Accidental Creativity: drop the wrong tulip and see what happens.
This is Lucia’s 10th photo a day. Lucia takes her photos for their beauty. She has a really good eye and loves to explore the unexpected. It’s been an interesting process for the two of us. She takes a photo that pleases her and I see what I can make of it from my point of view as a presenter, designer and writer.
Here is an interesting find she made at a commercial tulip field. Clearly this place requires that their tulips behave and stay where they were planted otherwise selling bulbs would result in customer complaints. Who wants a yellow tulip when they ordered red. But somehow this jaunty little yellow guy jumped the walkway into the red bed or was jolted out of the mechanical planter at the wrong time or slithered unnoticed from the planter’s glove.
Whatever the cause of this colorful accident, the result is beautiful, but unexpected. I believe that thinking about this anomaly, this goof, this planter’s mistake, is a good exercise for creative types. It is another way to think outside the box. (Oh, I dislike that horrible cliché. I like “dropping the wrong tulip better”, don’t you.) Still I believe that a powerful force in creative thinking is merely the chance placement of two unexpected and traditionally unrelated things side by side.
In the case of the book I’m writing, the idea of placing two gigantic but dissimilar schools of thought side by side, to use one to create “aha” moments for the other, came to me as I was falling asleep. At first I was puzzled to see how it would work. Would I get lot of customer complaints? Neither has a clear relationship with the other, they are from different sides of the aisle, but together something symbiotic was starting to emerge. I could see how the flashy side of one school could help the other more pedestrian side of the other. This inspirational and unexpected relationship could create excitement and even fun for my readers. Clearly, for me at least, this artificial relationship cleared a lot of the mustiness away and created bright contrasting colors. Like the yellow tulip among the red.
