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Content creation seems simple, but if you've tried creating content, you know that it requires a lot of mental energy and discipline to produce high-quality videos, text, and posts. While many creators are willing to execute, they don't seem to have many fresh ideas. As a result, most creators simply hop on trends and emulate other creators. If you don't want to copy content, you must ignite your creative mind.
Putting limits around your premises and consuming a broad range of content can help you come up with fresh ideas because of subconscious connections and problem-solving. As a content producer, you should keep an idea journal to record spontaneous and intentionally generated ideas.
In this article, you will discover the methods to Ignite Your Creative Mind for Producing Engaging Content. You will also discover our guide to creativity towards the end. But first, let's get started with the round-up of the top 10 creativity-inducing tactics for content creators:
Consume Content In Other Media
Create "What If" Scenarios
Put Yourself In Someone Else's Shoes
Watch Something That Makes You Angry
Look Back At The Classics
Create An Anchor For Your Ideas
Force Yourself To Write 20 Ideas
Look At Content Requests
Capture Your Experiences
Take An Anecdote Or Study And Use It In An Unconventional Way.
Consume Content In Other Media
One way to boost your creativity for producing content is to consume content that isn't in the media in which you work. To create paintings, you might want to read books. To write books, you might want to listen to music. By consuming content from a different media, you force yourself not to plagiarize. At the same time, you open yourself up to the muse.
When you have decided that you need ideas for fresh content, your brain starts working on soliciting and curating them. This can lead to unintentional plagiarism. Comedians often report a phenomenon where they "come up" with jokes they have previously heard but have forgotten.
You don't want your video ideas coming directly from videos you've watched and forgotten. Similarly, you don't want your photography ideas coming from photos you have viewed and forgotten.
Consuming different types of content than the kind you produce protects you from unintentional plagiarism while boosting your creativity. Moreover, changing media can force you to be creative and adapt content. Commentary and reactions are common content types for cross-media adaptations.
Create "What If" Scenarios
It is impossible to create "what if" questions without producing creative answers. The more "out there" your question, the higher the likelihood of a genuinely creative answer. If you are an audio content creator, you could start with a "what if" scenario like, "what if the president was autotuned?" From Epic Rap Battles of History to Autotune the News, multiple channels have sprung up from such premises.
The fresher your "what if" scenario, the more unique your content. Push yourself to come up with unique premises. Let's look at a few popular series and their respective content premises.
| Series | Premise |
|---|---|
| Pitch Meeting | What if movie pitch meetings were self-aware? |
| Honest Trailers | What if trailer producers were brutally honest? |
| Kids React | What if standard reaction channels were operated by kids? |
| Epic Rap Battles of History | What if historical figures had rap battles? |
| Lip Sync Battle | What if celebrities faced off while lip-syncing? |
| Hot Ones | What if celebrities were interviewed while eating spicy chicken wings? |
| Sneaker Shopping | What if celebrities were documented shopping for sneakers? |
Put Yourself In Someone Else's Shoes
One way to come up with new content ideas is to think from someone else's perspective. For instance, you can ponder how Hemingway would react to the political landscape of 2016. Then, you can create a video with the same title, but you don't need to be on the nose with your premise.
Thinking about Shakespeare's reaction to Artificial Intelligence might jump-start your creative process. Your final content idea might not feature Shakespeare or artificial intelligence. But the off-beat nature of your starting point ensures that the final idea is unique.
This method of igniting your creative mind is very important for high-volume content creators. Creators who produce the same kind of content over and over tend to produce a creative muscle memory. Their creative instincts go back to the same ideas, and their body of work starts to look repetitive.
Watch Something That Makes You Angry
If pushing yourself to think from an alternative perspective doesn't get your creative mind in overdrive, then try consuming content that makes you angry. Where there is anger, there is a burning willingness to react. Don't go on a live stream while you're mad at a specific piece of content, though. The content you produce in disagreement with pre-existing content must be polished.
