Creativity: A Short and Cheerful Guide

by John Cleese

my unconscious was working on stuff all the time, without my being consciously aware of it.

This intelligent unconscious of ours, then, is astoundingly powerful. It allows us to perform most of our tasks in life without requiring us to concentrate on them. Without it, we couldn’t function at all. There’d be much too much to think about.

And that’s the problem with the unconscious. It is unconscious. You can’t order it about or hit it with a stick. You have to coax it out in all sorts of strange and crafty ways. And be clever about interpreting what it does tell you.

the language of the unconscious is not verbal.

book by Guy Claxton, called Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind. In it, Guy Claxton talks about two different ways of thinking. The first, he says, involves “figuring matters out, weighing up the pros and cons, constructing arguments and solving problems.”

Then, he argues, there is another kind of thinking which he calls “Tortoise Mind.” This, he says, “proceeds more slowly…It is often less purposeful and clear-cut, more playful, leisurely or dreamy. In this mode we are ruminating or mulling things over, being contemplative or meditative. We may be pondering a problem, rather than earnestly trying to solve it.”

the more patient, less deliberate modes of mind are particularly suited to making sense of situations that are intricate, shadowy or ill defined…when

This type of intelligence is associated with what we call creativity, or even ‘wisdom.’

The conclusion he came to was that there were only two differences between the creative and the uncreative architects. The first was that the creative architects knew how to play. The second was that 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 to 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.

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.

if you have a decision to make, the first question you must ask is: “When does this decision have to be made?”

if you can wait longer, two incredibly important things may happen. You may get new information. You may get new ideas.

So why would you make a decision when you don’t need to? Because you’re uncomfortable, that’s why!

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

The greatest killer of creativity is interruption. It pulls your mind away from what you want to be thinking about.

But perhaps the biggest interruption coming from your inside is caused by your worrying about making a mistake.

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

As Einstein once pointed out, if we know what we’re doing when we’re investigating something, then it’s not research!

you have to create a safe place, where you can play. This involves first creating boundaries of space, and then boundaries of time.

You create boundaries of space to stop others interrupting you. You shut the door and put up a “DO NOT DISTURB” sign; or you go and hide somewhere people won’t bother you.

You create boundaries of time, by arranging, for a specific period, to preserve your boundaries of space.

Well, people who are stronger-minded than me seem to be able just to bat these thoughts away. Lucky sods. I can’t do that. Instead, I write them down straight away on a yellow sticky note on my desk. Then I can forget about them.

the longer you sit there, the more your mind slows and calms down and settles.

you find that you’ve had lots of vague new ideas and are starting to feel a bit overwhelmed and confused, that’s the moment to start work on clarifying them, prior to bringing your logical thinking to bear. Now you’re in a logical, critical period. After a time there, however, when you’ve assessed everything, you will get a bit bored. That’s a sign that now is the moment to go back into your creative thinking mode again.

This back-and-forth process is called iteration. It’s what creative people do all the time.

“borrow” an idea from someone you admire—an

If you’re writing creatively, you can improve scripts hugely by making lots of smaller improvements that aren’t very creative at all.

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

It seems that it’s rare for someone creative to maintain a constant high level of freshness.

Whenever you try to come up with something original, you will find that some days the stuff flows, and some days it doesn’t.

fallow periods as preparatory to the fertile ones,

get your panic in early! The good thing about panic is that it gives you energy. You never think, “I’m panicking, so I’ll have a nice snooze.” Instead, the panic will help you get down to the job.

You might be writing for academics, in which case you don’t have to be interesting.

Or for people who have a limited attention span, in which case you have to be very interesting.

“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?”

Finally…as you get further into this piece of writing, remember just one thing: “Brevity is the soul of wit.” It is also the soul of not boring people. Remember the famous apology, “Sorry this is such a long letter, but I didn’t have time to write a shorter one.”

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’re not going to be creative.

The trouble is that most people want to be right. The very best people, however, want to know if they’re right.

First, there is the one I described earlier, when you bring the critical faculties you suspended during the playful stage to bear on whatever it is that you have thought of. You’re now sufficiently clear about your idea to be in a position to evaluate it. If you decide it can be improved, you go into the iteration process, until you are really satisfied with it.

Second, when you’re sure that you really like your new idea, you can proceed from thinking to doing, from planning to action. This might be a small step, or a huge one.

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.

decide how valid the problems are…and fix them yourself. The people you have asked will probably suggest their solutions too. Ignore these completely.

As to when you should seek a second opinion, my view is that you should do so when you have reached a point of sufficient clarity for someone else’s judgement to be of practical help.