Category: Creativity

You know the feeling when you have something due, and you think there is still plenty of time. That was what I was feeling when I left the article writing to the last minute.

Just an hour was left before the article was meant to go live, and I hadn’t even started it yet. Do you know what happens in situations like these?

Your left brain takes over.

It sounds something like this. Are you crazy? You can’t write an article in less than an hour. It takes you two to three hours to pull one up on good days. On bad days, I have seen you taking seven to eight hours. Are you kidding yourself? Don’t send a half-baked, typo-strewn article to get yourself ridiculed. Give yourself time. Maybe give up writing. You have been writing for years and still struggling with it. Find something else. Something more suitable for your skills.

Sounds familiar?

How about when you were asked to make a speech in front of colleagues? You froze. That was your left brain in control of you again.

Do you remember when you were learning to drive and, for the first time, drove on a busy road? You could feel the taste of your stomach acid in your mouth. It’s your left brain at work.

The left brain is the bully brain. It doesn’t just complicate things with its logic; it goes one step further. It drowns out the free-thinking nature of the right brain.

Let’s figure out how the left brain works.

The left brain is mathematical and logical. It makes sure 6 + 4 is always 10 (not 11). It makes sure we reach a conclusion logically. Remember Mr. Spock of Star Trek movies. It is Mr. Spock of our Enterprise. For it, everything has to be logically evaluated and weighed and analyzed.

My left brain is raising its eyebrow at the moment. It is telling me logically I can’t write an article within an hour if my average is 2 to 3 hours. 

For it, 2 or 3 is not equal to one. 

For the bully brain, everything is black and white.

But thankfully I have another brain the right brain.

The right brain can see many colors. It can see the rainbow and the whole color pallet in between. That is why when we are painting, or drawing, or playing music, we are using the right brain.

This, of course, drives our bully brain totally crazy. It tries desperately to pigeon-hole everything into black and white. And, of course, it fails. And when the two brains are at odds with each other, it sends us into a spiral.

When we are faced with a problem, which brain we should listen to? Well, the logical answer is that we should reach out to the left brain. To Mr. Spock.

But how about if we reach out for the right brain—the crazy brain— instead.

The crazy brain doesn’t give a hoot about being black or white. So if you are to make a speech at work to a gathering of 100 colleagues, it will randomly pull out something it had stored away somewhere, which you don’t even remember, and get you started. It will start putting words in your mouth, and you wonder where is it coming from?

It will make you take action even before the bully brain has the chance to open its mouth. It will get you going even before Mr. Spock has time to lift his eyebrow.

The crazy brain works splendidly for writing.

All I had to do was to start writing. As soon as my fingers started moving on the keyboard, the ideas started coming. First a bit awkwardly but then fluently. I set the timer for fifteen minutes, which kept me more on track. Now there is a race between time and the crazy brain. It has to bring words faster than the timer runs out.

When we do something under strict time limits, the bully brain ping pongs between black and white. When we do something quite radical, it confuses the bully brain so much that it shut down.

If you haven’t done it before, try it. Give yourself 5 minutes to write an email. You have to address all the issues and type out a 200-words email in five minutes. Immediately your bully brain will snarl. Surely you can’t have speed and quality, it hisses. But ignore it. Just go with your crazy brain. And at first, you’ll get resistance, but eventually, the bully, like all bullies, will get fed up and leave.

I found this when I was learning typing in 1996.

I was using typing software to learn to type. When I started using it for the first time, I kept the speed at the slowest. But after some days, when my fingers became aware of where the letters were, I still kept the speed slow so that my accuracy improves. But rather than improving, it was getting worse. Then one day, out of frustration, I increased the speed of words appearing on the screen and started typing without looking at the keyboard. My accuracy was all-time better. I had managed to shut the bully brain.

But does that mean we should always go with the crazy brain?

No, of course not. Both brains have their value. But we have to recognize that the bully brain doesn’t do very well when dealing with fuzzy stuff that doesn’t end up with 6+4=10. So you have to bypass it.

Sometimes speed works. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes we can use a change of method, location, technology to trick the bully brain. Our job is to find out how to stop our bully brain from taking center stage and prancing around like a spoiled two-year-old.

What if the bully brain starts taking over?

If you start freezing or taking too much time or if what you do is driving you crazy, you need to stop the bully brain.

Find a way to access your crazy brain instead to tackle the same job in a totally different way. You get your work done and most importantly that bully brain shuts up. Phew!

Try it.

Photo by Morning Brew on Unsplash

Did you know that the Grand Café in Oxford was the first coffeehouse to open in England, in 1650. Before the spread of coffee and tea alcohol used to be the drink of choice through British culture.

Both elite and mass folks drank alcohol day in and day out, from dawn until dusk. They would drink a little beer with breakfast and have a little wine at lunch, a little gin, and top it off with a little beer and wine at the end of the day. That was the healthy choice because the water wasn’t safe to drink. And so, effectively, until the rise of the coffeehouses, an entire population was effectively drunk all day.

