More on creativity

As I  mentioned in the last post we went and saw the play Souvenir last night: resilience was the major character aspect for Florence Foster Jenkins, along with a remarkable inability to hear what others heard. Artists need resilience. Up to a point I have it, though I can get quite down about things not going well, perhaps less than I once did. My wife's had to say more than once that either you do the work because you love it and want to do it and don’t care about the immediate results, or you get all depressed about it if it doesn't take off as you expect. There’s an obvious choice about which one is going to be more effective, but of course it isn’t always easy just to pick up yourself after a knockback. 

Foster Jenkins’ was right to be resilient, though she was wrong in not being able to hear criticism. However, the thing that her pianist discovered ˗ at least in the play ˗ was that she could hear the right music in her head; she just couldn’t reproduce it. I think in a way that’s what a lot of artists ˗ including writers ˗ struggle with: the story, the music, the performance they have in their head isn’t matched by what they achieve in reality. I've often had a piece of music in my head that's really excited me, but trying to get it down on paper turns out to be impossible. Sometimes it turns into something altogether different which has a life of its own. Sometimes it just goes down the tubes. And then there are the piano performances I've given in my dreams...

I’ve never forgotten the story about Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, told by the woman who was page-turning for his accompanist one night. She was rapt by his performance ˗ as she should have been; he was a consummate performer and deserved all the kudos he got. But as they came off stage she heard him berating his performance as mediocre and well below his best. She was astonished because she couldn’t equate his view of it with what she’d heard. (Foster Jenkins had the opposite problem, of course.) What it did for her was disappoint her; it didn’t make her feel that striving for the best was important; criticism of your performance was important. And yes, of course it is. But that should be something you deal with yourself. Let your audience take out of the performance what it can and will. Don’t be so overwhelmed with your own performance that you become boastful; equally don’t let minor slips be a major issue; correct them if you can in the next performance. 

The adjudicator at the Junior Singing Competitions this month said to the kids performing: everyone makes mistakes in performance (the actress playing Foster Jenkins made at least three slips in her lines last night that I noticed) ˗ in fact, she said, professional orchestras make an average of seven mistakes per minute in a concert. This doesn’t take away from the overall performance, which for most of the audience will be enthralling or delightful or exhilarating. Always improve, and always strive to improve. But don't pull yourself down because you haven't achieved what you hoped for. 

Quite apart from anything else, even the most astute audiences fail to notice most things that go wrong in performances. 

Patrons needed

Even if you bought an exceptional Michael Kelly guitar at Musicians Friend and made the best album in the world there's no guarantee that the Wider Music World will notice you. I've just been watching a programme on Choice TV which pointed out that some musicians who have music on Spotify have to have up to 125 downloads of one of their tracks before they earn as much as a dollar. It isn't Spotify that's causing this issue, it's the fact that there are an awful lot of musos out there, and they're all chasing your money. Social media is a good way to improve your chances of being heard (as one of the women musicians interviewed discussed), but it takes a fair amount of promotion all the same, and most of that's going to have to be done by you, otherwise that one dollar you've earned will be eaten up by some expensive advertising campaign. And that takes away from your productive music time.

I was talking to one of the older ladies at church (older than me, that is) this morning, and she was telling me about her artist son (he's now in his sixties), and how it's never been easy for him to promote himself. He's had exhibitions and his name is known but that kind of promotion is hard work for him, as it is for many artists. Most artists - musicians, painters, writers etc - need a patron to survive well enough to be able to do their best work. The reality is of course that most musicians, painters, writers etc don't have patrons, and struggle. They have to deal with daily life, real life, and that's another factor that affects their work.

This is a bit of a minor rant, really.

Some thoughts on being Intuitive

Recently I've been more and more thinking of myself as an intuitive writer/composer/actor.  Creatively I work by discovering the creation piece by piece rather than forming it carefully in advance. Certainly I've worked on structure, and the musical (Grimhilda!) was pretty well structured, but I think that was because I had someone else assisting with that side of things.  On my own the process of structuring something (especially something large) doesn't come easily to me. 

The intutitive aspect is probably also why I tend to absorb stuff, like books I'm reading, rather than learning the details, or the arguments. Even though it hasn't been consciously 'learned', the information will often turn up when needed at a later time. I don't have to search my brain for it; it arrives in some sort of subconscious way. 

