Distractions Fuel Creativity – A Ramble

Well, I thought that I’d talk about distractions today. This was something I ended up thinking about after getting completely distracted one Sunday afternoon back in mid-June. I’d planned to spend the afternoon doing “useful, but not essential” stuff, but instead found myself binge-watching the “BBC Archive” Youtube channel instead. An official collection of old documentary, non-fiction TV show etc… clips from the BBC.

Although most of the videos on there were from before my time (I was born in the late 1980s), this just made them more fascinating. Whether it was someone from the late 1970s talking about new-fangled “word processing” gadgets. Whether it was a pre-release review of the film “Blade Runner” (1982). Whether it was a gigantic video-phone from 1986 that had almost the same sort of blocky video compression that even modern low-resolution digital videos can have.

Whether it was an old clip from a 1970s episode of “Blue Peter”, where one of the presenters uses a satchel-like mobile phone – with a rotary dial and a giant radio cabinet – in a rainy garden. Whether it was a mid-1980s clip of a composer from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop called Elizabeth Parker making amazing “Blade Runner”-esque background music using a bulky 1980s synthesiser. Whether it was Delia Derbyshire explaining how she created the original “Doctor Who” theme tune. Whether it was Rowan Atkinson and Stephen Fry discussing the script for an episode of “Blackadder Goes Forth”.

Whether it was an interview with Lemmy from Motorhead in 1982 during a video about heavy metal music at the time, which also introduced me to an amazing band called Rock Goddess. Seriously, their live cover version of the Moody Blues’ “Nights In White Satin” is a masterpiece! One of those covers that sounds even better than the original song.

On a side-note: If you end up buying a digital copy of this cover song, be aware that the “Live From London” MP3 version sold on Amazon (when I wrote the first draft of this article in mid-late June) doesn’t seem to include any “Loudness War” stuff – which means that it might sound “too quiet” unless you really crank up the volume. When I looked at it in an open-source audio editor called Audacity, the wave-form was noticeably thinner than many modern MP3 format songs.

Anyway, getting back on topic, the “BBC Archive” channel was a cornucopia of fascinating old videos. A glimpse at a world which I recognised from all of the old novels, TV show repeats, albums etc… I enjoyed when I was growing up but which I never actually directly experienced. A glimpse at how the limitations of the time made the BBC’s output back then even more distinctive and creative than it is these days.

And, although getting distracted like this was mildly annoying, I also got the sense that it was probably good for my creativity. “Recharging” my imagination with enough fascinating stuff to daydream about that – after writing the first draft of this article – I ended up making this really fun “1980s heavy metal album cover” style digitally-edited painting. Here’s a preview:

Here’s a detail from a digitally-edited painting which, due to my ridiculous art buffer, probably won’t appear here in full until mid-July.

Yes, some distractions are mindless and pointless things. Doomscrolling through social media, watching reality TV etc… but if you can find a distraction that genuinely fascinates you and fires your imagination, then it can actually be a surprisingly productive thing if you also create stuff. Again, it’s like “recharging” your imagination, refuelling the parts of your mind that love daydreaming. The parts where all of the best ideas come from.

And I experienced something vaguely similar to this on the day before I found this Youtube channel too. Due to the hot weather at the time, I hadn’t slept that well and had planned to catch up on lost sleep during a quiet Saturday afternoon. So, as I lay there and tried to relax, I decided to distract myself with a daydream.

The daydream quickly took on a life of its own though. It was one about a hyper-stylised alternate version of myself driving a large motorhome around a fictional version of 1990s America cobbled together from TV shows, novels and movies. Spectacular vivid images of standing on the edge of a golden corn-field with dark blue skies above, mere seconds before a dramatic thunderstorm. Of small-town cinemas showing a random selection of films from the time. Of diners with checkerboard tile floors and of glasses of soda with ice-cream floating on top.

Again, I could spend quite a while describing this daydream (and I definitely wrote it down), but one of the simultaneously amazing and annoying things about it was that it was too good. It was better than the average daydream, the sort of vivid immersive distraction which is so good that you don’t want to ruin it by falling asleep. Needless to say, I didn’t fall asleep. This was annoying, but it at least inspired me to make a digitally-edited painting based on part of the daydream. Here’s a preview of it:

This is a detail from the daydream-based painting that I made. The full painting should hopefully appear here sometime in July.

Once again, the point of this is that good distractions can be really useful for your creativity. If you can find things to distract yourself with that fire your imagination and genuinely fascinate you, then this will probably help you to be more creative. Plus, it’s a really fun way to “recharge” your imagination too 🙂

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Anyway, I hope that this was useful 🙂