An Investigation Into Whether David Usher's Book Can Make Me Creative

David Usher, the lead singer of 90s alternative rock band Moist, whose most famous song “Push” is about the pros and cons of having sex in a car, has recently become an author. His book, Let the Elephants Run, is a how-to guide for unlocking your inner creativity. It’s built on the premise that all people are creative but too many of us switch off our creativity once we become adults and place false limitations on what we can achieve.

This immediately piqued my interest in a major way. Not only because I value being creative, but as someone who recently moved from freelance writing to the corporate world, I sometimes wonder whether my creativity is falling by the wayside. Maybe Usher's book could help me keep on top of my game. I opened it up and realized it was an interactive book, with creativity exercises throughout and a command at the beginning to scribble everywhere and mess up all the pages. It sounded fun, if too much like an elementary school workbook—but then apparently my creativity was at its peak when I was young, so it might turn out well. The first exercise asked me to imagine removing myself from everything around me, from my computer to my books, and completely leave "the world of things." "What's left?," Usher asked on the next page. "Just you! Naked, sitting in an empty field. It's dark and the grass is went against your bare skin. Something big is moving in the bushes just beyond the ridge. Better get up - and start running."

So by page 11 I was already running around naked in a field because a thing in a bush scared me. It was a little weird, but I figured it was only uphill from there. Or maybe it would be uphill from page 14 onward, which featured a picture of two naked apes walking through the snow with full on frontal ape nudity. This was all very creative for sure, but would the whole book be peppered with references to being naked and outside? That could get a little old.

Fortunately things turned around with the first fill-in-the-blank creativity exercise. It asked the reader to complete a survey about their own creativity, both as an adult and a child, and talk about some of their creative outlets. Finally, I felt like I was doing something. Maybe this would be the beginning of my transformation.

It was fun writing directly on the page but I didn't really know what to do with my answers. Unlike an elementary school workbook, there was no answer key and no teacher coming around to mark my work.

Still feeling confused and uncreative, I thought I would go straight to Usher and see if he could help me out. I originally asked if we could sit in a coffee shop and do the rest of the creativity exercises from the book together. This request was declined, so I settled for a regular old phone interview.

Noisey: Where did you get the idea to write a book about creativity?
David Usher: When I have public speaking engagements, I'm mostly speaking at business conferences about creativity, or how the creative process works and how to incorporate it into an existing structure. And I found that a lot of people were coming up to me afterward and saying either that they thought they weren't creative, or they were in a creative project and they were really stuck. That really led me to wanting to write a larger piece about the project itself.

Not only are those people a lot more creative than they think they are, if there was more time spent on what the process actually is, you could get a better understanding of the process by actually studying it. You find this with artists a lot—artists tend to go through the creative process almost by instinct, and so there's an idea of what the artist does that the general population believes, and most artists believe as well, that if you really drill down into what they do, most of what people believe that they do is stuff they actually do.

That’s a really organized way to think about creativity. How did you get to that point?
One of the big reasons is that when I started working in a discipline outside of music, I noticed the similar patterns that were beginning to appear and emerge of creative processes from different genres and how similar they are and how many of the same processes are used whether you're working in tech startups or in the artistic sphere or in marketing, you're doing a lot of the same things. So it's not that there's any one magic formula to how creativity works, but there's a methodology to how you can go through a process.

So this is part of why you think structure is so important to creativity?
It seems counter intuitive, right? But the reality is with creativity, you need to have this incredible freedom of imagination, you need to have this open curiosity and be able to see things that others can't because you're open and see these crazy ideas from different places. But at the same time, creativity isn't just about having crazy ideas. I mean, hang out with your friends at the bar long enough, and someone is going to come up with some amazing, ridiculous, incredible idea every single night, but no one is going to deliver on that idea, right? Creativity is about delivering on ideas. It's not just about sitting beside an idea or having thoughts, it's about being able to go through a long process, and going through all the steps of the process to get a deliverable thing at the end, and to do that, you need a structure where you can go through those steps, and push through all the roadblocks you need to push through to come out on the other side. And that takes a structure. People might not want to call it a structure, but that's what it is, you know?

