There’s a common trap that people fall into when thinking about their creative process, and that is to think only in terms of output. It’s inevitable that you should focus on your writing, paintings or musical compositions, as these are the desired end product. They’re hard won, they take time and they are the outcome of all those long, painful hours spent hunched over a keyboard or standing perplexed in front of a canvas. But to focus only on outcome is to ignore one of the most fundamental but overlooked truths of the creative process; a truth perfectly encapsulated by Joe Strummer of The Clash: “No input, no output.”

Joe Strummer of The Clash looking cool as f**k

Creativity is really just our capacity to take things we’ve observed or experienced and reconfigure them into new and surprising combinations; to give our mental kaleidoscope a twist, as Mark Twain memorably put it. But that mental kaleidoscope needs something to work with. In my work as a creative coach I sometimes encounter people who feel that they’ve lost their mojo, that they’re failing to break new ground or that their work has become tired. And the prescription is usually a simple one: to flip from fixating on the quality of one’s output and instead devote time to the quality of one’s input. Our creativity is like a tank. Fail to fill it up and it will run dry.

So what you should you be filling your tank with? Well, there’s culture, of course. Movies, art, books, performance, all these things will be invaluable grist to your own particular mill. I’ve found it’s often helpful to dabble deliberately in genres that you might normally avoid. Or to engage with bad work and consider how you might make it better. But even more important than culture is life – the chaotic, messy, spontaneous stuff that is happening all around you right now.

I’m in the middle of reading Haruki Murakami’s excellent book on writing, Novelist as Vocation. Among the many passages I’ve already underlined is this one …

So if you lament that you lack the material you need to write, you are giving up way too easily. If you just shift your focus a little bit and slightly alter your way of thinking, you will discover a wealth of material lying about just waiting to be picked up and used. You only have to look.

Those final five words sound so simple. But the problem for us human beings, especially ones living in the twenty first century, is that we’re just not very good at taking the time to really, properly look. There’s the well documented issue of our diminishing attention spans, driven by the mini-computer we carry in our pockets, loaded with nefarious programs intended to rewire our brains and turn us into twitchy, dopamine hungry scroll monkeys. And then there’s a subtler point, and one not peculiar to our era, which is that as human beings our brains readily default to an energy saving setting of auto-pilot. We tend only to notice things that are out of the ordinary. If the world around us conforms to our expectations – as it usually does – then it passes us by. To look and listen in a way that sustains and enriches your creativity requires a deliberate act of will. You have to take some time each day to do it.

Now I know that this is easier said than done. And that if you give yourself a nebulous and ill-defined objective like ‘I need to do more listening and looking’ you’ll probably be back on the same old auto-pilot setting after just a few days. So here are some activities that you could consider building into your regular creative practice; activities that will ensure your tank always stays topped up.

1. Channel Leonardo

There’s a lovely quote from Leonard from Da Vinci in which he encourages aspiring artists to stop and look at walls ‘splashed with a number of stains, or stones of various mixed colours’ and see in them ‘landscapes adorned with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, great plains … various battles, and lively postures of strange figures, expressions on faces, costumes, and an infinite number of things’. (A statement that conjures up an image of irritated Florentines attempting to squeeze past a young Leonardo resolutely staring at a wall on a busy street).

You could do as Leonardo says and simply find a wall or some lichen covered rocks and look at them until figures or shapes begin to emerge. Or, even better in my book, why not take yourself to your local park on one of those days where the sky is filled with cumulonimbus, lie on your back and do some cloud spotting? The sky is an endless canvas of evolving stories that never repeats itself.

2. Conduct your own performance of 4’33”

The composer John Cage was ridiculed for his piece 4’33”. And not without some justification: it instructs the orchestra not to play for 4 minutes and 33 seconds. But what Cage’s critics failed to understand was the point the composer was making. If you attend a performance of this infamous piece you don’t hear silence, because true silence doesn’t exist. Instead you hear the distant sound of traffic outside the auditorium, the creak of floorboards, a cough from a fellow audience member, the hum of the air conditioning. What John Cage was saying is that all sound is music.

So why not conduct your own performance of 4’33”? Find yourself a bench or a place to sit, set your phone timer for exactly 4 minutes and 33 seconds, close your eyes and listen. Allow your awareness of sounds to roam around from the nearby to the distant. Zoom into particular noises. Catch snippets of conversation. What are the sounds you hadn’t noticed before you stopped to listen?

3. Waiting meditation

Our everyday lives are punctuated with those frustrating moments when you have to wait for something. You’re standing in a queue at the supermarket or the coffee shop. Or you’re waiting at the dentist or doctors. And when this happens most of us submit to the impulse to reach for our phones.

Next time, don’t give in. Instead take a couple of slow, deep breaths, feel your feet on the floor or your bum on the seat, and look and listen. Chances are there’ll be some people around. Take them in one by one. What do you imagine their backstory could be? Try being Sherlock Holmes and look for significant details that might give you a clue to their lives outside the supermarket or doctor’s waiting room. Observe minutiae.

4. Make yourself a viewfinder

Regular readers will know that I’m a fan of nun turned artist and teacher, Sister Corita Kent. Much of Corita’s teaching was about encouraging her students to look properly – she talked about ‘a kind of looking where you don’t know what you’re looking for’. To help them she would give out empty 35mm slide mounts. Corita called these ‘finders’ and they were a way of looking without being distracted by content or context. Students would be encouraged to go to a busy intersection or market, or any place where there is lots going on and look through the finder, taking time to reframe and isolate different details that would otherwise go unnoticed.

You can pick up old slide mounts for next to nothing on eBay. Or you can make your own finder by cutting a rectangular square out of a piece of cardboard. As Corita herself once wrote, ‘Everything is a source.’

5. Give yourself an assignment

There’s a simple way to nudge your brain out of its default auto-pilot setting and that is to give it something to do. Now, I’m not talking about some grand, hifalutin creative project here. I’m suggesting a simple, easy to complete task that you can do most days. In Rob Walker’s book The Art of Noticing he suggests a numerical scavenger hunt. You set yourself the task of photographing the numbers from 1 to 100. Next time you see ‘1’ on a door, a T shirt or wherever, you photograph it and then you’re hunting for the number 2 and so on, all the way to 100.

My friend, the artist Daniel Eatock, among his many ongoing projects, keeps a look out for vans and cars that have had a panel or door replaced in a different colour of paint to the rest of the vehicle. Whenever he sees one he takes a picture and uploads it to his website.

One of Dan Eatock’s ‘Pictures of The Week’

The benefit of projects like Rob and Dans’, and indeed all the activities I’ve suggested above, is not so much the quirky archive of observations that you’ll soon accumulate (though this can be a treasure trove in itself), it’s that they induce a way of being in the world, one that is alert and aware to the everyday riches that most of us, most of the time, overlook.

So if you’re struggling with output right now, maybe it’s time to start thinking of input. I’ll leave the last word to the singer and songwriter Amanda Palmer …

“We can only connect the dots we collect.”

Filling Up The Tank