The first step to becoming more creative is believing you can, and the basis of all creativity starts with imagination. If you don’t believe you have an imagination ask yourself what your parents put on the fridge that you did. My mom put up my artwork and my poetry, no matter how bad it was because she wanted to recognize the effort and work that I put into creating something. She wasn’t interested in the quality; she was interested in allowing her child to grow. She even put up the only test that I ever flunked because I put work into flunking it. It felt good to have those things on the fridge and to see them every time I grabbed the milk for a bowl of cereal. It kept me in the habit of being creative. Use these tools and learn how to improve your imagination using your fridge.

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Actual Tools for Your Fridge

What you put on your fridge can inspire your imagination and boost your creativity. Happy family photos are good for providing a positive atmosphere. Letter magnets are great for younger children, but for adults, they can provide a way to make short poems. A ‘Z’ can become an ‘N’, a ‘W’ can become an ‘M’, and you can make up words that never existed. Fridge poetry magnets are also a good way to practice using your imagination and building poetry, playing with words, or using them as ways to make a picture (then you can really see if a picture is worth a thousand words). These magnets make use of the cut-up technique that both David Bowie and the Beatles used in creating their songs and fueling their imaginations.

Reward Yourself

The food in your fridge should never be a reward or a punishment. However, you can still use your fridge to reward yourself for a job done as best as you can do. And that’s an important note. Comparing yourself to someone else by looking at their finished product versus yours is a no-win situation, especially in imagination and creativity. Your drawing may not look like a Picasso or a Dali, but when they started their drawings didn’t look like Picasso or Dali either. Instead of comparing yourself to others, revel in the fact that you’ve done something creative. Put it on the fridge and enjoy it. Then work on your next example of imagination and creativity.

More on Imagination and Creativity

If you want more on creativity or how to draw, join our Patreon. In June 2020, we’ll post our first video in a series about the seven essential shapes you know how to make that you can use to draw. There are videos, articles, and other things on improving creativity. And penguins! You can also sign up for notifications from this blog. “Disneyland Is Creativity,” and “The Haunted Mansion Is Creativity” are available for purchase; they use the history and structure of Disneyland (or the Haunted Mansion) to explore research-backed creativity principles. “Penguinate! Positive Creativity” offers essays and activities to improve creativity. Do you have any other suggestions on how to improve your imagination using your fridge? Leave them in the comments below.