Creative minds share how they work.

Julie Taymor

Where she starts: Ideograph.

“I start with the notion of the ideograph,” she explains. “An ideograph is a Japanese brush painting — three strokes and you get the whole bamboo forest,” she says. “I go to the concept of The Lion King and say, ‘What is the essence of it? What is the abstraction? If I were to reduce this entire story into one image, what would it be?’ The circle. It’s so obvious.”

Elizabeth Gilbert
Where she starts: Preparing for the struggle.

“I had this encounter recently where I met the extraordinary American poet Ruth Stone, … When she was growing up in rural Virginia, she would be out working in the fields and she said she would feel and hear a poem coming at her from over the landscape … She knew that she only had one thing to do at that point, and that was to, in her words ‘run like hell.’ … She said there were points where she would almost miss it, right? So she’s running to the house and she’s looking for the paper and the poem passes through her and she grabs a pencil just as it’s going through her and then, she said, it was like she would reach out with her other hand and she would catch it. … That’s not at all what my creative process is — I’m not the pipeline! I’m a mule and the way that I have to work is that I have to get up at the same time every day, and sweat and labor and barrel through it really awkwardly.” 

TED Blog