Cross-training creativity
If you or anyone you know is at all serious about a sport, running, or exercise, you’re probably familiar with the concept of cross-training. The idea is that you improve faster and are more likely to avoid injury if you do more than one type of exercise or sport – strength training as well as aerobics, for instance. Cross-training is useful for avoiding repetitive stress injuries, but it also ups performance and speed of improvement generally by working out a wider variety of muscles and joints.
Yesterday, I was watching a video on very successful people that brought up this concept. The speaker claims that the most successful people “cross train” their skills by doing things that work the same mental muscles, but from different perspectives – successful managers who coach Little League teams, for instance, or a Human Resources executive who spends weekends helping a local soup kitchen schedule their other volunteers.
This got me thinking. Nearly every other writer I know has some creative outlet besides writing – they compose music, sing, and play in bands; they knit or crochet or weave; they paint, throw pots, or make jewelry; they design everything from computer software to clothing. They’re amateur (and sometimes professional or semi-professional) actors, dancers, cooks, gardners, woodworkers, bloggers, and photographers.
Each writer’s activities inevitably inform their writing, but I’ve never heard anyone describe what they do as “research” or even “material.” We don’t think of hobbies or creative activities that way. If you are doing something creative and you’re not making money at it, it’s generally considered a hobby whose only benefit is providing relaxation and “down time” and maybe a bit of fun. Consequently, you occasionally hear people who have multiple creative outlets declare that they are giving up one or another of their pursuits in order to “focus on building a business” in the one that remains.
I think that, as phrased, this is a mistake. Oh, deciding that your true love is music or jewelry-making or photography is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, and it’s equally reasonable to put some extra energy into that pursuit once you’ve decided that it’s your main interest. But too often, it isn’t the love of photography or writing fiction or music that is the deciding factor; it’s that the person thinks it is impossible to make a living writing poetry or knitting or gardening.
The real trouble, though, is the giving up of all other creative pursuits in order to follow just one. Because the more I think about it, the more it seems to me that the most talented and successful creative people I know do work in multiple fields, even if they’ve chosen to concentrate on one in particular as their main production or income source. And I think that one reason this is true is that these people are unconsciously doing the kind of mental cross-training that the speaker in that video was talking about. At the very least, being interested in two or more creative arts provides a person with the opportunity to exercise their creativity in different ways, which can’t hurt as far as I can see.
Yet I’ve seen a lot of people complain that their favorite writer is “wasting writing time” by doing some other creative activity. I’ve seen the same thing happen in reverse to musicians and artists who also want to write. It doesn’t seem to occur to these people that a) creative people need hobbies and down time just as much as everyone else, and have just as much right to have it, or that b) there may be non-obvious benefits to having multiple creative outlets. It really doesn’t occur to them that they have no business trying to limit the ways someone else chooses to exercise their creativity.
Nobody currently pretends to know how creativity works, but there are some techniques that seem to help trigger it. One of them is changing things up – moving into a different medium, working with different materials, changing one’s process, finding a way to incorporate some random object in a way that makes sense. Most of those suggestions come out of drawing and art, or from “creative problem solving” research, but based on my own experience, they apply a lot more broadly. Indeed, a lot of them map directly onto the writing experience: moving into a different medium or materials (like switching from short stories to novels, or changing genres); changing one’s process (doing an outline or winging it, working back-to-front or skipping around); incorporating a random object (“If you’re stuck, have some ninjas jump in through the window”).
Furthermore, almost all of these creativity techniques are things that I and the writers I know have been doing more or less unconsciously for years. I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to speculate that they may apply more broadly and in more areas than the researchers and teachers have gotten around to noticing.
I’m not saying that every writer should go out and immediately adopt a second creative pursuit. For one thing, people have time constraints; for another, some people prefer a single focus. I do think that experimenting with other areas is worth doing, and I most definitely think that someone who loves and enjoys music or woodworking or knitting should not feel guilty about doing it and need not be too strict in limiting the time they spend on it. It’s cross-training for the brain, I say, and as long as one meets one’s personal commitment to one’s primary love (writing, in my case…), having multiple interests is a Good Thing.
