Creativity

Everyone in a creative industry is asked where they get their ideas. Some of us have learned how to tap into our source, and I believe that everyone has a reservoir of them waiting to be found and encouraged.

Ideas don’t just spring out of thin air unless you have trained your imagination to produce them. Some people appear to do this more naturally than others, but often that’s down to their life experience. Small children can be amazingly creative, but if they’re told they're silly, they’ll stop. The tap is turned off and hidden in the mental cupboard under the stairs. Finding it again can take time and encouragement, but it’s worth the effort.

If you read something here and think it’s useful, please borrow it, adapt it and incorporate it into your method. If you find something you disagree with, change it, ignore it or find something better. It’s all part of being creative. I’ve been called a self-taught perfumer, but I’ve learned perfumery from many people - the majority of them not present at the time - adopting some ideas, totally rejecting others and I’ve formed one that works for me.

The shortest, best and most straightforward book on creativity I have found is A Technique for Producing Ideas by James Webb Young, written in 1965 when he worked in New York in advertising. If you intend to make original perfumes which no one else has ever smelled before, I'd encourage you to read it. Young stated that he didn’t mind sharing his technique because he knew that very few people would put in the effort needed to follow it and earn the results.

Essentially it's this: study everything you can about your own field, and keep doing it. That’s a given, but the second step is to absorb all the other creative stimuli you can find and experience. Arts, science, cities, countryside, books - fiction and non-fiction, modern and classic - cinema, sport, architecture, festivals, food, music, everything. This doesn’t end; it’s a lifetime project.

Next is to take all these accumulated experiences from perfume and beyond and fuse them. Dedicate time to putting ideas together to make new ones, no matter how daft they might feel, write them all down. An industry becomes dull when it only takes inspiration from within itself.

Following all this hard work, leave time and space for the really good ideas to form. It’s normal for our great ideas to appear while we are not concentrating on them, while our minds are out of focus, meandering around in a little fog; in the bath, on a stroll, half awake. They happen not when we try harder, but when we try softly. This is something modern life discourages, but if we’re going to grow new ideas they need air. Finally, back to the hard work of refining, experimenting, iteration and polishing.

For perfumers, applying Young’s method includes the recommendations that Master Perfumers have set down, learn your materials, smell existing fragrances, absorb others’ wisdom, blend two materials together then three and more, making many disappointing scents, taking notes and learning from all of this. In addition, if you want to be creatively adventurous as well as technically proficient, look outside your own world.

One of the differences between industry perfumers and artisans who own their own method of production, is that industry is mostly acting for brands, creating something to match a vision that the client presents to them. Some industry perfumers set up their own brands to escape this and make whatever they like. Some succeed; others find that they do their best work when given clear instructions, and given total freedom they create perfect, yet unadventurous fragrances.

Regulations permitting, artisans can do whatever we like! That leads to another set of problems. Where do we find our inspiration, but how do we narrow it down to something we really want to make? If you’re like me, you’ll have a list of 42 different fragrance ideas you would love to work on at any time, and not enough days in your life. Currently I’m finalising the aromas of the plants I imagine would grow in a version of heaven, earth, and hell described in a series of fantasy novels by Vivian Shaw with inspiration from Bertrand Russell, Philip Pullman’s His Dark Material and Joanne Harris. I added limbo because I accidentally created a fourth which I needed to publish too.

Using James Webb Young as a guide we can work on a scale of creativity.

Take one idea and add it to another idea.

1: On days you're stuck, add one material to another random material and see what happens. Repeat until you create an accord you find interesting. You can do this with no aim in mind but exploration.

2: Take a blend you’ve made, and adapt it to give it a different mood. Change it a little with a different low slope material, or a lot with a high impact aroma.

3: Smell a fragrance you like, and see if you can put together something that feels like it, without looking it up.

4: Imagine a fragrance for a fictional character. What would that person smell like? 

5: Make the aroma of a painting. I worked with the Courtauld’s Learning Centre, artist Jeremy Deller and a group of young people to imagine the scent of Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergère and make a series of aromas depicting the man, the woman, the crowd and the candied oranges.

6: Observe everything: to improve your creativity all round, keep your ideas net handy, catch and keep inspiration you spot. 

The difference I have noticed between people who haven’t developed their creative skills yet, and those who have an abundance of ideas is that the creative people don’t always need media input to prevent boredom. They do need something to write or draw with, because they generate thoughts from their own external feeds: eyes, ears, scent, touch. They notice things, and they listen to thoughts forming within their own minds.

There was a 1985 UK children’s television series called “Why don't you just switch off your television set and go out and do something less boring instead?”

The answer to the question, “Where do you get your ideas from?” is everywhere. Of course this includes interacting with social media - posting as well as absorbing - television and songs, but also allowing real life, the situations we are in at the time, to take up space in our minds.

Ask yourself all the time, I wonder what that painting would smell like? Or, I like that flower, I wonder if I could make it? Or I wonder if I could make the perfect perfume. Keep wondering, keep observing, keep collecting ideas, colliding them with knowledge you already have and collecting the results. Write them all down, review them when you get a moment, and weave them into a new thought. 

We can use prompts the way writers do to start new stories. Recent ones I’ve given my students were California, a diamond, the sense of a ghostly presence, a field of wildflowers, a library.

Here are some scenes to imagine for starters. How would you scent them?

You could start by drawing a solar system to plan your next steps.

What would be your Sun? Which Planets would you blend? Which Clouds would support them, help them merge into an actual fragrance, to give texture and help them to last longer?

The film below explains more about the solar system.