Igniting the Spark: Activating Your Creative Mind

Igniting the Spark: Activating Your Creative Mind is a book about the field, application and practice of creativity. This book is geared toward students and is designed to help them understand from a theoretical and practical perspective what it means to be a creative person and live a creative life. Creativity is defined as "using the imagination to make something new". The chapters focus on a list of concepts that the authors believe are central to the cultivation of a creative mindset. The book begins with the concept of openmindedness and describes how being open to new experiences and perspectives is central to the practice of creativity. Other concepts covered in the book include the imagination, inspiration, play, daydreaming, intuition and optimism. 

Each chapter begins with a real-world example that illustrates a particular creative concept, such as the daily walks that Charles Darwin took as he spent time daydreaming about his new theories of evolution. The chapters also cover the current research of the concept being discussed, and the role that concept plays in the creative process. A list of exercises comes at the end of each chapter, and is designed to help students apply the concepts to their own creative practice. Our goal for this book is to help students learn about the field of creativity, understand how creativity is portrayed in real-world examples and ultimately discover how to cultivate their own creative energy.