I learn how to do things properly if I have an enthusiasm for them, but I'm not good at retaining 'facts' or 'information' by trying to learn them. I tend to absorb them in a way that I don't understand - probably like a child learns language. 

This intuitive approach can be unhelpful at times, especially when you know something you've written isn't working but can't see why, or you know a piece of information, but getting it to come to the surface is a problem, or when faced with the need for lateral thinking, you seem to fall over completely: the ideas will come, but long after you need them for that situation.   

I look with some degree on envy on those writers who can churn out work at the drop of a hat; they plan the structure, and then just get on with it.  I have to discover the whole thing (or a good deal of it) before I know I've got anything to structure.   

Yet give me a topic - like getting rid of moths, for example - (and even better, a deadline to go with it) and I'll produce something out of the blue.  I won't have any idea at the beginning where it's going, but it will slide out of the brain bit by bit and then, with a bit of editing and sorting out, it will be formed.  I used to do a lot of my columns for the Star Midweeker in that way...especially it they were needed the following morning and I hadn't managed to write anything in time. If I needed to do any research, I'd do it once the thing was done - generally.  Although this wasn't a hard and fast rule.  

The flash fiction I've written for the Flash Frontier site has tended to arrive in this way: having a theme means I've got something for my subconscious to get its teeth into, and having a deadline helps as well.  And I remember writing a couple of songs by request for our current church, and doing them with ease at a couple of days' notice.  It helped, again, that there was a topic, and a deadline.  (And at our previous church I wrote a script and several songs within a very short time because we had to start rehearsing so we could present the thing by a certain date. Amazing what happens when you're under that sort of pressure.)

However, things that involve a lot of facts and information, things that needed compiling into order, from different sources, are sheer hard grind.  I can do them, and it's usually satisfying in the end, but the process is much harder for me than doing something that has no obvious order when it starts.  This was the kind of work I did in my last job before I retired.  It took a lot more concentration than the purely creative stuff does.  Which is curious.

 

Enjoy Art!

Visiting art galleries, museums and the theatre is good for your health - particularly if you're a man. So says a Press Association report.

I'd love to think that they were inferring that sports aren't good for your health, especially if you're a man, but I doubt that that follows...

Norwegian Researchers asked 50,000 people about their cultural activities and found that being creative in music or art is good for both genders, improving health, life satisfaction and lowering the risk of depression. In fact, being involved in creative activities was even more beneficial than just attending them.

This brings to mind those various tortured souls who were male artists: Van Gogh, Pollock, to name just two; but of course there have been female artists (Freda Stark) who've suffered in art as well. Do these counter the Norwegian findings, or are they exceptions? Or is it possibly that if you are an amateur in art, you'll be happier, but not if it's your life's work?

What education can & can't do

In the Wellington paper, the Dominion Post, there's a weekly segment relating to the education of a particular well-known person. EPMU national secretary and Labour Party president, Andrew Little, was the man this week, and I liked a couple of things he said:

Although your formal education teaches some knowledge and understanding, as well as technical skills, it cannot teach values, personality, character and other things that matter in life.

and...

Study is a good starting point for whatever discipline you're preparing for or just for developing an inquiring mind, but that's all it is. It isn't a substitute for life's other passions or the creative spirit.

Authentic Theft

Came across the following wonderful quote on the Prodigal Kiwi(s) blog today - no doubt it's already all over the Internet, but let me add it one more time...

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery — celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from — it’s where you take them to.”

Jim Jarmusch, The Golden Rules of Filming.

Creating Creativity

Earlier in the month, Tony Schwartz, on the Conversation (one of the Harvard Business blogs) wrote a piece  called Six Secrets to Creating a Culture of Innovation.

It's geared towards those running a business, primarily, but I thought it might be interesting to consider how a loan wolf artist like myself might use the 'secrets.'

The first secret is 'Meet people's needs.'   Well, that's something I have no problem doing: if my inner man says, in the middle of writing something, I'm hungry, I send him off to the kitchen (which is conveniently placed a couple of metres away from my computer).   He can make as many cups of tea or coffee as he likes in a day - or finish off that fruitcake someone obligingly gave me...him.   If my inner man has unmet needs, I know about them pretty quickly, as you can imagine.   I can't always settle them immediately, (especially if the fruitcake was finished the day before) but I do my best.

