Jumping without a safety net into the unknown is where you’ll find the real joy of creativity, says author Steve Aylett, which is why he has created The Trickster Brick of prompts – treasure from the great beyond to spark your wildest ideas
You’re at one of those crossroads in life where there’s nothing in any direction. Is the universe telling you to stop looking outward and be silent for a moment? Or is it hinting that you plough your own road in a Mad Max truck fitted with paint guns and seed cannons?
While creative ‘prompts’ are supposed to provide a nudge sideways into fertile realms, I have found most to be so bland, humourless and risk-averse that they, at best, form a conformity to react against. It’s like holding a shell to your ear and only hearing other people’s ideas. I wanted to make a deck of prompt cards that worked, and so put together The Trickster Brick, a block of 78 vivid interventions. In nature there’s no telling where the next useful mutation will originate. After all, we arrived here fish-first. Maybe creativity is anything you wouldn’t be ashamed to do in front of a salamander. The best way of getting into something is to think of it as mischief.
When devising the character archetypes, scholars gave the Trickster all the exceptions, alternatives and freedoms left over from the other archetypes, inadvertently making the Trickster the most playful and interesting figure in any story. It doesn’t run on rails and is free to roam idea-space. That sticky infinity of unformed ideas is so rarely visited by humanity that many notions have assembled themselves in exasperation and crowded forward for easy access, free offers to attract the attention. Like brewers’ fruit left too long on the branch, the merest touch brings them into your hand. Originality hangs suspended in every direction and is ignored. The problem is not finding it, but dodging the stale fear and rigidity that obscures it. The fear of the intensity that comes with real creativity, that house-tornado in which intermeshing components roll and radiate in collisions of bliss, is a pretty good gauge of your final creation’s power.
Imagine writing without any filler material, where every sentence comes directly at you. Each point is the head of a thread, a retrievable plumb-line of information. Every atom is a golden ticket. Perhaps, smothered by genre or imitation, your real voice haunts you with a feebleness that does not impress. Write fast with both hands at the same time. One hand may blurt the truth out of sheer panic. Mimes do some of their best work when
