Getting Weird

There was this unintentional exercise in creativity I participated in totally by chance many years ago. It was a simple prompt: Create your own alien life form, and describe it. The important part was not to just pick some alien like ET or the infamous xenomorph in the Alien franchise, but make up one of your own. The hook here is that, by definition, your alien could be anything in the universe. A number of us participated in this, and it was actually very telling in just what it meant to be creative.

Of the people who participated, they stretched their imaginations. Aliens with eyes on their feet, with tentacles and feelers to investigate the world around them. Some changed colors, some were invisible. Large, small, winged, everything - they covered the spectrum, each one a derivation on the creator's idea of a cool alien. My alien was a little creature that, for all intents an d purposes, resembled a pair of sunglasses. It was a parasite that would control the minds of potential hosts, and make then wear the alien sunglasses, which would then latch on to the host around the eyes, slowly feeding off of it. Outsiders would just see someone with a cool pair of shades, but it was the alien pair of sunglasses in control.

Needless to say, I got some looks when I read this idea for my alien. People found it amusing and out-of-the-box, and it was mentioned that it had the potential to be a B-movie classic. However, the real stunner was that after everyone was done showcasing their aliens, the moderator brought out the clincher. They pointed out that while everyone did create an alien, they were surprisingly contained in their ideas. Regardless of how creative they were, all these aliens across the universe apparently were roughly humanoid, with arms and legs in the standard pattern, they walked upright, and were still just modifications of homo sapiens himself. Except for the sunglasses, of course.

Now, fundamentally is it creative to have a pair of sunglasses as the alien of choice? After all, sunglasses are already kind of a thing, right? The moderator didn't chide me for borrowing a household item, but instead pointed out the whole takeaway of this exercise: being creative is often about going beyond what we identify with. Creativity shows not just in making one's own version of an upright humanoid alien, but finding something fresh and new that reinvigorates the idea itself. I play this game with other people, and point this out after they introduce their mostly-humanoid creation. It gives them a revelatory moment, and the concept sticks with them for a bit. (One friend made an alien that was a cloud - she is just freakishly creative, so she wins).

Sometimes, the best route toward developing the "new alien" idea involves escaping the concept itself. Too often, we hear a challenge like that and we start thinking about what would make an alien more interesting than what we currently think of. Unfortunately, this anchors us to a predefined idea of what an alien might be. Engaging creativity often involves starting from a completely unattached point - the "fresh cloth" approach - and finding out what concept you want to express then building it out around that point. It means getting rid of preconditions and locking onto one point of the concept that triggers your creativity. From there you cut the new pattern and make something completely your own. Even if it ends up being just a pair of sunglasses.