Let yourself be bored. Daydream. Look out the window. Do nothing. Try to meditate.

Connexions seem to happen when we try less, and connexions lie at the center of creativity.

There are some good suggestions, but I want to mention that you are being a bit hard on yourself. Pressure will not help creativity. Give yourself permission to relax. And realize that it gets harder as you get older, but don’t punish yourself for time passing.

Echoing the others here, give yourself time to let your mind wander.

Boredom will make your brain creative. Go sit somewhere quiet and relaxing and let your mind wander.

• uppers and downers (at the same time, experiment what works, but NO alcohol that just makes you stupid)

• walking (!)

• stream of consciousness writing (NOT diary writing!)

• focus on the process, not the result

• authism is not an excuse, Văn Gogh had it worse than you, yet still managed to do stuff

• messes birth miracles and sometimes works of genius. don’t disregard your messes!

• don’t be too self critical. some people get fucking famous without ever having an original idea or talent or even working hard. Just two days ago I tried to read serotonin by houellebecq, and HOLY SHIT, here I am full of self doubt about every sentence and thought, tormented with the knowledge that I have nothing to say… and this piece of shit gets called a star and genius for his literally unreadable trash??

• If it really doesn’t work maybe fuck it. I overcame my worst writers block by learning how to play guitar

require an idea but the truth is i have nothing and im not sure how to get an idea or if its even possible for me due to my autism or how my brain works.

Creativity is just connecting two or more seemingly unrelated things, and combining them into something new. People with autism are definitely capable of doing that, even if it might require a non-traditional approach or different ways of getting there for you.

You can start generating ideas just by practising combining different things and seeing what happens. For example, maybe you like music. Take your favourite tune and try it with instruments that were never intended to play it. Speed up different parts and add a new beat to match a different song you enjoy, slow parts down, change the key, etc. If you like the result, keep adding. Maybe you’ll find a pattern in the combination you enjoy and you can combine that with something else. Maybe you don’t like it, start with 2 different new ingredients. Or still use it and think about what you could add or take away to like it more.

It doesn’t have to be music, it could be programming or drawing or data analytics or writing or cooking or lego or anything.

By practising combining things snd evaluating the result, you are generating ideas. At some point eventually, one of them will be something you enjoy building on.

Add in a dash of “trying something new” if you think you can manage that too!

I read in Why we sleep by Matt Walker that in your sleep, your brain starts experimenting with making connections between concepts it wouldn’t make while awake, i.e. when it’s job is to navigate the real world using logic and sanity (and that apparently is one of the proposed explanation for why dreams get so weird, illogical and random). In the book, he also writes about Thomas Edison’s method for recording the dream induced ideas and novel connections of concepts. Edison would sit in the chair with three metal balls in his hand, the arm on the armrest, such that the hand with balls was hanging off the chair. Directly underneath that hand he would place a pan. Once he fell asleep deep enough to start dreaming, his muscles would relax, release the balls that in turn would make a noise hitting the pan, waking Edison up, giving him the chance to write down whatever he was dreaming about.

I don’t know if you can actually use the technique, but I thought I’d share.

Edit: typo

Something I was taught in college helps me a lot. Identify the problem, then think about the problem you wish to solve, then create a word cloud about what you know. Research the topic, and expand the word cloud. Then, when you have some knowledge, attempt to produce drafts of what could solve the problem. See what can be improved, and iterate. In my case, this was for graphic design, but it’s helped me in illustration when I’m fresh out of ideas, and in creative writing (as a DM). I’ve realized it was sort of like design thinking mixed with lateral thinking. It’s about tackling problems through a methodological creative process, to eliminate bias and inform decisions as much as possible.

For a stretch of time after college I had issues with creative solutions even with that method, however. After finally being checked out by a psychiatrist, it turns out I was depressed and anxious to high heaven. After I started taking medications and doing what my psychologist taught me, not only did the classical symptoms of GAD, depression and adhd ameliorate, I started to feel creative again.

