Don't Create Anything Without Applying This Rule

Hello, creative souls. Welcome back to the Creative Spotlight.

Today, let's talk about all of your great ideas. I have to give credit where it is due, to the lovely, fantastic Twyla Tharp. If you're not familiar, she is an American dancer and choreographer and she has earned her stripes. She's also written a couple books about creativity, which is so very cool because you don't need to be a dancer or a choreographer to enjoy her books and learn from them - much like I hope this blog will be because I'm a theater maker, but you could be a creative of any medium and hopefully what I'm sharing with you has a positive influence and impact on your creative life.

I read one of her books so long ago. She has at least one more book that I'm aware of that I can't remember the title to, but it's also about creative process. One of the things I learned from this book is a quote that my husband and I use so frequently. It's like the alphabet, in the way that it’s just become so baked into our creative process that we don't do a project without touching base on it. We use it so much that I finally realized, in preparation for this post, that we've actually been saying it wrong. So let me share with you the correct one because what we like to say is you don't have a great idea until you have two great ideas… which sounds ridiculous and fabulous. The direct quote is “You don't have a really good idea until you combine two little ideas.” So, same point.

As usual, I have a story for this one. It exemplifies this teaching and hopefully you can take it on for yourself. So, you don't have a great idea until you have two great ideas. I love this because it stretches our capacity for creativity. And it's really fun to get a great idea, right? When I have a great idea for a show, I spout off the great idea and my husband and get our wheels turning. We're like, oo, yes, this will be fantastic. We get really excited until we inevitably hit a plateau and think something is missing… until we remember Twyla and realize we only have one great idea. We'll ponder a little bit until it finds another idea, and then they blend together much like a relationship and then it becomes even better. It sounds so silly, I know. I think that's part of why I like it. You don't have a really good idea until you combine two little ideas.

I think one of the best examples from our shows to exemplify this work is one we launched a few years ago now called Silence in the Jungle. If you've seen any image from this blog, you know I love the jungle. We spend a couple months each year in Costa Rica, and a few years ago we were there and we had just previously opened a show. We were in our dark season. Our little town of Eureka Springs, Arkansas goes dark for a few months a year. We closed the theater up because our tourism basically goes flat during the winter months. I use that time to write a new script and prepare to produce a new show; but we weren't planning on doing that. We had just opened a show in the fall and we were ready to just reopen that show again. It took a lot of work and it only got a short run, so we were going to just run that show… and then I found out I was pregnant and I can't do the show we had just written while being pregnant. So I hit panic mode for a minute and wondered what I was going to do for work while I grew this belly.

Then I said, "What if we just produce a new show?"

And my husband was like, “I was waiting for that. That took you longer than I thought to get there.”

It was so sweet to learn he'd already gotten there in his head instead of just saying to me, "Hey, Em, why don't we just produce a new show?" Because he knows me so well. That probably would have spun me into panic, but once it was my idea, then I could handle it.

We didn't have a lot of time though, because for one, I had to race the baby. I had to like hurry up, produce it, get on stage in enough time to sell some tickets and make some money off of it, and then get off stage so I could, you know, have a baby. That means there was pressure involved.

So we're in Costa Rica and I have no show ideas on deck that I'm ready to do - definitely no show ideas on deck that are for a pregnant woman. I really felt the presence of a blank slate wondering what we were going to do, so I just used my surroundings. What if we do a jungle show? Here we are in Costa Rica, in the jungle. Let’s do a jungle show.

We had just come off of producing I Haunt You. If you saw my last post about that one, then you know we used soundscape a lot to build out worlds that visually weren't really physically there, but you can hear them crystal clear, and there are SO many sounds in the jungle. My husband can put together this incredible soundscape and people will feel like they're sitting in the jungle instead of inside of our historic ballroom. We knew we had a great idea, but something was missing clearly, and it was the second great idea.

It wasn't until we pulled in the second great idea that we had the ability to build out a story. We like to do spooky theater. We don't always do spooky theater, but we enjoy it very much. On day, my husband said, “What if we tell another ghost story? We love ghost stories."

I kind of sat with it for a minute before thinking, oh no, that’s really good. So those were our two great ideas.

Yes. I'm really excited patting ourselves on the back, but it's a good show. It's probably actually my favorite show that we've produced, Silence in the Jungle. It's very psychological. It's very emotive and it's really about facing your own fear, your internal fears, and learning to let them go. It's got these Eastern philosophy themes and it’s set in the 1930’s. It's just a really lovely show. And of course, it's about this woman who's pregnant and really has no business traveling to the jungle, but she does. With the element of jungle, which is so tangible and terrestrial, there are real tangible fears: spiders, jaguars, snakes, rain. And then we've got the ethereal, the supernatural fear of like, is this real? Is this not real? Is this in my head? Am I being haunted?

We had these multiple layers to bring in together. From just those two concepts, jungle and ghosts, we were able to build out an entire story-line, an entire show. That's just one example of how you don't have a good idea until you have two good ideas.

Think about your own work, a project that you're working on. You have a great idea, you're really excited about it, but then maybe it hits kind of a plateau and you’re thinking, if it's so great, why am I not moving on it? If it's so great, why is it not so great? So what is the extra piece that could be brought into it? What's the second idea that will just light that idea on fire and give you so much inspiration, clarity and motivation that you can't not do it because it's too good? It's kind of a funny concept, but again, it's not mine. It's Twyla Tharp's concept and I just love it so much. It's so simple and yet so effective. So take that into your little pocket of inspiring things that you need to lean into in your creative work. You don't have a great idea until you have two great ideas. I hope it works for you as well as it has for us. I use it every single time I create. So thank you, Miss Twyla. Go read her books. She's phenomenal. Again, you don't have to be a dancer or a choreographer to know this stuff has absolute relevance.

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That's a wrap, my darling. Now, go do your creative work.