Top artists reveal how to find creative inspiration

Guy Garvey, Isaac Julien, Martha Wainwright and other artists give their top tips for unleashing your inner genius

Polly Stenham, Guy Garvey, Tamara Rojo, Mark-Anthony Turnage, Fyfe Dangerfield, Martha Wainright, Anthony Neilson, Rupert Goold, Isaac Julien, Lucy Prebble, Jasmin Vardimon, Sunand Prasad, Susan Philipsz, Akram Khan, Polly Morgan, Kate Royal, Ian Rickson, Olivia Williams, Martin Parr, Wayne McGregor

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Guy Garvey

Guy Garvey. Photograph: Fabio De Paola/Rex Features

Guy Garvey, musician

• For fear of making us sound like the Waltons, my band [Elbow] are a huge source of inspiration for me. They're my peers, my family; when they come up with something impressive, it inspires me to come up with something equally impressive.

• Spending time in your own head is important. When I was a boy, I had to go to church every Sunday; the priest had an incomprehensible Irish accent, so I'd tune out for the whole hour, just spending time in my own thoughts. I still do that now; I'm often scribbling down fragments that later act like trigger-points for lyrics.

• A blank canvas can be very intimidating, so set yourself limitations. Mine are often set for me by the music the band has come up with. With The Birds, for instance – the first song on our last album – the band already had this great groove going, and I knew I wanted the vocals to reflect the bass-line, so that was immediately something to work with.

• Just start scribbling. The first draft is never your last draft. Nothing you write is by accident.

• The best songs often take two disparate ideas and make them fit together. When I started writing lyrics for The Birds, I was sitting in a cottage in the grounds of Peter Gabriel's Real World studios. I was looking out at the birds outside, starting to think of lyrics about them; and then I thought about the last time I'd been there, 10 years before, at the end of a great love affair. I thought, how can I combine these two ideas? So I came up with an idea about a love affair that had ended in a field, with birds as the only witnesses.

• Don't be scared of failure.

• If it's all getting too intense, remember it's only a song. I learned that the hard way: when I was younger, I played the part of the erratic, irascible drunk in order to have something to write about.

• The best advice I've ever had came about 20 years ago from Mano McLaughlin, one of Britain's best songwriters. "The song is all," he said, "Don't worry about what the rest of the music sounds like: you have a responsibility to the song." I found that really inspiring: it reminded me not to worry about whether a song sounds cool, or fits with everything we've done before – but just to let the song be what it is.

Polly Stenham, playwright

Playwright Polly Stenham at the Royal court theatre

Playwright Polly Stenham at the Royal court theatre. Photograph: Andy Hall for the Guardian

• Listen to music I always have music on while I'm writing. I'm a very aural person; as soon as I hear a lyric or phrase, I'm transported to a particular time or place. My taste varies wildly. When I was writing That Face, I listened to Love Her Madly by the Doors, which seemed to say a lot about the characters' relationship with their mother. For Tusk Tusk, I played Radiohead's album In Rainbows over and over. One lyric, about being an animal stuck in car, even made it into the play's plotline.

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• Doodle I'm very fidgety, and I seem to work best when my hands are occupied with something other than what I'm thinking about. During rehearsals, I find myself drawing little pictures or symbols that are somehow connected to the play. With Tusk Tusk, it was elephants, clowns and dresses on hangers. I'll look back at my doodles later, and random snatches of dialogue will occur to me.

• Go for a walk Every morning I go to Hampstead Heath [in north London], and I often also go for a wander in the middle of the day to think through a character or situation. I listen to music as I go. Again, it's about occupying one part of your brain, so that the other part is clear to be creative.

Tamara Rojo, ballet dancer

Ballet dancer Tamara Rojo

Ballet dancer Tamara Rojo. Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian

I seek inspiration in film, theatre, music, art – and in watching other ballet companies, other dancers, and other types of dance. I never feel jealous of another good dancer: I always feel there is so much to learn from them.

