Out Loud – a Writing Adventure for Women –
Get in touch with your creativity.
We’ve all read feeds with the word creativity in the headline: How to be more Creative, Interview for Creative Employees, The Creative CEO. Every few years, creativity rises to become the new, new thing. With an old history.
Ever since that afternoon when Glog, Son of Blog hummed a ditty that was decidedly not a local bird call, humans have indulged, pursued, and been frustrated by the elusive idea of creativity which, when aggressively pursued, only leads to deeper questions, fiercely defended answers and a robust industry of inquiry. Creativity is thinking outside the cave, creativity can be measured, creativity is science by another name, without creativity there is no human progress, creativity is tasting the meat accidentally dropped in the fire. Management is convincing your younger brother to try it first.
No matter how it’s defined, creativity and the pursuit of inspiration is essential to progress and critical in the life of an artist.
But what, exactly, is creativity?
As it turns out, the definition depends on your era.
Greek philosophers and poets believed that creativity was a gift from the gods. The poet waited around until one of the nine muses deigned to bestow inspiration. It was up to the blessed poet to memorize (later transcribed) that divine inspiration. Creativity was a gift and as such was often out of the direct control of the poet. For many millennia, creativity was understood as the product of divine inspiration.
By the 17th century, pure inspiration from the gods was edged out by science. Natural philosophers (early scientists) focused on figuring out then explaining how the physical world worked, and the creative process was not exempt from their scrutiny. By the 18th century Enlightenment philosophers concluded that creativity could be achieved by following a specific process. Charles Batteaux (who wrote The Fine Arts Reduced to a Single Principle in 1746) commented that imagination was merely the result of observed phenomena. “The human mind cannot create, strictly speaking; all its products bear the stigmata of their model; even monsters invented by an imagination unhampered by laws can only be composed of parts taken from nature.” Imagination in the 18th century was little more than working those three-part flip boards – the legs of a lion, the middle of a turtle and the head of a phoenix – a new beast, but made of strictly known parts. Which does little to explain Grendel, the monster in Beowulf.
Concurrently, Denis Diderot (who created the first encyclopedia in 1751) concurred that imagination was merely “the memory of forms and contents. . . and creates nothing rather only combines, magnifies or diminishes.”
Forget divine inspiration, like most Enlightenment ideals, creativity followed rules:
Since creation is defined as creating something out of nothing, and only God can create something out of nothing, then pure creativity is impossible for man to achieve.
Creation is a mystery, and mystery negates the whole POINT of the Enlightenment which was to never admit there were any mysteries left. Men of this time were confident that not only could they figure out the whole world, but they could also explain it. (now you know where that propensity originated).
To that end, artists working during the late 18th century were all about rules, if you don’t follow the rules of painting or writing a sonnet or composing a sonata: no soup for you.
Except, as Houdar de la Motte (d.1715) observed: rules are ultimately a human invention. and how much imagination and invention did it take to create these artistic rules?
A nice circular argument – things were ripe for change.
By the mid-19th century, the cold science of the Enlightenment was warmed up by the hot passion of the Romantic movement. Instead of bowing to the rules of science, artists embraced the practice of communing with the mystical, painting the impossible, and experiencing the divine through awe. A change in focus like this was destined to happen. However, there remained a strong desire to figure out how all this creative work was achieved.
Enter Henri Poincare – (1854 – 1912), a mathematician by trade and propensity, who proposed that creativity happened in four stages:
Preparation: The artist sets out intentions and define the goals.
Incubation: The artist dreams into the possibilities, honors the unknown and becomes receptive to what is seeking him (or her, remember this is the Victorian age -so most men were referencing other men).
Illumination: The artist has the revelation in which some new possibilities take shape.
Execution: The artist creates, manifesting and materializing his discovery.
Great, another system.
It wasn’t until the 21st century that scientists, mapping and studying brain activities realized creativity in fact, never followed any discernible pattern. Ever.
Jacob Nordby in his book The Creative Cure – 2021), proposed that “Creativity is not orderly, nor does it easily break down into clear steps reaching up to heaven or enlightenment.”
In other words, creativity is messy.
Nordby writes that instead of trying to break creativity into easy-to-follow steps, consider that often there are three components to creativity: loving, knowing, and doing. But these components do not fit together like Legos, they flow around, back and refer to themselves, more like sticky spaghetti.
How do we view creativity today? We understand and support the concept that imagination is personal – each of us does it differently. If that is so, then it is not necessary to follow a path or a system.
We also understand that creativity is internal, we create on purpose, and we don’t need any outside tools to do it. That said, there is a movement to return to the idea of courting and attracting the Muse for that divine inspiration, disconnecting our ego from our creative impulses – full circle.
How can we attract the Muse and inspiration? Or better, how can we get back into the groove after a holiday, vacation or crisis?
Choose a project. Just launch into it. Don’t prepare, don’t try to follow any rules, just go. See what happens.
Learn something new – embrace your Beginner’s Mind, and revel in the necessary concentration to master a new activity or technique. Just that initial work will often enhance and inspire you to return to a beloved project with a fresh perspective. The concentration required to be new at a project often produces new energy for an “old” project.
Spend time with masters of your art: read a great novel, visit an art museum, attend a concert, open up to awe like Romantic painters did capturing, as best they could, the sheer enormity of their world, allow for inspiration like an Ancient Greek poet.
What can block these lofty efforts? Unlike the Greeks or Romantics, we live with one of the biggest threats to exercising our creativity – Socialization, which at this writing, translates to social media. You knew that didn’t you?
