My New Year’s resolution is to be more creative. Easier said than done, right? But creativity is not the sole domain of gifted right brainers and former editors of the Harvard Lampoon. Anyone can learn to be more creative. Anyone can learn to draw, or write, and with practice can produce great works of art. It does get a little trickier when clients are involved, though.

It’s not that clients can’t be creative, it’s just that when you are tasked with being creative on their behalf, you lose the autonomy of your vision. It’s not about the art, it’s about impact, brevity, brand guidelines and (ick) *selling* stuff. The stakes go up, your control goes down and suddenly you’ve got creative block. What now, smart guy? For me, I’ve developed a formal, if fragile, process that helps get the noun really verbing.

1) Luck (have it, or make it). Sometimes you’re just on. But you can also create luck. I constantly play word games. I rewrite other people’s dialog in my head, I write new slogans for products I like, I pun, I study new words, I read the trades. On one hand it keeps the brain fast and sharp, and on the other, it loads you up with words and phrases and images that your subconscious will later put together and fling out for you.

2) Inspiration. Get it from brainstorming, from magazines and movies and music. I use a combination of these to get in the mood, to inspire me to be creative.

3) Sublimate. Do anything to push the real task into the subconscious. Think about it as hard as you can for as long as you can on a logical level. What are the feature/functions/benefits? Saturate your left brain with the data. Then forget it. I get my best ideas watching old movies or playing video games, because it forces my active brain to think about something else, while my subconscious turns the flotsam into the core of the idea.

4) Redirect. Redirect the task to a different form, (e.g . if it’s text, try telling the same story in pictures, if it’s a graphic, try describing it in words, try describing how a viewer will feel after they see your video and work backward from there).

5) Beg, borrow, cheat and steal. There are formulas to story telling in every medium–from the 36 dramatic situations to Joseph Campbell’s Hero of a Thousand faces to the Golden Mean. The audience is conditioned over thousands of years to expect certain of these conventions, even to demand them. What are the conventions of the medium you’re working in? How can you play with or against those conventions such that it’s still fresh? It’s how the Wizard of Oz and Beverly Hills Cop can tell the same exact story without anyone noticing. Detroit is Kansas, Beverly Hills is Oz… one detective needs courage, another needs a brain. Or how movies like Pulp Fiction and the Usual Suspects can fracture the narrative structure and have the audience still get it.

If and when that fails, get out of the box. Whatever the box is (your office, the hook, the people you sit with). For example, a few years ago, Hugh “Hughtrain Manifesto” MacLeod compiled a bunch of his blog posts into a great article called “How to be creative.” I have it bookmarked for those days my own process isn’t cutting the mustard for me. Like today for example, when I couldn’t think of something to blog about. And with that, I’ll leave you with the one immutable law of being creative:

Don’t quit. Don’t stop writing, don’t stop sketching, don’t stop brainstorming. Don’t stop making thumbnails, comps and drafts. Even when it’s forced you will get the solid bits down, and if it sucks, no one will make you show it to the client. Above all don’t give up on yourself. Trust that you have good ideas. Keep going and have confidence enough to let them come.