An idea never comes to me suddenly; it sits inside me for a while, and then emerges. When I'm preparing for a particular character, I look for ideas about her wherever I can. When I first danced Giselle, I found Lars von Trier's film Dancer in the Dark incredibly inspiring. It was so dark, and it felt just like a modern-day version of Giselle – the story of a young woman taken advantage of by others. It brought the part alive for me. Now when I talk to others who are playing Giselle, they sometimes say they're worried that it feels like a parody, and not relevant to today. I tell them to watch that film and see how modern it can be.

To be truly inspired, you must learn to trust your instinct, and your creative empathy. Don't over-rehearse a part, or you'll find you get bored with it. Hard work is important, but that comes before inspiration: in your years of training, in your ballet class, in the Pilates classes. That work is there just to support your instinct and your ability to empathise. Without those, you can still give a good, technically correct performance – but it will never be magical.

Mark-Anthony Turnage, composer

• Forget the idea that inspiration will come to you like a flash of lightning. It's much more about hard graft.

• Find a quiet studio to work in. Shostakovich could not have composed with the telly on.

• Try to find a studio with more than one window. I work best when I have windows in two walls, for some reason; maybe it is because there is more light. At the moment, I'm working in a room with no windows. It's not going well at all.

• Routine is really important. However late you went to bed the night before, or however much you had to drink, get up at the same time each day and get on with it. When I was composing [the opera] Anna Nicole, I was up at 5 or 6am, and worked through until lunch. The afternoon is the worst time for creativity.

• If you write something in the evening or at night, look back over it the next morning. I tend to be less self-critical at night; sometimes, I've looked back at things I wrote the night before, and realised they were no good at all.

• If you get overexcited by an idea, take a break and come back to it later. It is all about developing a cold eye with which to look over your own work.

• Take a break of two to three weeks after finishing a work, and before sending it off to wherever it has to go. That is difficult if you have a deadline – but it is very important in terms of developing an overall view of what works and what doesn't.

Fyfe Dangerfield, musician

I used to think that being inspired was about sitting around waiting for ideas to come to you. That can happen occasionally: sometimes, I'm walking down the street and suddenly hear a fragment of music that I can later work into a song. But generally, it's not like that at all. I liken the process to seeing ghosts: the ideas are always there, half-formed. It's about being in the right state of mind to take them and turn them into something that works.

One of the most difficult things about writing music is the sheer number of distractions: mobiles, email, Twitter, YouTube. When you're writing, you have to be very disciplined, to the point of being awkward: turn off your phone and find a space to work without any of these distractions.

For me, the image of the tortured artist is a myth – you don't need to be miserable to write songs. In fact, if I am feeling down, the last thing I want to do is write; though it's important sometimes just to sit down and get on with it, however you're feeling. Your creativity is like a tap: if you don't use it, it gets clogged up.

We all have that small voice that tells us we're rubbish, and we need to learn when to silence it. Early in the songwriting process, comparisons do nothing but harm: sometimes I put on a David Bowie record and think, "Why do I bother?" But when it comes to recording or mixing, you do need to be your own critic and editor. It's a bit like having children: you don't interfere with the birth, but as your child grows up, you don't let it run wild.

Martha Wainwright, singer-songwriter

I definitely don't have rules – I'm pretty disorganised. In fact, I often have to guilt-trip myself into sitting down to write. It is so easy to let your life get filled up with other stuff – cooking, cleaning, going to the bank, looking after your baby. These everyday things do come through in my songwriting, though. Most of my songs are defined by a sense of loneliness, of isolation, that I probably get from spending a lot of time on my own.

The little images that I get from sitting alone in my apartment – the way the light is falling through the window; the man I just saw walk by on the other side of the street – find their way into snatches of lyrics. I write in short spurts – for five, 10, 15 minutes – then I pace around the room, or go and get a snack.

When I first moved to New York some years ago, I used to go to concerts every night – I would see six or seven musicians a week. Now that I'm a songwriter myself, I find watching other musicians can be frustrating – I want to be the one up there performing. But every so often I see someone who inspires me to try something different. That happened recently with Sufjan Stevens – I saw him perform in Prospect Park, and his sound was so huge and poppy that I went home thinking: "I should really try something like that."