If it's more about structure and process, do you ever think you would've done something else as your career if you were born at a different time? Like with the crazy ideas you came up with with your friends at bars, would you have followed up on one other than being in a band in a different context?
I think creative is separate from genre. So I'm happy to apply the creative process that I use to different genres, whether I'm working on a song or an album or a show or a speaking gig or a book. What I call a creative thinking methodology is something that can be removed from genres and superimposed on multiple disciplines.

For me it goes beyond that idea of what you do. When I talk about creative process, I tend to think about creative thinking. So rather than just apply it to a discipline, you can apply creative thinking to a conversation, an interaction, or a negotiation. Really what you're doing, if you strip it down to what it is, you're looking at patterns in the world, you're recognizing patterns. And, you know, you are not waiting for evolution to make the changes. What you're doing is sticking mutations into the patterns to see what the result is going to be. You have an idea and you stick this mutation into this pattern and disrupt it in this way, the result will be this. And if you think of creativity like that, suddenly it opens up the world of what creativity is and what it's used for.

You talk a lot about being inspired by the Internet, and using it as a tool for creativity. Why do you think it’s so important?
I really had sort of this lightbulb moment where I was living in New York when the music business got hit by the internet, and as I watched the music business sort of descend into the sea, I also watched the rise of this new means of delivery and dissemination, and I got very interested in the way digitial and the web works. Really what the web is is a new way of delivering ideas, it changes the way ideas flow. And what happened is it sort of re-sparked in me a curiosity, but also this act of learning, where suddenly I was obsessed with this thing that was going on, but that idea reenergizing your learning centre is such a huge part of creativity. When you want to explore new things, it leads you to new things.

But then it can also just be about personality quizes and porn, right?
The web is a double edge sword, right? It's this incredible burning machine where you can learn the most incredible information from the top people in their field talking about what they're working on while they're working on it. So you can move right to the edges of a field, learning about things while they're developing those ideas, where before you'd have that information locked away behind closed doors or in a library or inside someone's head. And now the way ideas moved has changed. But it's the opposite of that as well. It's a learning machine on one hand, but it can be this incredible distraction on the other, so as easy as it is to learn the most incredible information in the world, it's even easier to check your Twitter feed and watch The Walking Dead. But so much of creativity is about this brutal discipline and obsession to get what you want done.

I came away from our interview energized and inspired to make this happen for me. First I tried using the revolutionary tool and double edged sword that is the Internet to jog my creativity. I started by Googling “How can I be more creative?” and got a Time Magazine article called “9 Ways to be More Creative in the Next 10 Minutes.” This was sweet, because Usher’s book is over 200 pages long, which would take me about five years to read because I can’t stop Snapchatting, but here I could be more creative in 10 minutes. Then I saw an article in the sidebar called “12 Adorable Animals That Could Kill You,” and had to click on it because look at that cute monkey ready to murder me. One thing I learned is that a Dingo is just a big, cute dog, when I’d always assumed it was some kind of scary bird. So that was useful information. Then I got distracted by a popup ad for an adult fantasy game called Wartune. After emerging from my bedroom five days later, I reflected on whether this experience made me more creative. Aside from seeing the world in a weird glow that made me question whether everyone around me was really human or a digital Medieval avatar looking for a swingers party, everything was pretty much the same.

I figured I was missing something in Usher’s message, so I went back to the book. It seemed like I had gotten the Internet part down, but was forgetting about structure, planning, discipline, and action. So I flipped to the section about structure and planning and decided to do the creativity exercise there. It said to “describe what you are working on in detail” and “define your timeline to completion,” which was scary since I wasn’t working on anything at all. Then it hit me. I remembered the thing about using the book's pages any way I wanted to, and decided I was going to rip out the page and make an origami bird.

Did David Usher make me more creative? After a careful study, I’d say he definitely did. Before reading his book, the last time I’d made art was in 5th grade, and he managed to break me out of that creative slump. Now I’m excited to go into work tomorrow and make origami birds for the whole office.

Greg Bouchard is a writer living in Toronto - @gregorybouchard