Tom Kuegler wrote the other day, “If writing an article feels like pulling teeth, then you need to change the topic.”

Lately, I have been feeling that my writing is getting stale. That I am running out of fresh ideas. I love writing about traveling, writing, productivity, and personal development, but I can’t do it over and over again. It feels like I am just adding to the noise.

So I changed the topic. I created a comic strip.

I gave the main character my name — Gogi. My nickname. The name my grandfather gave me. A name nobody has. And today, I found a comic character with the same name. A Pakistani girl created it. She gave her heroine my name! And she sketches much better than me. BBC even did a story about her and her comics.

But her topics are different. She creates comics about women’s issues and social constraints, whereas I will tackle productivity, writing, and creativity challenges.

Most people, when they think of creativity, they think of art. They think of writing, music, painting, theatre, movies, dancing, and making sculptures.

But creativity isn’t just limited to arts. One can be creative in any area of life — in science, or in business, or sport.

By creativity, I simply mean new ways of thinking about things. — John Cleese, Creativity

These notes are from John Cleese’s brilliant book aptly titled, Creativity — A Short And Cheerful Guide.

You are being creative wherever you can find a way of doing things that are better than what has been done before.

There is another myth about creativity. That you have to be born with creativity. It’s not something that can be taught.

According to John Cleese, that’s not true. Creativity can be taught. “Or more accurately,” he says, “you can teach people how to create circumstances in which they will become creative.”

John Cleese was not a creative child. When he was growing up in the forties and fifties, no one talked about creativity. It simply was not in vogue, to explore one’s creativity, like it is now. John studied maths and science in school, hardly the subjects with room for creativity. “You have to learn an awful lot of science before you can even to begin to think about taking a creative approach to it.”

When he went to Cambridge, he studied Law. Not much creativity there either, unlike now when lawyers are becoming much more creative with their practices twisting the law in favor of their clients (this pun is mine).

But when he was in Cambridge, he get to know a very nice group of people who were a part of a society called ‘Floodlights.’ They used to put on little shows on the club-room stage, performing sketches and monologues and musical items.

John desperately wanted to be part of that group of people. But to become a member of ‘Footlight’ you have to write something and perform it. John wrote a couple of sketches and performed them in the monthly meeting. They made people laugh.

“It was during the course of writing sketches — the first imaginative thing I was ever conscious of doing — that I realized that I could be ‘creative.’”

Role of the unconscious mind in creativity

Then John noticed something else. He would write a sketch in the evening and often get stuck. He would try to get unstuck by sitting late, but eventually would give up and go to bed.

“And in the morning, I’d wake up and make myself a cup of coffee, and then I’d drift over to the desk and sit at it, and almost immediately, the solution to the problem I’d been wrestling with the previous evening…became quite obvious to me!”

It was like a gift, a reward for all my wrestling with the puzzle.

So this is how he started tapping on his creativity. He would put the work in before going to bed and often would have a creative idea overnight.

Once he wrote a sketch and lost it. So he wrote it again, from memory. Then he found the sketch. Out of curiosity, he cross-matched them and found that the remembered version was better.

He began to realize that his unconscious was working on stuff all the time, without him being consciously aware of it.

The Language of the Unconscious

Then he started observing other things about the unconscious mind. This intelligent unconscious of ours is astoundingly powerful. It allows us to perform most of our tasks in life without requiring us to concentrate on them.

But that doesn’t mean that our intelligent unconscious behaves in an entirely predictable way.

Put simply, you can’t ask your unconscious a question and expect a direct answer — a neat, tidy little verbal message. This is because your unconscious communicates its knowledge to you solely through the language of the unconscious.

The language of the unconscious is not verbal. It’s like the language of dreams. It shows you images, it gives you feelings; it nudges you around without you immediately knowing what it’s getting at.

Role of Play in Creativity

A psychologist Donald MacKinnon did an experiment during the early sixties at Berkeley. He asked a number of architects who were considered the most creative ones in their profession, to describe to him what they did from the moment they got up in the morning to the moment they went to bed at night.

