The Care and Feeding of Ideas: A Guide to Encouraging Creativity

Great ideas are not easy to cultivate. They need rich soil, attention, and encouragement to take root and grow. Jim Adam's classic, CONCEPTUAL BLOCKBUSTING, was a handbook to weeding your garden, to clearing your mind of rubbish that stifles creative thought. THE CARE & FEEDING OF IDEAS is its long-awaited sequel, a guide to creating a greenhouse environment in which ideas can thrive. "If you're serious about encouraging creativity, you need to understand the entire creative process-from concept to reality"-Adams. You need to understand thinking-the mystery and mechanics of creative thought. You need to understand doing-the actions you can take to increase your creativity. Only by becoming aware of how you conceptualize, and of those techniques which lead to better problem solving, can you begin to bring forth you very best ideas. Adams leads a tour through the unconscious mind, the brain and nervous system, and the storehouse of memory, and points out how they work (and conspire against us) when we tackle problems. He shows that bad problem-solving habits can be broken, that money and time are your muse's best friends, that creativity involves risk but the risk is worth it, and that the stereo you bought with your last bonus was not a luxury, but a necessary reward. He illustrates his arguments with ingenious games and exercises that will surprise you with what they reveal about your patterns of thought. Whether you're a midnight novelist or management consultant, a Sunday painter or city planner, this book can forever change the way you approach creative challenges.--- From the inside flap of the dust jacket.

Explains the creative process, looking at such areas as brain chemistry, memory, the senses, and personality and shows readers how to create the proper environment to nurture creativity.

A great resource for blocked screenwriters! I recommend it to all my seminar students!

This book is amazing in that it offers a great balance between practical techniques, whilst satisfying my curiousity for the underlying functioning of the mind. Well structured - you can read any of the chapters on their own and still get real value.