Some people might be angry at capitalism, while others might be angry at communism. Some dislike modern rap, while others dislike old-school rap fans' disdain for modern vibe music. If these topics don't draw your attention, then think about world hunger, the energy crisis, and major wars.
You will find something to be angry about, and you might come up with solution-based content or an entertaining rant. Just make sure to polish the final cut so that it aligns with your brand.
Look Back At The Classics
Not everyone is okay with using anger as their content, creating fuel. Fortunately, emotions like nostalgia and love can also be used to create content. Looking back at the classics in any media can inspire one's desire to create. The definition of a classic is important in this context.
A classic is a timeless piece of content that one can always go back to. It is simultaneously the standard of excellence in a genre as well as a recognizable standout of its time period. In this context, you must approach the content that you consider to be classic. Watch movies that you don't mind watching over and over. Read books that you love to go back to.
Consuming content you love will make you think about creating content that you love. A single thread from the content you consume can inspire an entirely independent idea. So consume content with an open mind and give yourself the challenge to derive at least five ideas from a classic that you enjoy revisiting.
Create An Anchor For Your Ideas
A much less immediate way to ignite your creative mind is to set an anchor for your creative moments. As a content creator, you know the rush that comes from stumbling on a fresh idea. Whenever you have a promising idea, you feel a sense of achievement and excitement. What do you do after that?
Most people either jot down their ideas in a notepad or on their smartphones. This is a wasted opportunity because one can create a physiological anchor during creative periods to ignite creativity on command. If you jump up and down every time you get an idea, you can start inducing ideas by jumping up and down.
This is called NLP anchoring and works just like Pavlovian conditioning. Pavlov figured out that by ringing a bell every time he fed his dogs, he could anchor their appetite to the sound of his bell. As he hypothesized, the dogs started salivating upon hearing the bell, even in the absence of food. Dr. Milton Erickson learned that such conditioning was possible in humans as well.
Whenever you are feeling creative, you can set anchors. Later, you can trigger the same anchors to induce a creative state. Music, coffee, and even a specific posture can be associated with one's creative high. Whatever anchor you associate with your creative period must not be used arbitrarily. If you listen to specific music when you're in your creative zone, you should make it exclusive to your creative time.
Initially, you should listen to it only when you're feeling creative. Once the trigger is firmly set, you can try playing the music and pay attention to how your ideas flow. You will notice a significant improvement in your general creativity.
Force Yourself To Write 20 Ideas
Feeling creative and jotting down ideas is a generally positive experience, but most professionally creative people do not wait until they are feeling creative to create. Instead, they let creativity be the byproduct of discipline. Force yourself to write down 20 ideas regardless of how creative or blank you feel. The fact that you're aiming to have 20 ideas will push your brain to come up with them.
Why 20, though? Because your initial ideas will not be good. They will be filler ideas that your mind presents without working out your creative muscle. But once you go through a few ideas, you start coming across genuinely creative ones. For some people, it takes 20 forced ideas, and for others, it takes 5 to get to fresh ones.
Look At Content Requests
The reason forcing yourself to be creative leads to creative output is that the human brain is a machine. Because your brain comes up with solutions for the problems you focus on, you can start seeking out problems to come up with creative solutions.
One way to not just have great content ideas but also to produce content that people actually want is to start browsing content requests. Even if you don't have people requesting specific content from you, you can source requests from other channels. By looking at the comments that people leave under other creators' posts, you can have an idea regarding the kind of content that is in demand.
After you've jotted down a few requests, you should make it a point to write an original idea next to each one. For instance, you might find a comment requesting MrBeast for a Ferrari giveaway. You wouldn't create a piece giving away a Ferrari, though. But by noting down the request, you give yourself the task of coming up with a relevant yet doable idea. You might then come to the conclusion that the closest thing you can do is a Ferrari giveaway prank.