As for the sticky note thing you mentioned, I tried that and ended up having piles of sticky notes that I couldn’t easily recall. I started using google keep at first, and now use Notion instead. Wish there was a FOSS detective board style app or something to map my ideas and write down simple notes. Would help me organize my mind a lot.

Edit: also, for reference, I’ve scored high on self-diagnosis exams on embrace autism, but wasn’t diagnosed with it. Idk if my psychologist is up to date with the current science, because the reason she gave me for not diagnosing me with it was because I’m not violent, everything else checked out. And afaik, not all autistic people lash out violently when frustrated. Idk, just wanted to put this out there.

Walks, showers, naps, repeat cycle. That’s how I do it.

Start with something specific, like a character or a setting and think about what it could be like. Sketch and get ideas on paper. It doesn’t have to be good but you have to start somewhere to learn what works and what doesn’t.

How do you process information best? Some writers have elaborate timelines of their character arcs drawn out on paper, while some have a spreadsheet of character info, and others just write what comes to mind and edit as they go.

When I ask you what your favorite movie is, what do you consider to pare the list down? Is that answer influenced by me at all? If the answer to that is yes, do you actually have ideas but your brain won’t let you believe they are creative because you think others would react negatively?

Maybe you should write a very short story and post it online for feedback as a first exploratory step. I think you can do it. If all else fails just sit down and start typing your comic book. Nobody has to see it.

The best method to get the brain active to create something is to build things. If you don’t have any new ideas, start by building something that already exists.

Look into design thinking and in particular ideation. There are lots of formal processes, exercises, activities, etc. that are used by individuals and teams in all sorts of contexts specifically for coming up with ideas. The process is usually one of throwing a bunch of things on the table, sorting through them, getting rid of most of them, elaborating on the ones that seem interesting, then following one to completion, or at least to some sort of first draft/prototype/mockup. You then decide whether or not you want to work on the draft further, or decide that it’s a dead end and start from scratch. The thing with “ideas” is that all of them are terrible and only serve to help guide us towards doing something interesting. Creating things is an intensely iterative process, and what you start with is unlikely to look much like what you end up with after a number of iterations.

Ideas are also all derivative. There are no new ideas, just riffs on existing ones. Even most interesting and innovative works have been influenced by past works, or works from different disciplines, or inspired by nature. If you’re looking to make a short comic, start by figuring out what works and artists and styles you like. Try recreating parts of them, or emulating them, or combining elements of them, and see if the results speak to you. That’s one of the few actually useful applications of LLM AI. You can quickly test concepts, maintain some elements and discard others, do mashups, etc. When something grabs you, try to figure out what it is that resonates about it, then try to recreate it with your own spin.

Ultimately, ideas are just prompts for doing work, and having a good idea (to the extent that such a thing even exists) is far less important than being willing to test a number of ideas to find out what will motivate you to spend real time and effort on creating something.

What gets my brain going is actually engaging with the subject. What I mean by that is the following: Let’s say I wanted to further my DnD World. The best way for me to to that is by either playing some myself or sometimes it’s enough to just watch some content related to DnD or Just worldbuilding. I guess what I’m saying is fill the brain with Stuff similar to what you want to do and the desire to do it combined with being already there mentally will do the rest (at least for me)

Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies » http://stoney.sb.org/eno/oblique.html

• If this doesn’t work
• You must go into the kitchen and pour out a saucer of cream
• Place it by the foot of the bed and say,
• “Here, kitty kitty kitty kitty kitty
• Kitty kitty kitty kitty kitty
• Here, kitty kitty kitty kitty kitty
• Kitty kitty kitty kitty kitty
• Here, kitty kitty kitty kitty kitty
• Kitty kitty kitty kitty kitty
• Here, kitty kitty kitty kitty kitty kitty kitty kitty kitty kitty
• Here, kitty kitty kitty kitty kitty
• Kitty kitty kitty kitty kitty
• Here, kitty kitty kitty kitty kitty
• Kitty kitty kitty kitty kitty
• Here, kitty kitty kitty kitty kitty
• Kitty kitty kitty kitty kitty”

I go for a walk outside and let my mind wander.