Creative Composting: How Home Composting Can Work Wonders For Your Creativity Too!

Many of us know the benefits of home composting, collecting up vegetable scraps, paper, tea bags and other organic waste from our kitchens and putting them on a compost heap or in a compost bin to break down. A few months later you have a highly nutritious compost that your garden will love and thank you for. All from stuff you would’ve previously thrown out in your rubbish bin and would’ve ended up as landfill.

Great idea then, but what’s this got to do with being more creative?

Well, you can use this principle to similar effect in your creative life. A good example is with your creative ideas. Say you’re writing a poem. Now, few of us are able to write a poem from start to finish in one go, and have it pop out exactly as we want it.

Usually there’s some editing, reworking of the form, adding a little here, taking away a little there. So inevitably there will be some “offcuts”, words and phrases that don’t quite fit into this particular poem, but have an interesting aspect to them.

You could write your new poem out in a document then when it’s done, delete any offcuts or parts that didn’t end up in the finished piece, and leave just your poem. But this is a little wasteful.

So, in comes the home composting concept!

Have another file – either on your computer or in paper form – where you keep all these scraps and extra poetic words and phrases. Each time you complete a new piece of writing, put all the offcuts into your “compost file”.

As time goes by, you gradually build up a collection of creative ideas and poetic snippets that can be developed into full poems themselves. That alone is a wonderful benefit of doing this.

But there’s more.

What you’ll also find when you have ideas gathered in one place is that they’ll naturally intermingle and breed.

Two poetic offcuts written down together arbitrarily may actually work brilliantly together and instantly spark off other ideas.

Another way of using these composted scraps is to just scan through them randomly. Jot down ideas that really grab you and inspire you most. As soon as you have one or two, you’ll naturally start looking for others that feed into the same idea or concept that’s forming in your mind. In a few minutes you’ll have the core of a great new poem. Just from a collection of offcuts you were ready to discard!

This same technique can be adapted for other artistic projects. Whatever parts and materials you don’t use for one project can be collected up and used in future projects, rather than starting from nothing each time.

An example is a creative colleague who cuts up parts of old paintings she has done and no longer wants, and uses the pieces to create new collages. It’s the same recycling principle, whatever creative media you use.

Start home composting in your creative life today, and you’ll be amazed at the nutritious effect it can have on your creative blooms!

“Creativity Coach Dan Goodwin is the author of “Create Create!”, a
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