The second secret (how can these be secrets if he's telling us them?) is 'Teach creativity systematically.'   According to Schwartz there are five well-defined, widely accepted stages of creative thinking: insight, saturation, incubation, illumination, and verification.   I read the blog post the link in the previous sentence takes you to (it's very irritatingly bringing up some oddball codes on my browser) and I don't particularly disagree with these steps.   Although when she (someone called simply, Maria) says, "The first stage of the creative process is finding or formulating a problem. The tricky part about this stage is that it requires creativity in itself," I kinda feel that there's a bit of a catch 22 in there somewhere.   However, these stages are worth considering - once I've dealth with one of my inner man's unmet needs.

The third secret is to nurture passion.   I have to be excited about what I'm creating.  Don't give me some mundane work to do; my inner many won't stand it.  He'll hive off to the kitchen again.

This ties in with the fourth secret: make the work matter.  There's no point giving me a job writing about cashmere mittens for women if I don't have some excitement about aforesaid cashmere mittens - or about women, if it comes to that.   But if you can get my creative juices going when it comes to cashmere and mittens and women (and not necessarily in that order), you're on the way.

Provide the time.  This is the penultimate secret (another secret Mr Schwartz doesn't mention is include slightly more obscure words in your blog posts).   I try to give my creative person all the time in the world.   What does he do with it?  Fritters it away on Twitter or Facebook or writing blog posts of an inane nature, or checking his emails every few seconds, or playing another round of Scrabble online or seeing if anyone's paid him for anything in the last week/day/hour/second.   I can be a slightly tetchy boss at times.

Finally we have: Value Renewal.  Mr Schwartz says that human beings are not like computers; they can't be left on day and night flicking meaningless screen savers across their faces.   Human beings need to expend energy and then relax.  Expend and relax.  In the relax stage they recover their creative juices and get ready for another hack at the problem in question.   And at the same time, miraculously, while they're whiling away time making the fourteenth cup of tea/coffee, or playing 'fetch' with the puppy, or checking out the Guardian sports videos, all sorts of remarkable creative breakthroughs are taking place.   When that cup of coffee is drunk, or the puppy worn out, or the videos have proved to be not as exciting as the Guardian made them out to be, then you'll find that the brain is just itching to go, full of new insights, ideas, stuff you can use.  Or not.


Sometimes this creative incubation stage just doesn't get itself going quite as quickly as you'd like, and a whole day, or week or more can be whittled away while the incubation is going on.   However, you can fool the brain by working on some other totally unrelated project in the meantime, and give it a double job to do: incubate on project one and project two simultaneously. 

The brain may happily mix these up - and according to all creative writers this is a good thing.   Just make sure that at the end of the day that project 1 winds up with creative solutions to itself and not to project 2.  Unless your boss also thinks that's a good thing.  

Photo by velo_city on Flickr.com

Creativity and Failure

"Creativity is a consequence of sheer productivity. If a creator wants to increase the production of hits, he or she must do by risking a parallel increase in the production of misses. ... The most successful creators tend to be those with the most failures!" Dean Keith Simonton

Robert Sutton wrote in Weird Ideas That Work, that "in a typical year this group of about 10 people generated just over 4,000 ideas (which they know because all ideas are tracked on a spreadsheet):

Of these 4,000 ideas, 230 were thought to be promising enough to develop into a nice drawing or working prototype. Of these 230, 12 were ultimately sold. This "yield" rate is only about 1/3 of 1% of total ideas and 5% of ideas that were thought to have potential. Boyle pointed out that the success rate is probably even worse than it looks because some toys that are bought never make it to market, and of those that do, only a small percentage reap large sales and profits. As Boyle says, "You can't get any good new ideas without having a lot of dumb, lousy, and crazy ones."'

No one should choose the option of failure deliberately, but trying especially hard to avoid it means taking no chances on change. The better message to get across is that failure is a by-product of risk-taking, and honest mistakes will be forgiven.

All of the above are from an article, Forgive and Remember, by Robert Sutton, Professor of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University. He studies and writes about management, innovation, and the nitty-gritty of organizational life.

Peter Bregman, iPad and addiction

I've quoted Peter Bregman's articles before - mostly on the Mission Resource blog that I also write. I like his self-deprecating humour, and his good sense. I'm not going to quote him this time, just tell you that you need to read the article entitled, 'Why I returned my iPad'.

Why do I think you need to read it? Because in it he tells us what the value of returning the iPad was as opposed to keeping it. He doesn't say there's anything wrong with the iPad itself, but there was something wrong with him.

