When I started writing “Organizing Creativity”, I wanted to convey a few ideas, mainly:
- creativity is more than one idea, for example, a book consists of more ideas than an idea for a plot, but also characters, settings, etc. pp. and that this needs organization because you simply cannot remember all ideas and have them available when you need them
- creativity (in the sense of producing something new and useful) is a process that consists of acquiring knowledge, generating ideas, capturing and collecting these ideas, realizing the project, and (possibly) archiving it
- creativity takes hard work and time to achieve the preconditions to be creative and hard work and time to realize the projects — it is nothing like the “creativity” usually “achieved” by “artists” who “spend [their] time sopping up sauce or blowing weed, and talking about the [works they are] going to do” (modified quote from “I will fear no evil” by Robert A. Heinlein)
- present multiple ways to support creativity with analog and digital tools for capturing and collecting ideas and discuss the criteria for capturing and collecting tools
I am not sure whether I have achieved this with this book, or whether making it available as html-pages on this website helps. [NOTE: No longer online.] Perhaps in a year or so, I’ll try again with a more concise version. But perhaps I simply need to provide the book in another way. So, additionally to the text on this site, I’m making the book available as .pdf here. Gasp! Yes, the PDF for free, here. [NOTE: Since posting this entry I have published the second edition — the links now go to the second edition.]
You are free to download it, however, it is still copyrighted. If you want to use parts of it, cite it and adhere to fair use! If you like it, buy it as paperback or as eBook. BTW, the file is not protected, this does not work anyway and the only consequence is that it needs one smart cow first to make it available unprotected somewhere else. So I might as well offer it here:
Organizing Creativity Book (PDF)
Happy reading
Daniel