Capture Your Experiences
If you prank your friends with a fake giveaway, they will have a rollercoaster of an experience. And if they even recall it in a talking-head format, it would be entertaining. Humans are wired to consume stories and have been doing so since the days of early hunter-gatherer societies. By recalling your experience in an entertaining manner, you can produce interesting content.
In the conveyed experience genre, content ideas consist of choosing experiences to talk about. But if you convey your perspective on different issues, then your content ideas revolve around the issue you want to talk about. To expand your library of lived experience content, you need to live an interesting life. More importantly, you need to find something interesting in the life you already live.
Take An Anecdote Or Study And Use It In An Unconventional Way
Creativity is the result of thinking outside the box. So, when you pick something that's inside the box and force yourself to approach it unconventionally, you can have hypercreative ideas. Let's take the standard anecdote of a husband looking at his newborn and suspecting that his wife cheated.
There are stories like that all over the internet. But if you force yourself to make an unconventional premise out of it, you might create a setup where the wife gives birth and realizes that her husband cheated on her.
How can you possibly connect the birth to a father's unfaithfulness? It is not as inside the box as connecting it to a mother's unfaithfulness. By creating a setup that doesn't have a conventional answer, you work out your creative muscle.
You can do the same with a study. Take a paper documenting the glaciers warming up. Force yourself to use it to prove that smoking is bad. When you're in a position where logic fails, you have no choice but to be creative. Moreover, the more tied you are to a specific problem, the more creative you become. But if you simply "consider" ideas and pass on them, you will not come up with a unique or admirable one.
Creativity And Content Creation: A Complete Guide
Having gone through the 10 methods to ignite your creative mind, let's go over what makes them work. In this section, you will find out more about how professional creatives come up with brilliant ideas and how you can ensure that you have an evergreen library of creative ideas on the go.
How Creative Ideas Come About
Creative ideas come about when the conscious and the subconscious mind align on a solution. They come as a result of consumption, connection, and problem-solving. For content creators, the primary question is: "What content should I create?" And trying to solve this problem with ideas isn't a very good idea.
Because there are millions of possible pieces of content one can create, the question doesn't inspire a unique idea. Creativity becomes potent when faced with limits. Think about lifting a glass of water. You probably envisioned lifting one with your hand. But add the limitation of not touching the glass, and you're in the right spot to have a creative answer. How can you lift a glass of water without you or anyone touching it?
Whatever answer you come up with for that question will be more creative than lifting the glass with your hands. Limits ensure creativity. And by focusing on unconventional premises, you can make yourself more creative.
Idea Log And Idea Hour
There are two major practices that most creative people engage in. Firstly, they have a way to record ideas whenever they have them. From a voice memo recorder to a notepad, anything that's convenient can work for this purpose. Secondly, they spend time engaging in mining ideas.
Many authors mention writing for one hour regardless of whether they like what they are writing. In the process of writing, they stumble across the narrative threads they end up using. As a content creator, you can emulate the same practice by setting aside an hour to write content ideas.
Because they cannot use creativity block as an excuse to escape the work, they end up unlocking their creativity in the process. If you can set aside one hour to write down ideas or content scripts and can keep a notepad to record ideas whenever you have them, you will get the most ideas per creative minute.
Quality Vs. Quantity: A False Dichotomy For Creatives
As a content creator, you're the editor and the publisher of your work. Even if you have an editor, you still get to decide what gets created and posted. Therefore, you should not have to choose between quality and quantity. Creativity is the result of aiming for quantity until you have a high-quality idea. So, feel free to write down as many bad ideas as you must until you come across a good one. Quantity leads to quality, and you can filter out what doesn't fit your standards.
If you are interested in turning a few high-quality pieces of content into a larger quantity, check out this post on content repurposing.
Final Thoughts
If you are a content creator who wants to produce unique content, you should get comfortable working around self-imposed limits. The tighter the confines of your premise, the more distinct your idea will be. By setting up a creative writing hour and forcing yourself to mine ideas from anecdotes, studies, and content that you have consumed, you can expand your library of content ideas.