Anthony Neilson, playwright and director

• Don't forget to have a life. It's important to look outside the business. There are so many great stories out there that have nothing to do with the theatre, or with other writers.

•Be as collaborative as possible. I do a lot of my thinking once I'm in the rehearsal room – I'm inspired by the actors or designers I'm working with. Other creative people are a resource that needs to be exploited.

• Try to ignore the noise around you: the chatter, the parties, the reviews, the envy, the shame.

• Listen to music to find a way into the story you're telling. Music is incredibly evocative: find the right piece that reflects the world you're writing about, and you're halfway there. When I wrote my play Penetrator, I listened to a miserable Sade song on a loop. Listen to a song enough times, and it provokes a Pavlovian response that helps you get back to the place you're writing about.

• Masturbate frequently. You'll probably do that anyway, but you may as well make it a rule.

Rupert Goold, director

• Get an alarm with a long snooze function and set it early. Shallow-sleep dreams have been the source of many of my best ideas (sadly, small children are no respecters of prospective genius).

• The best ideas are tested by their peaks and troughs. One truly great image or scene astride a broken mess is more intriguing than a hundred well-made cliches.

• Once you have an idea, scrutinise the precedent. If no one has explored it before in any form then you're 99% likely to be making a mistake. But that 1% risk is why we do it.

• Make sure you are asking a question that is addressed both to the world around you and the world within you. It's the only way to keep going when the doubt sets in.

• I always try to reshape my ideas in other forms: dance, soap opera, Olympic competition, children's games, pornography – anything that will keep turning them for possibilities.

• I prepare less and less as I get older, and try to lose my script in the first few days. In the collaborative arts, the more open you are to shared inspiration, the richer the work. Or maybe I'm just getting lazy.

• An idea is just a map. The ultimate landscape is only discovered when it's under foot, so don't get too bogged down in its validity.

• Love the effect over its cause.

Isaac Julien, artist

I have a magpie attitude to inspiration: I seek it from all sorts of sources; anything that allows me to think about how culture comes together. I'm always on the lookout – I observe people in the street; I watch films, I read, I think about the conversations that I have. I consider the gestures people use, or the colours they're wearing. It's about taking all the little everyday things and observing them with a critical eye; building up a scrapbook which you can draw on. Sometimes, too, I look at other artworks or films to get an idea of what not to do.

It's very important for inspiration to go elsewhere: to move away from the city into pastoral settings, and to make space for meditation. I also enjoy talking to people who aren't involved in art. For my recent work, I've had a lot of conversations with people involved in digital technologies. It's useful to get perspective on what you do by talking to all sorts of different people.

Lucy Prebble, playwright

Lucy Prebble.

Lucy Prebble. Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian

• Act it out yourself. Draw the curtains.

• If ever a character asks another character, "What do you mean?", the scene needs a rewrite.

• Feeling intimidated is a good sign. Writing from a place of safety produces stuff that is at best dull and at worst dishonest.

• It's OK to use friends and lovers in your work. They are curiously flattered.

• Imagine the stage, not the location.

• Write backwards. Start from the feeling you want the audience to have at the end and then ask "How might that happen?" continually, until you have a beginning.

• Reveal yourself in your writing, especially the bits you don't like.

• Accept that, as a result, people you don't know won't like you.

• Try not to give characters jobs that really only appear in plays; the deliberately idiosyncratic (eg "the guy who changes the posters on huge billboards at night") or the solipsistic (eg "writer").

• Write about what you don't know. If you know what you think about something, you can say so in a sentence – it doesn't take a play.

• An apparently intractable narrative problem is often its own solution if you dramatise the conflict it contains.

• Surround yourself with people who don't mind you being a bit absent and a bit flakey.

• Be nice to them. They put up with a lot.

• Break any rule if you know deep inside that it is important.

Jasmin Vardimon, choreographer

Usually, I become aware of what has inspired me only towards the end of the creative process, or much later. These are the sorts of things that motivate me:

• Places that have certain emotional dynamics: hospitals, parks, court rooms, therapy rooms.

• Significant moments in my life that sharpen my senses, make me listen carefully, look for the detail, and awaken my curiosity.

