Category: Creativity

Creativity on demand

Neera

Lately, I have been lamenting that I do not have time for creativity.  

My excuses are: it is winter, it is too cold, days are shorter, I am too tired, and I need to wind down after coming back from work. Blah! Blah! Blah!

In Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time, John Robinson, a sociologist, in an interview with the writer Brigid Schulte says:

“It’s very popular, the feeling that there are too many things going on, that people can’t get in control of their lives. But when we look at peoples’ diaries, there just doesn’t seem to be the evidence to back it up.”  

She has nailed it. Time is not the issue. There are so many other factors at play. Lack of prioritization, the tendency to procrastinate, and preoccupation are to name a few. (There are tons more, I just picked some starting with the letter ‘P’)

What is the solution?

In one of my previous posts, I talked about the four stages of the creative process where an idea needs to go through preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification.

Creativity takes time.

But what if you can take ideas through these stages quickly so that there is something tangible at the end of the process? Something that gets your creative juices flowing.

Well, I found this technique by William Burroughs, which has been around for ages.

In the mid-twentieth century, William S. Burroughs, one of the most adventurous writers, famously employed the cut-up method to override the inner critic.

In Burroughs’ own words:

“The method is simple. Here is one way to do it. Take a page like this page. Now cut down the middle and cross the middle. You have four sections: 1 2 3 4 … one, two, three, four. Now rearrange the sections, placing section four with section one and section two with section three. And you have a new page. Sometimes it says much the same thing. Sometimes something quite different–(cutting up political speeches is an interesting exercise)–in any case, you will find that it says something and something quite definite. Take any poet or writer you fancy. Hearsay, or poems you have read over many times. The words have lost meaning and life through years of repetition. Now take the poem and type out selected passages. Fill a page with excerpts. Now cut the page. You have a new poem. As many poems as you like.”

This is one way of doing it. There could be infinite ways to do it. I cut short paragraphs from four different articles and then put four of them together to make a story. It worked like magic.

Now it can be creative on demand.

Here is the video on William S. Burroughs you can listen to:

Four stages of Creative Process

Neera

English socialist and social psychologist Graham Wallas proposed four stages of the creative process in his book The Art of Thought, published in 1926.

These stages are:

  • Preparation
  • Incubation
  • Illumination
  • Verification

The preparation is the feeding stage. Your brain is hungry for knowledge, so you got to feed it. At this stage, your brain is like to sponge, soaking in everything, storing it, and making subconscious connections.

During the incubation stage, your brain is still making connections. Forcing it to come up with a unique and special idea during this stage is asking for too much. Let it do its work. It knows there is all this good material it has stored in its files. It hasn’t indexed that material yet.

Illumination is the stage when your brain comes up with great ideas, connecting pieces you had been looking for, causing you to leap out of your chair and scream “EUREKA!” These “lightbulb moments” happen at all sorts of awkward places—in the shower, just before you fall asleep, on long walks alone, or on a solitary drive in the car.

In the final stage, called verification, your brain takes that beautiful, shining lump of clay and molds it into the perfect statue. It evaluates the idea, verifying that it is a realistic idea, and starts building the surrounding framework to bring it to life.

The Art of Thought is out of print, but the following excerpt from it beautifully explains that our brain can be in one or all of these four stages at a time. They are constantly overlapping each other as we’re exposed to new exploration and experiences.

In the daily stream of thought, these four different stages constantly overlap each other as we explore different problems. An economist reading a Blue Book, a physiologist watching an experiment, or a businessman going through his morning’s letters, may at the same time be “incubating” on a problem which he proposed to himself a few days ago, be accumulating knowledge in “preparation” for a second problem, and be “verifying” his conclusions on a third problem. Even in exploring the same problem, the mind may be unconsciously incubating on one aspect of it, while it is consciously employed in preparing for or verifying another aspect. And it must always be remembered that much very important thinking, done for instance, by a poet exploring his own memories, or by a man trying to see clearly his emotional relation to his country or his party, resembles musical composition in that the stages leading to success are not very easily fitted into a “problem and solution” scheme. Yet, even when success in thought means the creation of something felt to be beautiful and true rather than the solution of a prescribed problem, the four stages of Preparation, Incubation, Illumination, and the Verification of the final result can generally be distinguished from each other.”

Source: Brain Pickings

Deep dive in creativity

Neera

Below are ten things I find worth sharing this week.

  1. This week I explored creativity. From trying to figure out What is creativity, I explored Is being creative means being original, and shared the Seven Principles of Creative Living.
  2. “Creative is not a Noun” post by Austin Kleon is priceless. I recommend that if you do nothing else this week but find an hour to listen to his video you will have the magic formula you are looking for to unleash your creativity.
  3. Did you know that 72% of people have creative insights in showers? Or that trauma has hidden creative properties? 7 Surprising Facts about Creativity reveals how the brain’s creative circuitry holds some unexpected secrets that scientists are only just beginning to understand.
  4. The most impressive post on beloved writer Oliver Sacks’ Creative Process, his never-before-seen manuscripts, brainstorm sheets, and notes on writing, creativity, and the brain.
  5. My deep dive into understanding creativity got scientific with Your Brain on Creativity article on Psychology Today. Check it out, it might be a little heavy reading, but the conclusions or two scientific studies are priceless.
  6. How about this for an everyday story? A humble seven-year-old boy, Jack Berne, started Fiver for a Farmer campaign with his schoolmate with a goal to raise $20,000 for drought-stricken farmers has unexpectedly raised a massive $1 million.
  7. I found this inspiring story of a home cooking blogger who is replacing her lawyer income with a blogging income. Libby Hakim of Cooking with Nana shares how a series of four mini-breakthroughs led to her discovering how to replace her previous job as a lawyer with income from her blog.
  8. What is synaesthesia and what’s it like to have it?
  9. It is so accurate that it is almost freaky. I took this 16 Personalities test and finally found out why I do what I do. Try it, it is free.
  10. The book I am reading and immensely enjoying at the moment is Deep Work.

