How often do you sit down and allow your imagination to run wild? Using my imagination is one of my favorite parts of the creative process. When I write comedy, I spend very little time actually touching the keyboard. The vast majority of my time writing is spend playing around with ideas in my imagination. It’s only after I find something interesting in my imagination that I actually write it down and begin working with it. 

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Using your imagination is intensely enjoyable. Think of it as a form of mental playfulness. Using your imagination is different than simple problem-solving. 

When you problem solve, you have a specific outcome in mind. You can win or lose. When you use your imagination, there’s no specific outcome that you have in mind. Of course you hope to stumble upon something you can use, but just like how children play, the act in itself is the outcome. You don’t do it to get anything from it, even though you will. You do it because it’s fun to freely explore your ideas. 

What makes using your imagination so great is that you can run through a lot of different ideas very quickly (we’ll talk more about experimentation later this month). If you were to sit down and try to generate ideas, it’d be a relatively slow process. But you can run mental experiments in your mind dozens of times in a single minute. And not only is the process an effective way to generate ideas, but it’s actually fun.

As your creating today, spend some time playing around with ideas in your own imagination. Let ideas freely bounce around. Let them combine and then separate again. You can consciously guide the process so that you keep focused on the general topic without being overly controlling of them. Think of it as telling children where they’re allowed to play, but not telling them what or how to play. They still get to be children and have fun, but they need to do it in the area you tell them to. Do this, and you’ll find unexpected and unique ideas. 

 The combinations of ideas found in your imagination don’t have to play by the same rules as those you work for. If you’re consciously trying to solve a problem, you’ll likely reject weirder ideas. When you’re playing inside your imagination however, those ideas are allowed to be weird. They’re allowed to be crazy. When your imagination finally stumbles upon something amazing, you’ll know it. A red flag will pop up in your head and you’ll think “Wait a second! That’s actually good.” From there, you can take your idea and elaborate on it. Let go of the need to control the process. Use your imagination to have fun and let the solution find you.

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