• Things that keep dragging my attention and my thoughts, haunting me at night.

• Books, especially those that make me want to check their bibliographies.

• A sentence I read or hear.

• Things that my daughter says or does.

• Contradictions and double meanings in language or actions.

• Ugliness.

• My dancers, the artists I collaborate with.

• Questions I can't answer easily.

Sunand Prasad, architect

• Keep asking: "What is really going on here?" – like a detective (or Rudolf Steiner).

• Immerse yourself in the worlds of the people who will use and encounter the building or place.

• Forget the building for a while. Focus totally on what people will be doing in the spaces and places you are designing – next year, in five years, in 20.

• The most inspiring thing is to see human ingenuity in action – it is all around us.

• Ask off-piste questions. What if this library were a garden? If this facade could speak, would it be cooing, swearing, silent, erudite?

• Keep practising scales. Architectural problems and propositions have many scales simultaneously – keep ranging across them.

• Gather inquisitive and reflective people around you. The rapid bouncing back and forth of an idea can generate compelling concepts at amazing speed.

• Once there's an idea, turn it upside down and take it seriously for a moment – even if it seems silly.

• We all have a sense of the sublime – use it to test your propositions as rigorously as logic and functionality.

Susan Philipsz, artist

• If you have a good idea, stick to it. Especially if realising the project is a long and demanding process, try to keep true to the spirit of the initial idea.

• Daydream. Give yourself plenty of time to do nothing. Train journeys are good.

• Be open to your surroundings. I try to find inspiration in the character of the place I'm exhibiting in. It helps me if I can respond to something that is already there.

• Always have something to write with. I seldom draw these days, but I need a pen in my hand to think.

• I like reading and watching movies, but mostly I find that it's things I have seen or read a long time ago that come back to me. The things that you found inspiring when you were starting out usually stay with you.

• Keep it simple.

• Be audacious.

• It doesn't always have to make sense.

• I love silence. I can't listen to music while I work and I need to be alone.

• I go through messy phases and tidy phases. Being messy during a tidy phase is never good, and vice versa.

Akram Khan, dancer and choreographer

Akram Khan in Desh

Akram Khan in Desh. Photograph: Alastair Muir/Rex Features

• Collaborate Go on a journey with someone who is as different to you as chalk and cheese. I am inspired by the dialogue between two different bodies, two different minds, two different ways of expressing a single idea.

• Observe I observe my surroundings acutely – an animal in the city streets, a man in the wilderness.

• Displace yourself I am always inspired by things that are placed in an unfamiliar territory. Even after 37 years, I still feel displaced within my own body: I have never felt completely at ease with it.

• Find stories I am inspired by stories of people, of communities, of different cultures, of new history that we are writing or forming. Mostly, I am inspired by children and their grandparents: the way their faces dance.

• Let go The subconscious part of myself creates far more interesting things than the conscious part can ever dream of.

Akram Khan's Desh premiered at the Curve Theatre, Leicester in 2011.

Polly Morgan, artist

• Don't wait for a good idea to come to you. Start by realising an average idea – no one has to see it. If I hadn't made the works I'm ashamed of, the ones I'm proud of wouldn't exist.

• Leave the house. Or better still, go to Battersea Dogs & Cats Home and rescue a staffie. I did so partly to get out more, as I was spending too much time surrounded by the same objects, within the same walls. The sense of guilt I feel when my dogs are indoors forces me out at regular intervals. One of my favourite new ideas came about when I stopped to examine a weed growing in the forest I walk in.

• Hard work isn't always productive. Your brain needs periods of inactivity. I think of it as a field lying fallow; keep harvesting and the crops won't mature.

• Don't restrict yourself to your own medium. It is just as possible to be inspired by a film-maker, fashion designer, writer or friend than another artist. Cross-pollination makes for an interesting outcome.

• Be brief, concise and direct. Anyone who over-complicates things is at best insecure and at worst stupid. Children speak the most sense and they haven't read Nietzsche.

• Don't try to second-guess what people will want to buy. Successful artists have been so because they have shown people something they hadn't imagined. If buyers all knew what they wanted before it had been made, they could have made it themselves, or at least commissioned it.