When coffeehouses became a vogue in the 1650s, they did something more than making people sober.

According to Steven Johnson the author of the bestselling Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, coffeehouses became the breeding ground for sharing ideas. It was a space where people from different backgrounds, different fields of expertise, would get together and share. It was a space, as Matt Ridley talked about, where ideas could have sex. This was their conjugal bed, in a sense. And an astonishing number of innovations from this period have a coffeehouse somewhere in their story. 

One of the contributing factors was the architecture of the space.

The confined chaotic environment of the coffeehouses was exactly the place where people from different backgrounds were likely to have new, interesting, unpredictable collisions.

So if you are trying to come up with new ideas this is the kind of place you need to visit often. We take ideas from other people, people we’ve learned from, people we run into in the coffee shop, and we stitch them together into new forms and we create something new. 

Building upon existing ideas is nothing new.

Artists have been doing it for centuries. Painters draw upon the tools, techniques, and approaches of other painters; musicians build upon the styles of other musicians they have heard; writers are influenced by the books they have read.

Steve Jobs, the cofounder and former CEO of Apple Computer, said in an interview that “the key to creativity is to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then to bring those things into what you are doing.” He goes on to say that what made the original Macintosh computer great is that the people working on it were “musicians, and poets, and artists, and zoologists, and historians, who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world.”

The analogy “trade is to culture as sex is to biology,” from a Wall Street Journal article on the importance of trade in enhancing innovation, captures this concept. According to the article, communities that are at the crossroads of the world, such as ancient Alexandria and Istanbul or modern Hong Kong, London, and New York, which attract people from vastly different cultures, benefit from the cross-pollination of ideas and increased creativity.

What we call distractions, those trivial and time-wasting things might lead to new ideas.

We might want to discard internet surfing or phone browsing as mindless activities with absolutely no result but in fact, they are virtual coffeehouses where ideas are cross-pollinating.

Jan Fortune writes, “Productive people, we learn, are those with their heads down who do one thing well. Whilst there are people who pursue a single passion to great effect, the dictum of the one thing can also be narrowing and separating. Sometimes the price of single-minded productivity to the exclusion of all else is myopia that kills relationships and sacrifices the riches of a multi-disciplinary approach to life.”

Cross-pollination is a marriage between the unlike ideas.

As Suzanne Collins famously claimed in an interview with The NewYork Times that the idea of “The Hunger Games” came to her while flipping channels one night between reality television programs and actual footage of the Iraq War. “On one channel, there’s a group of young people competing for I don’t even know; and on the next, there’s a group of young people fighting in an actual war. I was really tired, and the lines between these stories started to blur in a very unsettling way.”

At that time she was completing the fifth book in The Underland Chronicles, in which she examined the idea of an unjust war developing into a just war because of greed, xenophobia and longstanding hatreds. She wanted to continue to explore writing about the just-war theory for young audiences and wanted a completely new world and a different angle into the just-war debate. And there it was, “The Hunger Games” was conceived,

Creativity is often simple like that.

The novel I’m currently writing started with just one incident that I witnessed as a child. As I wrote one chapter another one surfaced and became the turning point. A five-second scene from a TV serial I watched as a teenaged became the ending.

If you go into the depths of writer’s block, you will find that you need cross-pollination. We get stuck for ideas because we make the mistake of restricting our input sources.

Writers need constant input not only cross-genre but through different mediums.

A lot of people who aspire to be writers use reading the type of books they want to write as their only source of input. Sticking to just your own genera makes you a boring writer.

If you’re serious about becoming a better writer, you’ll put on your headphones, put on a podcast and get some much-wanted exercise. The information that goes into your head through the medium of audio is different from video or text. You may, or may not get time to watch a video or read, but there are at least a dozen opportunities for audio.

Finally, a writing style also requires cross-pollination

When you first start out as a writer, you’re likely to feel like a clone. It is because your manner of writing is either a copy of someone else’s work or some formula you picked up along the way. It feels like you don’t have a personal style. However, your own style is not that far away. And usually, the process is sped up when you cross-pollinate the writers you read and the speakers you listen to.

If you read one writer for a long time, his style becomes a part of you, when you add a second writer, a bit of her style creeps into your being as well and soon a sort of metamorphosis starts to take place. You haven’t changed much consciously, but your work changes a lot.

A style develops when you read or listen to different authors or speakers, drink deeply from one for a while.

When you dig deep into one person’s style, you get an insight that doesn’t come with bouncing around from one author to another. The style needs a bit of monogamy for at least a while before you go out and find another writer to love. Burrow deep into one writer, one speaker for a while and then add the second and the third and possibly the fourth and fifth.