Substitute 'iPad' for any one of a hundred other addictive things, and you get the idea.

By the way, his use of 'boredom' might be questioned, and is questioned by some of those who comment. A better word might be found....

And some of the very negative comments show that there's a need for this way of thinking. They're far more vicious than anything else I've seen on the Harvard Business site

Facing the Fear

An extract from an interview with Seth Godin.
The interviewer was Gretchen Rubin on The Happiness Project - a blog with the subtitle: A chronicle of my attempts to test-drive every tip, principle and scientific study that promotes happiness. (Hmmm - happiness is scientific?)

Back to Seth:

"There are two secrets to creativity:

1. Understand that there's no gene for it. No cultural or family history required. Creativity isn't a gift from above, it's something that everyone is capable of.


2. The only thing that prevents your creativity from showing up is fear. Fear of being laughed at, fear of being wrong, fear of seeming uninformed. So many creative exercises and habits revolve around overcoming that fear.

For me, the single best thing you can do to become more creative is to be wrong more often. Creative people are wrong all the time (look at Apple's long string of failures). The goal is to create a safe place to be wrong, a way to be wrong without destroying yourself. The more wrong I am, the more often, the better I seem to get at being creative."

I can certainly agree with Seth about the fear aspect: it's very easy to think 'no one will like this - I'm going to make a fool of myself [especially when it comes to acting, or performing my own music] - this stuff isn't as good as so-and-so's' - and more. It's something you have to keep stepping up on top of and ignoring.

Gillian Ayres

Painter Gillian Ayres is 80 this year and looking forward to an exhibition of her new work. Some quotes from an article in the Artists and Illustrators magazine

"Old age is a bastard, really," she says. "I don't feel any different inside to how I did when I was 15. I hobble about and look old in the mirror, but inside I feel exactly the same as I always did."

"Creativity increases all one's life and you can never have enough...I know that I won't be here in another 78 years and that does increase the pressure, but I just carry on."

"It is really for other people to decide what they think about the new work. I just want to paint."

That comment about feeling the same inside whatever age you are is so true. It's something you become more aware of as you get older, I think. We may need joint pain relief - my piano fingers are starting to feel some effects of arthritis, I think - and our knees may suddenly give out when we're climbing stairs, but inside we 'see' ourselves as the person who can still do anything our 20-year-old self could do, and as being as good-looking as we were at that time, too.

I'm not sure her comment about being here in another 78 years has been accurately quoted (I got this from an ezine); perhaps it should read another 7-8 years?

Alison Silva

Looking some more at the brain, and creativity.

I came across this video about the artist, Alison Silva, in which we learn that she has a strange clotting up of blood vessels in her brain, and her concerns that if/when she has an operation to deal with this, she will lose her ability to be creative.

Since the clotting made its appearance, her art has taken a different tone and colouring.


Watch CBS Videos Online

Thanks to Jurgen Wolff for alerting me to this video. (But why oh why do news reporters talk in such a condescending way?)

More on David Tammet

Just a little more on David Tammet and some thoughts on his ideas on creativity and autism. He quotes a professor of psychiatry called Michael Fitzgerald at one point. Fitzgerald, who has an autistic child, has a theory that such creative geniuses as Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Nikola Tesla, and Mendel 'may all have found their genius through autism.'

This idea comes from the point that autistic people appear to have less inhibitors between certain sections of the brain, inhibitors that appear more regularly in people who aren't geniuses. This lack of 'inhibition' gives the brain synapses in autistic people the means to make connections that would otherwise be forestalled. This would tend to suggest that most creative people have less inhibition between the sections of their brains, but I suspect that this isn't a case proven as yet. Perhaps what might be closer to the truth is the point that people in general are on a continuum from very dull brained people (for whatever reason) to ones whose brains perform fantastically - and creatively.

People are on continuums in all sorts of spheres: look at men and women in terms of their innate masculinity or femininity: the spectrum is enormous from men who are so male that any hint of emotion or softness seems unlikely, to men at the other extreme who are all softness and have almost feminine characteristics. The same applies to women, who range from females who seem to be almost masculine in their outlook on life and their body language to women who are the epitome of softness. These are very loose generalisations, of course.

Perhaps autism isn't quite the illness we've thought, but something closer to a kind of extreme ability to use the brain that most of us don't have. But then, autistic people, like 'ordinary' people range over a wide spectrum too.