• Don't be afraid to scrap all your hard work and planning and do it differently at the last minute. It's easier to hold on to an idea because you're afraid to admit you were wrong than to let it go.

Kate Royal, opera singer

Soprano Kate Royal

Soprano Kate Royal. Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Guardian

• Don't expect inspiration to happen when anyone else is watching. It usually happens when you are on your own, and it's gone in a second.

• Inspiration on stage is a controlled version of what you might experience in the practice room. As opera singers, we are bound by many rules – musically, dramatically, interpretatively. When inspiration strikes, you have to hope that the other 10 people on stage will give you space to wallow in your "moment".

• Try not to analyse other voices and interpretations too much. Of course we gain inspiration from the greats, but it is best found in the the opera's score or in the poetry. If this doesn't inspire you, then you are in the wrong job.

• Mistakes can be inspiring – allow yourself to take risks, and do what scares you. People might remember the colour of your dress and what encore you sang, but no one will remember if you forgot a word or if your phrasing didn't go to plan.

• Remember that art is everywhere. It's amazing what you can find inspiring on the No 464 bus from Peckham.

• Alcohol and singing are not a good combination – not in opera, anyway. The more you drink, the uglier you sound.

• Be kind to your voice. If you want it to inspire you, you have to inspire it, with lots of rest, steam, sweets and a good talking to every now and again.

• Don't Google yourself or your reviews. It can only end in misery – you either believe the crap or the good, or none of it at all.

• Let the audience into your world and you are bound to receive inspiration from them. Sometimes even the man asleep at the back has inspired me to sing with a little more "edge".

• Get some perspective. I always thought I had to have music every second of every day, or I wouldn't survive. The truth is that when I step back from it and learn to enjoy the more mundane aspects of life, I appreciate my music so much more.

Ian Rickson, director

• Hang on in there. Inspiration can come at any time, even after it feels like you haven't been getting anywhere. Keep your stamina up, don't force too hard, and trust that you will find your way.

• Try to create an atmosphere where people feel free to take risks. Fear can shut down creativity, as can the pressure to impress.

• Enable the power of the group, so that what can be collectively achieved transcends the pressure upon any single person.

• Trust the ingenuity and instinctiveness of actors. Surround them with the right conditions and they'll teach you so much.

• You cannot overprepare. Enjoy being as searching and thorough as possible before you begin, so you can be as free as possible once you've started.

• Questions often open the doors of the imagination, even if we feel we should provide answers.

• Embrace new challenges. When we're reaching for things, we tend to be more creative.

• Try to remove your own ego from the equation. It can get in the way.

• Work hard and relish the opportunities.

• Take a deep breath, and a leap of faith.

Olivia Williams, actor

Olivia Williams

Olivia Williams. Photograph: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian

• Stay open. Acting is specific, because it requires co-operation and social interaction – both to observe, experience and empathise with other human behaviours in order to reproduce them believably on stage or screen, or just to work with other actors to create a scene.

•Relax. That doesn't mean the work itself or the preparation is relaxed, but the beginning of the process – the reading of the script and the vision of how it can be realised – is not forced. Then, when inspiration has struck, comes the messy process of practicalities.

Martin Parr, photographer

We live in a difficult but inspiring world, and there is so much out there that I want to record. However you cannot photograph everything, so I have to select subjects that throw light on the relationship I have with the world. This is often expressed as an ambiguity or a contradiction.

Look at tourism, for example. We have an idea of what a famous site will look like as w've seen the photos – but when you get there, the reality is usually different. This rub between mythology and reality is the inspiration – and the contradiction.

Inspiration can also come when a good connection is made with the subject. The nature and quality of this connection can vary enormously. It may range from getting into a small community and winning the trust of the subjects over a number of visits; but it could also come from walking in the mountains and feeling a certain affinity with the landscape.

The knack is to find your own inspiration, and take it on a journey to create work that is personal and revealing.

Wayne McGregor, choreographer

• Do

• Empty

• Panic

• Forage

• Generate

• Embody

• Edit

• Decide

• Persist

• Practise

Interviews by Laura Barnett

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