Humans automatically follow cultural norms. Once Blog’s brother, Ogg, survived eating cooked meat, it became the thing to do. Humans spend most of our days first learning, then following the rules of socialization, so much so that we may as well be operating under the weight of Enlightenment style rules. Worse, since WWII, we have been gradually transformed from Humans into Consumers.
We spend our days following an elaborate call and response: I read that I am not good enough – To become good enough, I need to purchase this product – I purchase the product – I feel good today. The next day I read that my recently purchased solution that made me good enough yesterday will not do the same today and I need to purchase this new, new solution. This destructive cycle is very bad for your creative soul. Not to mention your budget.
Create your own call and response:
Step away from social media.
Take a break from constant consumption.
Breath and feel what it’s like to be yourself: enough.
From that space:
Court the Muse – which means you show up consistently, daily and create as best you can, as often as you can. When you work, the inspiration (the Muse whispering in your ear) will arrive and help. Does alcohol help attract the Muse? What does she like best, Manhattan or martini? Authors drink at the end of the day, not before. The Muse is a fairly sober lady.
Do a new thing very badly.
Work on several projects simultaneously. If one project isn’t working, just leave it and work on the other project.
It’s perfectly okay to have a few creative projects all out on the table at once. If you have this project, and it’s not jelling, move to that project. Multiple projects, reasonably, mitigate the pressure of focusing on ONE BIG THING. Sometimes switching back and forth (and this counts for working on a pottery project to take a break from the poetry collection) lets you, your brain and your Muse know that it’s not all about one high stakes project. This helps.
We will discuss the Muse further as well as how to give yourself permission to rest, but there is one more thing that ironically fuels creativity: boredom.
Boredom used to be a rather common state of affairs, waiting for school to end, waiting for summer vacation to end. Waiting for the buffalo to emerge, waiting for Mr. Darcy to call. But like eating cooked meat, it is now the norm to never be bored, we have banished ennui. The Enlightenment natural philosophers would have been thrilled.
Except, boredom isn’t all bad. A bored brain is a working brain. Boredom can be an astonishing source of innovation and creativity. Undistracted, our brains will wander, consider and invent. For instance, during the COVID-19 pandemic, boredom because of lockdowns and isolations helped many artists explore new ideas and discover new interests. People all over the world not only baked sourdough bread, but found time to explore and experiment. Boredom can lead to an increase in self-awareness and trigger a course of self-improvement. Studies have shown that people who experience moderate levels of boredom are more likely to engage in creative thinking and problem-solving.
In her newsletter, the Marginalia, Maria Popover writes in Defense of Boredom:
“A capacity for boredom is equally central to the arts. Without boredom, there would be no daydreaming and no room for reflection. Without positive constructive daydreaming.” there is no creativity; without reflection, we are no longer able to respond and instead merely react.
To be bored is to be unafraid of our interior lives — a form of moral courage central to being fully human. Gathered below are some of the most enduring and insightful meditations on boredom and its paradoxical blessings I’ve encountered over the years.”
Bertram Russell makes an especially timely note of how “the hedonic treadmill of consumerism” becomes our chronic, and chronically futile, attempt at running from boredom:
“As we rise in the social scale the pursuit of excitement becomes more and more intense. Those who can afford it are perpetually moving from place to place, carrying with them as they go gaiety, dancing and drinking, but for some reason always expecting to enjoy these more in a new place. Those who have to earn a living get their share of boredom, of necessity, in working hours, but those who have enough money to be freed from the need of work have as their ideal a life completely freed from boredom. It is a noble ideal, and far be it from me to decry it, but I am afraid that like other ideals it is more difficult to achievement than the idealists suppose. After all, the mornings are boring in proportion as the previous evenings were amusing. There will be middle age, possibly even old age. At twenty men think that life will be over at thirty… Perhaps it is as unwise to spend one’s vital capital as one’s financial capital. Perhaps some element of boredom is a necessary ingredient in life. A wish to escape from boredom is natural; indeed, all races of mankind have displayed it as opportunity occurred… Wars, pogroms, and persecutions have all been part of the flight from boredom; even quarrels with neighbors have been found better than nothing. Boredom is therefore a vital problem for the moralist, since at least half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.
And yet the child’s boredom evokes in adults a reprimand, a sense of disappointment, an accusation of failure — that is, provided boredom is even agreed to or acknowledged in the first place — commonly alleviated today, twenty years later, by sticking a digital device in the child’s hands. In a certain sense, we treat boredom like we treat childishness itself – as something to be overcome and grown out of, rather than simply as a different mode of being, an essential one at that.
British Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips wrote, back in 1954, “How often, in fact, the child’s boredom is met by that most perplexing form of disapproval, the adult’s wish to distract him — as though the adults have decided that the child’s life must be, or be seen to be, endlessly interesting. It is one of the most oppressive demands of adults that the child should be interested, rather than take time to find what interests him. Boredom is integral to the process of taking one’s time.”
A little boredom can lead to that wonderful AHA moment. Bored creatives take things apart and reassembles them. Bored creatives try new tricks, fix things that aren’t broken. They light things on fire.
Are you bored? Blah? Wondering what’s on Netflix? You may want to sit with your boredom for a few more minutes before picking up your phone. That aimless, blah state is often a indication you are on the verge of a creative breakthrough. It’s as if your imagination, your unconscious is storing up energy for that big break through, that final push to finish a project or (even better) energy for that new project.
How ever you approach it – creativity and the random, seemingly pointless activities that feed the process, is important. Without random acts of creativity, we’d still be crouched around a small fire gnawing on large chunks of raw meat and throwing rocks at our siblings because we forgot the phone charger in the cave.
