one moment.
Then, “Think like a marathon runner. Think like a scientist. Try giving yourslf severe restrictions. Stop whatever you’re doing and do the opposite. Go to sleep.”
Eckert pitched her flurry of ideas, along with 50 sample pages, to her editors at Storey Publishing. The result is “Your Idea Starts Here: 77 Mind-Expanding Ways to Unleash Your Creativity.”
The book has had amazing success: a first printing of 15,000 released May 17 has already sold out and the book has gone into a second printing. About the size of a large postcard but as thick as an average novel, the book feels good in your hands. Eckert says the uncoated paper of the hardbound cover and inside pages was chosen to create a pleasing tactile experience.
“I wanted it to be personal,” Eckert says. “To feel intimate, holding it.”
And she wanted her book to appeal to all kinds of people facing creative challenges — which is all of us, really — so she packed the book with a wildly various array of visual images, quotes and anecdotes that complement and support her upbeat text.
In a nutshell, Eckert’s book is about thinking differently, a concept reinforced visually in the author photo on the inside back cover. Taken by Mars Vilaubi, the photo shows Eckert looking in the opposite direction of a prominent arrow stenciled onto the brick wall of a building at Mass MoCA, the contemporary art museum right next door to Storey Publishing.
“You could just be sitting here and all of a sudden observe something that you’ve never seen before,” Eckert says. “It’s all about looking a different way.”
Eckert divided her book into three sections: “Gather,” “Break,” and “Build.”
She’d originally thought each section would contain 25 suggestions but found that structure too confining. She ended up with 77 suggestions. She wanted the visuals in the book to expand on the text rather than merely illustrate it. Flipping through, you’ll see photos, schematic drawings, reproductions of artwork, a Rorschach test card, examples of beautiful data-input mistakes made by a neuroscientist at MIT . . .
For suggestion #46, “Shift Your Perspective,” Eckert turned a teacup and saucer upside down, an idea that came to her at the last minute during a photo shoot.
“And you might ask, ‘Why would you ever do that?’” Eckert says. Then answers, “Why not? It’s beautiful.
“I would get to each one and ask, ‘What do I want to look at?’” Eckert says. “I wanted science, I wanted art, I wanted math. Mainstream and totally offbeat. I would try to go wide and just type whole sentences into Google.”
Those Internet searches took her on winding journeys from article to article, “Down paths and down rabbit holes for hours,” Eckert says, with a laugh that shows how much she enjoyed it.
“I’ve had a very wiggly path,” Eckert says of her design career, “And I think that helped in fleshing this (book) out in so many directions.”
Eckert, a Rhode Island School of Design graduate, began her career designing letterpress books, and has carried elements of that classic aesthetic into her career designing magazines and books.
She says people have told her they’ve bought the book for 13-year-olds, “Because they like cool facts and they like looking at fun visuals. And they’ve bought it for high school students because they want them to learn to think differently early on. And they’ve also bought it for college students who sort of need a passion and might need to find their way. And for the self-confessed or self-professed uncreative, to show you it’s not secret language; it’s just little things that you can do.”
Even for people who already think of themselves as artists and have spent years cultivating creativity, Eckert’s book can provide jolts of recognition or new inspiration.
“This is all things they know already,” Eckert says, “but even I, sometimes, I’ll go walk around the block and see something black and I’ll think, ‘Black! I forgot all about black!’”
She laughs. “And so, they get to read about other artists’ inspirations, which is always fun.”
Where to find it: Look for Eckert’s book at World Eye Bookshop in Greenfield and Essentials in Northampton. Or go to: http://www.storey.com/books/your-idea-starts-here/
Trish Crapo is a writer and photographer who lives in Leyden. She is always looking for poets, writers, and artists to interview for her “Pioneer Valley Poets,” “Local Writer Spotlight,” and “ArtBeat” columns. She can be reached at tcrapo@mac.com