Is creativity learned?

I think it is.

I take a work-ethic oriented approach. Today I came up with 100 character ideas. Just a big list of one liners that briefly describe a possible character. Most of it is going to absolute garbage, but you can usually find something interesting in this exercise. It's the same approach that freewriting takes.

A lot of them are just really plain, boring, cliche stuff like:

  • An actor with stage fright

Others are just bad:

  • A dancer with no feet

  • A woman with enormous breasts, like james and the giant peach enormous

It's important to write these horrible ones down anyway, because you'll find some that wouldn't work if you took them straight:

  • A professor who murders students who fail

That would be a terrible thriller, but I could see a comedy there. Finally some I think might have potential:

  • A once famous actress now in her elder years turns to prostitution to survive

This one got me thinking something like, if Audrey Hepburn were still alive and incredibly desperate, there are probably fans that would want to sleep with her no matter how old she was, so what would that fall look like? Someone who used to be an icon of glamour and sophistication forced into such a debasing situation? That's an interesting character. Maybe a bit dark for the kind of writing I'm looking for, but interesting.

  • A tyrant who lives off the charity of his once subjects

This brings up so many questions. How is he still alive if he was deposed? Why are the people taking care of him? How has he handled his fall from grace? Is he bitter and spiteful, or has he changed, reborn from his once subject's graciousness?

Neither of these will necessarily end up as good characters once fleshed out, but they're interesting enough to me to see where they lead.

I take this approach with pretty much everything. Don't like a sentence? Five variations of the same sentence.

You just dig up everything, exhaustively, until you find a stone worth polishing.

/r/writing Thread