If you do, all you have is overload and your brain doesn’t get the opportunity to tease out the style and structure of the writers and speakers. 

The best part is you don’t have to do much. Your job is to read or listen, not even to necessarily make notes. Over time the brain figures out the patterns, and when you write, you notice the difference. That difference may not be apparent right away, but over time there’s bound to be a clear evolution in your style. 

You may not always have time to watch and read, but there are endless opportunities to listen every single day.

In summary cross-pollination involves reading, watching and listening deliberately in different genre, letting the ideas percolate in you and allowing them to influence your work.

Photo by Richard Sagredo on Unsplash

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Look at the above image. Does it talk to you? 

Does it make you stop for a moment?

Do you wonder what the guy is looking at?

What is he thinking? 

You almost construct a story in your head. He is looking at something distant, something that has made him stop and stare at it. He is reminded of a life moment that changed the course of his life. And he is wondering, am I on the right track? On this wet path, in this wilderness, after doing all I wanted to do so far, why am I feeling so empty? So alone?

I had never thought of photography as a medium to tell stories. 

I must admit that my photography skills were limited to taking family and travel photos.

But when I came across Matt Parker’s site Images With Stories, I got fascinated by the images he had posted there and the stories they invoke in the viewer’s mind.

The ease with which we can take photos these days with our mobile or digital cameras is causing frustration rather than satisfaction. We click mindlessly without even bothering to learn a few simple techniques that can result in much better images, the images that excite us and excite others as well.

“A good photographer,” says Matt, “takes pictures that prompt a reaction in people. Their work provokes discussion. As a result, their photography is satisfying and worthwhile.”

Sounds like storytelling?

A good photographer is a storyteller. Like a storyteller, she picks which stories to tell and which bits to highlight.

Finding a purpose in photographs is the first step. Why are you taking these photos? What you want them to say with them? Once you start asking these questions, the stories start becoming apparent.

Concentrating on creativity rather than technology, you can do a lot even if you don’t know much about photography. Some of the techniques Matt suggests on his site are:

• Have a theme. When taking photographs, look for a theme and take photos to exhibit that theme.
• Use compositional techniques by considering foreground, middle ground and background.
• Create analogies with photographs. A cold, foggy winter day in the middle of nowhere might mean longing, while fog might represent a blanket of security.
• Add words to your images.

Yesterday was a perfect day in Canberra. Blue skies with white clouds. I decided to test my newly acquired knowledge and drove to the Stromlo Observatory to take some photos. A van full of cyclists pulled in the parking lot simultaneously as I did and I had my theme.

I took several photos of the cyclists. Using some simple editing techniques, I made a photo journal on the theme of cycling.

Here they are.

We all own phones which have better cameras than the real cameras used to be even a few years ago.

Use some of Matt’s suggestions and take some photos. Who knows, you might start a new hobby.

Photo by Zoltan Tasi on Unsplash

When my daughters were five and two years old respectively, my husband decided he wanted them to learn classical dance. It was a bit surprising because there was no one with any artistic inclination on both sides of the family.

We found a local teacher who came from a reputed ‘classical dance family’ from north India. Her parents ran a Bharat Natyam school in India while her sister and she ran similar schools in Singapore and Australia.

We enrolled our daughters in her school and a very strict regime started for them at a very early age. Rules were strict and inflexible. Many kids left. Those who survived had to put their heart and soul into something which others regarded as just an extracurricular activity.

For this dedicated teacher and her whole family, Bharat Natyam is art. And art demands nothing less than total commitment.

One of the rules was an annual dance performance. There was no escape from it. Every student regardless of age or expertise had to participate.

Preparation for the performance demanded more than two months of commitment. Extra classes, longer session, repeat performance, full program rehearsals, full dress rehearsals, stage rehearsals. Sometimes my children had to practice four nights a week that too after school on winter nights. Even exams were not an excuse. Parents had to chip-in too, by selling tickets and cooking food to be sold during the break.

A normal perception could be that she would make a lot of money from it but she wasn’t. She was, in fact, putting money from her own pocket to buy costumes and jewelry. And she was spending countless hours into training before the show.

Why performance was so important?

Because without performance the students won’t get better. The age of teaching traditions of classical Indian dancing has an inbuilt element of performance. It is believed without performance, there is no learning.

To qualify as a Barat Natyam dancer a student has to perform Arangetram – an on-stage solo performance for three hours in front of a live audience. Not only the dancer has to have the stamina to dance for three hours but she also has to have variety in her performance to captivate the audience for that long.

Writing is also an art.

We need to present our work, on a regular basis.

We need to develop stamina too. Without that, we won’t be able to meet deadlines.

And we also need to develop pizzazz in our writing to captivate our readers.

Whether you are a dancer, painter, or writer you got to find a way to incorporate – presentation, stamina and pizzazz -in your art.

The images are from Cultural India.