I was working on a character for an X-Men fanfiction yesterday and had to come up with a whole mess of different mutant powers to go with various characters so I just started trying to think of something. At first, I went out and looked up the powers that people thought were over and under used, then just went to various topics within wikipedia and started coming up with ideas that I thought would work or be interesting. I went from the laws of science to methods of predicting the future to magic based powers to medical… I came up with something like 70 different mutant powers.

The reason I bring it up is because, while I was looking up the over and under used powers, I also came across a thread that was basically “hey lets see if we can come up with some new mutant powers!” and it seemed like every other post was “oh I couldn’t really think of anything…” I just randomly skipped around in various topics on wikipedia and came up with over 70 and you can’t even come up with 1??? And don’t go on about how “oh well you have a better imagination” or “you’re more creative than me”, sorry but I think that’s bullshit.

People need to actually put effort into what their doing, to actually try. No thinking about it for a minute (or maybe two) and then giving up and complaining that you can’t think of anything. It’s no wonder your writing/character/whatever sucks if that’s all the time you spend working on the ideas. And it didn’t take me hours to come up with each of those 70 either, all I did was take a bit of time to get inspired by reading about random things and thinking “how can I turn this into an interesting power” and bang I would come up with like 3 or 4 at once. Those weren’t your “generic” kind of powers either, like some simple variation of telekinesis or something.

Nothing is instantaneous and that includes creativity and imagination. Put some work into it and stop complaining that you “just can’t think of anything.” Honestly, if people spent the same amount of time getting inspired as they do complaining that their not, than there would be so much more creativity in the world.