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When I was at school in the late forties and the fifties, no teacher ever mentioned the word creativity. Just think how extraordinary that is.
Reading this wonderful stuff, I realised that my schools had had such an obsession with logical, critical, analytical thinking that they never appreciated that this kind of mental process is useless if you want to be creative. It was presented as the only way of thinking.
The greatest killer of creativity is 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 into a state of deep focus.
As Einstein once pointed out, if we know what we’re doing when we’re investigating something, then it’s not research!
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.
As Hindus say, the mind is like a chattering, drunken monkey. On and on, and all completely trivial and uninvited.
He once told me that when he was working on a particular scene he’d write down the key idea behind it on a piece of paper, and then stick the note right in front of his nose on the computer. If he realised his mind had wandered too far, he would glance at the note and that would bring him back to what he was trying to achieve.
Then think of one of the greatest scientists of all time, Edison, the man who invented the light bulb. He found that he got his best ideas in that funny no man’s land between being awake and being asleep. So he used to sit in a comfy armchair with a few ball bearings in his hand and a metal bowl underneath. When he dropped off to sleep his hand relaxed, the ball bearings fell on to the plate and the noise they made woke him up. He’d then pick up the ball bearings again and sit back and get into that same drowsy, dreamy frame of mind that he’d just been in.
There’s quite a good way of telling when your creative period has done its job and it’s time to move on. If 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. And so you go backwards and forwards between the creative mode of
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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 do need to start with an idea. As a beginner it’s not very 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 start working 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’.
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. Many people, in the course of acquiring great understanding and knowledge of a subject, become conventional in their thinking. Others, like Richard Feynman, the theoretical physicist, manage never to lose their ability to come up with fresh ideas. In other words, they learn to nurture their unconscious, and to trust it. Feynman spent a lot of time playing the drums. The great mathematician John Conway spent much of his time playing games. Playing… keeps you ‘fresh’.
We came to understand that the blockages weren’t an interruption in the process, they were part of it. For example, when you eat, the bit where the fork returns empty to your plate isn’t a failure. It’s just part of the eating process.
The anthropologist Gregory Bateson once said, ‘You can’t have a new idea ’til you’ve got rid of an old one.’ This insight helped me to view my fallow periods as preparatory to the fertile ones, and therefore as an inseparable part of the whole creative process.
Begin with simple stuff, such as … Who are you writing for? 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. 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! And — in case you haven’t realised this yet — recognise that all this time you will be feeding your unconscious and it will be chewing everything over the moment you stop working.
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.’ 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. Good luck. And get started.
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’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.
On one occasion, when my friend the great screenwriter Bill Goldman was helping me with a script, he advised me to ‘kill my darlings’, a phrase he said he’d borrowed from William Faulkner.
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.
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
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While you’re considering all this don’t ask yourself who is right. Ask which idea is better.
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.
