There are countless places (and things) that inspire creativity. Seek out artistic inspiration in commonplace, day-to-day living, even if—at first glance—these sources seem anything but interesting. Here are just a few that come to mind:
Vanity license plates
Vanity plates are everywhere and are consistently far more interesting than they have any right to be. The best ones aren’t the ones that are immediately comprehensible (though the immediate payoff of a genuinely funny or weird vanity plate is often worth it), but ones that read like puzzles and take time to decode. These often stay with me for days, if not months, and often end up manifesting themselves in some art project I undertake later on.
Old cookbooks
Dated, unfashionable cookbooks—the kind that probably exist in yours or your friends’ houses somewhere—are often full of deeply strange narratives, dated trends, a collection of quotes or photographs so out of step with a contemporary worldview that it’s hard not to laugh at them. Sometimes you get lucky and find entire histories within them. Consider Bull Cook and Authentic Historical Recipes and Practices, which claims to feature the Virgin Mary’s favorite Spinach recipe and proposes that teriyaki is the worst method of meat preparation before explaining how to make it. It’s hard not to be completely fascinated and to feel challenged to take on something similarly epic and bizarre after reading.
Crowded coffee shops
Coffee shops have the bonus of coffee itself, which may aid your creativity you if you’re one of those need-my-caffeine types. Coffee certainly helps me get into a mindset for creating art, and being surrounded by noise may yield fragments of conversations to listen in on and borrow from, musical ideas to explore later, and other jumping off points.
Dive bars
Bars and coffee shops have similar draws: beverages, loud noise and ambiance. However, a drink or two (and not much more than that, or things can get sticky) can help address one’s inhibitions when trying to start a piece of writing or a project. There’s also the goldmine that is bar graffiti, where a stray phrase or a particularly unique arrangement of words (likely grammatically incorrect and profane) can suddenly seem like the strangest, funniest, or most moving thing in the world; when it does, borrow it.
Bike paths, trails, and other outdoor surroundings
From time to time, it seems utterly vital to the creative process (if not to all processes, creative or otherwise), to step outside for fresh air. Getting your blood moving helps to get the brain going as well, and it’ll be far less difficult to create when you’ve taken a minute to process. You may even stumble upon a source of inspiration you’d never considered before.
Gerald Arnolds is a guest blogger for An Apple a Day and a writer on online nursing classes for the Guide to Health Education.