Then he went to a number of uncreative architects and asked them exactly the same question.

He concluded that there were only two differences between creative and uncreative architects.

• The creative architects knew how to play.
• The creative architects always deferred making decisions for as long as they were allowed.

When MacKinnon talks about ‘play’ he means the ability to get enjoyably absorbed in a puzzle: not just try to solve it so that you can get on to the next problem, but to become really curious about it for its own sake. He described this kind of activity as ‘childlike.’ Picture small children playing. They are so absorbed in what they are doing that they are not distracted, they’re just… exploring, now knowing where they’re going, and not caring either.

Children at play are totally spontaneous. They are not trying to avoid making mistakes. They don’t observe rules. It would be stupid to say to them, ‘No, you’re not doing that right.’ At the same time, because their play has no purpose, they feel utterly free from anxiety (perhaps because adults are keeping an eye on the real world for them).

Most adults, by contrast, find it hard to be playful — no doubt because they have to take care of all the responsibilities that come with an adult’s life. Creative adults, however, have not forgotten how to play.

Most people are very surprised to learn that this involves deferring decisions for as long as possible. Doesn’t this mean that the creative architects are, by definition, indecisive? Isn’t that a bit impractical and unrealistic?

No!

It simply means they are able to tolerate that vague sense of discomfort that we all feel when some important decision is left open because they know that an answer will eventually present itself.

Creative people are much better at tolerating the vague sense of worry that we all get when we leave something unresolved.

Interruptions

The greatest killer of creativity is an interruption. It pulls your mind away from what you want to be thinking about. Research has shown that, after an interruption, it can take eight minutes for you to return to your previous state of consciousness, and up to twenty minutes to get back inot a state of deep focus.

Create boundaries of space to stop others from interrupting you.

Create boundaries of time, by arranging, for a specified period, to preserve your boundaries of space.

Mistakes

When you’re being creative, there is no such thing as a mistake.

Meditation

Once you start chasing away any distracting thoughts (John does that by writing them down), you’ll discover, just like in meditation that the longer you sit there, the more your mind slows and calms down and settles. Once that starts to happen, you can begin to focus on the problem you’ve chosen to think about.

Clarity

When we’re trying to be creative, there is a real lack of clarity during most of the process. Our rational, analytical mind, of course, loves clarity — in fact, it worships it. But at the start of the creative process, things cannot be clear. They are bound to be confusing. It’s a new thought, how can you possibly understand it straight away? You’ve never been there before. It feels unfamiliar. So, much of our ‘Tortoise Mind’ work takes place in an atmosphere of uncertainty and gentle confusion.

It’s therefore really important that you don’t rush. Let these new notions of yours slowly become clearer, and clearer, and clearer.

New Ideas

When you first have a new idea, you don’t get critical too soon. New and ‘woolly’ ideas shouldn’t be attacked by your logical brain until they’ve had time to grow and become clearer and sturdier. New ideas are like small creatures. They are easily strangled.

Looking for inspiration

“When you start something creative for the first time, you have no idea what you are doing! But, whether you’re writing or painting, or composing a song, you need to start with an idea. As a beginner, it’s not likely that you’ll come up with a very good one. So ‘borrow’ an idea from someone you admire — an idea that really appeals to you personally. If you work on that, you’ll make it your own as you play with it. You’re learning, and learning from something or someone you admire is not stealing. It’s called ‘being influenced by.’”

Of course, that doesn’t mean you can slavishly copy exactly what another person has done. That is stealing. And, in any case, what would be the point of doing that if you’re trying to produce something creative? Exact copying can teach technique, but this little book is about creativity, not forgery!

Keeping going

If you want to be creative in the world of science or architecture or medicine, you have to spend years educating yourself before you are ready to start thinking creatively about anything your colleagues might not already know.