Seven Principles of Creative Living

Neera

Lawrence G Boldt, a writer, career consultant, and personal coach, gives seven principles for creative living in his book How to Be, Do or Have Anything:

1. Among human beings, creativity is a natural, and not an exceptional, trait. Birds fly, fish swim, and humans create.

2. For the individual, personal freedom and self-fulfillment depend upon the conscious expression of his or her innate creative capacities. Without such expression, one will meet with unhappiness and unnecessary limitation.

3. Social and psychological factors may limit or impede an individual’s innate creativity. These factors can be overcome.

4. The creative process follows a definitive pattern and is essentially the same for all outcomes.

5. The creative process is knowable and understandable. It can be taught and learned.

6. The more one creates, the more confident he or she becomes in his or her ability to create.

7. Experience gained in applying the creative process in one area of life can be transferred to other areas.

Is being creative means being original?

Neera

What is being creative mean to you?

If you think a creative is someone who creates something unique out of the blue, then you are as wrong as I was when I didn’t understand creativity.

Creativity is nothing more than a process. A process of creating something. From imagination to reality. From an idea to a tangible thing. We all create something all the time. That should be enough to make us all creatives.

But we don’t feel creative because we don’t think we are creating something ‘original.’ Because the literary definition of creativity is the “use of imagination or original ideas to create something new.”

Most of us get fixed on the idea of being original.

How to be original when everything has been done before? All story plots have been used endlessly, every emotion has been exploited, songs repeat themselves and there is no new way to paint the sky.

We get so obsessed with being original that we stop creating. We get frustrated because we can’t find a new way. All the time we are looking for a completely original way to do things.

This is where we are mistaken.

The true creators know there is nothing new under the sun. The concept has been best explained by Jobs, a genius in creativity. He writes in I, Steve: Steve Jobs in His Own Words.

“When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.

Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.”

In a beautiful article for The Atlantic, Nancy Andreasen, a neuroscientist who has spent decades studying creativity, writes:

“[C]reative people are better at recognizing relationships, making associations and connections, and seeing things in an original way—seeing things that others cannot see. … Having too many ideas can be dangerous. Part of what comes with seeing connections no one else sees is that not all of these connections actually exist.“

James Webb Young offered the same point of view many years earlier:

“An idea is nothing more nor less than a new combination of old elements [and] the capacity to bring old elements into new combinations depends largely on the ability to see relationships.”

Creativity belongs to the artist in each one of us. To create means to relate. The root meaning of the word art is to ‘fit together’ and we all do this every day. Not all of us are painters, but we are all artists.

Each time we fit things together, we are creating—whether it is to make a loaf of bread, a child, or a day.

“This energy which we call “making” is the relating of parts to make a new whole. The result might be a painting, a symphony, or a building. If the job is done well, the work of art gives us an experience of wholeness called ecstasy—a moment of rising above our feelings of separateness, competition, and divisiveness “to a state of exalted delight in which normal understanding is felt to be surpassed.”

In this video, How to be Creative, a web series exploring art, internet culture, and people creating it, filmmaker Kirby Ferguson urges people to let go of this romanticized idea of “originality.”

He agrees ideas don’t actually come out of thin air; in your subconscious, you were still processing all these influences from memories, education, experiences, etc.

He also mentions that humans create new ideas by copying, transforming, and combining other ideas.

Artists take existing ideas that nobody would have thought of combining and connecting them; making them work.

So, in nutshell, creativity is nothing more than connecting pre-existing ideas into new ideas.

We all are capable of doing it.

What is creativity?

Neera

If you are going to live a creative life, it is better to understand what creativity is. 

The Oxford dictionary defines creativity as the “use of imagination or original ideas to create something.”

But this definition is in direct contradiction with a much more cited quote from the Bible: “There is nothing new under the sun.” (Ecclesiastes 1:9).

If you need more of an artist’s definition, this one by Pearl S. Buck is quite up to the mark.

“The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him… a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god and failure is death.  Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create… so that without the creation of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating.”

Albert O. Hirschman spoke about the elusive nature of creativity.

“Creativity always comes in surprise to us; therefore, we can never count on it and we dare not believe in it until it has happened. In other words, we would not consciously engage in tasks whose success clearly requires that creativity be forthcoming. Hence, the only way in which we can bring our creative resources fully into play is by misjudging the nature of the task, by presenting it to ourselves as more routine, simple, undemanding of genuine creativity than it will turn out to be.”

Don Roff validated the fears of many of us with this quote.

“Regarding the creative: never assume you’re the master, only the student. Your audience will determine if you’re masterful.”

Mary Oliver put in words why many of us never lead creative lives.

“The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”

But it was Lady Gaga who put the finger on the pulse of creativity.

“When you make music or write or create, it’s really your job to have mind-blowing, irresponsible, condomless sex with whatever idea it is you’re writing about at the time.”