However, in the Arts, it sometimes happens that successful novelists never quite achieve the originality of their first novel. This is because beginners sometimes have a freshness in their approach that later fades away. Picasso said that he drew better when he was ten than he ever did again. Edvard Munch’s later paintings never recaptured the intensity of his earliest ones.

The Buddhists have a phrase for this — “Beginner’s Mind” — expressing how experience can be more vivid when it’s not dulled by familiarity. Playing…keeps you “fresh.”

Coping with Setbacks

Whenever you try to come up with something original, you will find that some days the stuff flows, and some days it doesn’t. The anthropologist Gregory Bateson once said, “You can’t have a new idea ’til you’ve got rid of an old one.”

This insight helps you to view your fallow periods as preparatory to the fertile ones, and therefore as an inseparable part of the whole creative process. When the juices are not flowing, don’t beat yourself up and wonder if you should retrain as a priest. Just sit around and play, until your unconscious is ready to cough up some stuff. Getting discouraged is a total waste of your time

Get Your Panic in Early

Begin with simple stuff, such as…Who are you writing for? Then, you can ask yourself whether the audience will easily accept what you’re saying, or whether they might be resistant. If so, you’ll have to persuade them, and not just tell them.

Then you can start pondering, “What am I really trying to say?” “What is the point of this piece of journalism, or speech, or book, or play, or pamphlet, or email?” Think up different approaches, compare them, begin gathering key facts and research — it never does any harm to have a few quotes!

Finally remember the famous apology, “Sorry this is such a long letter, but I didn’t have time to write a shorter one.” So when you finish your first draft:

• Cut anything that is not relevant (there will be more than you think).
• Don’t repeat yourself unless you really want to.

Your thoughts follow your mood

We all know that if we’re depressed, we don’t have cheerful, optimistic, energetic thoughts. And if we are happy, we can’t take gloomy pessimistic thoughts seriously. If we’re angry, we don’t want to play with the kittens — we want to plot our revenge. If we’re anxious, we worry. If we’re full of ourselves, we feel decisive. If we’re feeling envious, we can’t enjoy other people’s success much.

Now, feeling creative isn’t exactly an emotion. It’s a frame of mind. But if you’re in the wrong frame of mind — if you’re distracted or worrying about something else — it follows that you’e not going to be creative.

The Dangers of Over-Confidence

As a general rule, when people become absolutely certain that they know what they’re doing, their creativity plummets. This is because they think they have nothing more to learn. Once they believe this, they naturally stop learning and fall back on established patterns. And that means they don’t grow.

Kill Your Darlings

Any good work of art will change — sometimes in major ways — during the course of its creation. At the beginning of the process, a writer may get a great idea — one that they particularly like. This is their “darling.” Inevitably, as the project develops, parts of the story will change and that “darling” may not fit well into the new version of the narrative. A good writer will jettison it. A less good writer will hang on to it, so hindering the transition of the story to its new form.

Seeking a Second Opinion

If you are an experienced writer, and you show people your work, there are four questions you need to ask:

• Where were you bored?
• Where could you not understand what was going on?
• Where did you not find things credible?
• Was there anything that you found emotionally confusing?

Once you have the answers to these, then you go away, decide how valid the problems are…and fix them yourself. The people you have asked will probably suggest their solutions too. Ignore these completely. Smile, look interested, thank them, and leave because they have no idea what they’re talking about. Unless they are writers themselves. Then…listen carefully. But at the end of the day, you and only you must decide which criticisms and suggestions you accept.

As to when you should seek a second opinion, you should do so when you have reached a point of sufficient clarity for someone else’s judgment to be of practical help. Don’t wait until you feel your idea or project is as good as possible, because you may waste a lot of time if you ask for feedback too late in the procedure.

Here are two very interesting and informative videos by John Cleese. I urge you to take some time and listen to them.

The first one is an interview where he talks about his book. A fascinating account.

The second one, Creativity In Management, is a talk given by John Cleese to an international audience at Grosvenor House Hotel, London on 23rd January 1991.