6 Impossible Things: #1 Rose Ladder

// March 8th, 2010 // 1 Comment » // creativity, creativity theory, illustration

Creativity is a non-linear process. We start out at Point A and end up at Point C, or Point Q, or any other point that happens to not be called Point B.

This is because, on the way from Point A to Point B, impossible things happen that steer us away from our original endpoint and onto fresher, shinier, more startling destinations.

This is not to say that there is anything wrong with Point B as a destination, just that the creative way to get there probably starts at Point W, or some other ‘non-A’ point.

Anyway the point is: a key feature of the creative life is that seemingly impossible things occur along the way that really kick things along, but only make sense in retrospect.

This is a series of posts presenting 6 impossible analogies for these ‘things’

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#1 The Rose Ladder:

It’s easy to get discouraged when we think that for all our creative efforts we haven’t learned anything, or grown. All the hours spent sketching, writing, practicing scales can seem wasted.

But if we are creating regularly we are growing.

As we grow, the steps we take can be invisible to us. We rise through a succession of small moments of learning. Each as capable of bearing our weight as a single rose floating in mid-air.

But these moments do bear our weight and they do lift us.

As we climb these moments and reach the top of each level of learning, we simultaneously arrive at the bottom of the next level. This can help to solidify the sense that we are not advancing, that we are perpetually stuck in ignorance.

But this is not true.

Each act act we perform along the way adds to our storehouse of knowledge and experience. Walking faithfully along our path we can’t help but evolve creatively, even though we may not always see it.

Can you identify small creative acts that, while seeming inconsequential at the time, helped foster your own creative growth?

The Pinball Guide To Creativity

// February 18th, 2010 // 5 Comments » // creativity, creativity theory, metaphor

As a teenager, the KISS pinball machine was my absolute favorite. I was crazy about KISS, and playing that machine catapulted me into the world of a KISS concert: I could feel the make-up, the noise, the pyrotechnics and the excitement with all my senses.

While playing, I didn’t just feel I was watching a concert. For that brief time I felt like I was in the band, performing.

This is how I feel when I get lost in the creative process, too. When I’m really firing creatively I feel like I’ve entered another world. My state of mind changes, the imagination takes over and shifts that world around until something new and exciting is born.

Pinball machines and creativity…here goes:

The Back-glass:

The back-glass sits on top of the pinball machine with an exciting visual display that attracts players.

The main job of the back-glass is to carry the metaphor of the game. Every pinball machine is based on a metaphor. This allows the player to build an imaginary world which serves as a container for what are, really, a generic mix of plastic, rubber and metal bits bouncing a ball around a tilted surface.

Metaphors are essential to the creative process. Creativity is born from our ability to take seemingly unrelated ideas (bits of plastic rubber and metal and a rock concert, for example) and bring them together to create something new.

The Plunger:

The plunger is a small spring-loaded handle you pull back on and release to launch the ball. Here is the momentum needed to launch into your creative project.

This part of the machine is where the physical momentum begins. But there’s also the aspect of mental momentum.

If you’ve ever played pinball for a while, you more than likely developed a ritual around launching the ball into action. Mine usually kicked in while waiting for the ball to get into position for the next shot.  It went something like this: grip plunger, plant feet, check out the score, check targets, flip flippers (to check they’re working), SHOOT!

There’s even an inbuilt mechanism for creating this ritual as the player is forced to refocus for the time it takes for the ball to roll all the way down and back into position for the plunger. I don’t know if it’s coincidence, or part of the planning that goes into building a pinball machine, but this is a brilliant idea.

It’s also makes sense for you to build in small rituals at the start your creating time, or small downtimes in the middle  where you regather yourself. I always sit and sharpen a handful of pencils before I start an illustration. It is a small physical act that grounds me, quiets the mind and anchors me in a creative space.

When writing I sometimes go to this website where I can set a small mindfulness bell to go off every twenty minutes or so. It often helps to catch me if I’m drifting, but if I’m immersed in my writing and doing well, it’s not distracting enough to break the flow.

The Ball:

In the metaphor of the pinball as a field of creative activity the ball can be: your idea, your project, your problem, whatever you are working on.

Flippers:

The flippers are the tool you use to direct the ball around, just the way your creative choices direct your project. The ability to keep the ball in play by using the flippers well is what separates a good pinball playing experience from a frustrating one. This is where the many hours of ducking math class to play pinball over and over finally start to pay off.

Creative technique and skill keep your ideas and inspirations focused and moving along.

Like flippers moving the ball around different features on a pinball machine, we have the option of moving our original idea or vision through as many mental and physical frameworks as we can.

We can do this by asking questions like:

“What is a good metaphor for this idea?

”What would happen if I place my idea beside another concept?”

“How would these two concepts interact?”

“What if I restrict my palette to one colour?”

“How would this character react to losing everything?”

“What material can best give this sculpture a sense of movement?”

We can have the most luminous starting idea ever, but we also need to push it around and stretch it to reveal its full potential. Once we develop our ability to apply a range of creative options, we become like a skilled pinball player intuitively knocking the ball around the playing field, making all the right moves to keep the ball going and the score ticking over.

Note how physical the act of using the flippers is, too. Pinball machines get you so busy with hand-eye coordination and twisting the body around that they don’t allow much room for the rational mind to step in. They almost trap the player into entering a state of flow. (I wonder if that’s a key to their popularity.)

Lanes:

Once the ball has been launched up into the playing area there are usually three or four lanes divided by rubber stoppers through which the ball can drop. To some degree you can finesse the ball where you want it to go. However, once the ball has dropped down into a lane, you are locked into that trajectory.

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As Steven Nachmanovitch says in Free Play, his great book on improvisation: “Limits yield intensity.”

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Creativity is about breaking out of conditioned patterns of action. Paradoxically, restriction can be a powerful force in the creative process. Making a deliberate choice to restrict your creative options can open you up to moving in unexpected directions, and making creative discoveries you might otherwise miss out on.

Bumpers:

These round obstacles are built to actively propel the ball away on impact. This happens in a vibrant tangle of sound, movement and colour. When developing ideas, it’s useful to have in mind a few different areas of expertise or interest to bounce off. Think of these as your creativity bumpers and emulate that sense of vibrant excitement as you brainstorm.

Good at web design? Bounce your ideas against your knowledge of gardening, cooking or snowboarding.

How about a theory relating the process of web design to building a vegetable plot? Or you can relate creating a social media campaign to hosting a dinner party for 12 guests.  You get the idea.

Targets:

There are a number of different kinds of targets used in pinball machines. My favorite are the drop-down targets. Drop-down targets reset when they’ve all been knocked down, or whenever a new ball (or game) starts.

Targets are fun. They add to the complexity of a pinball game, and focusing on them can push you to raise your skill level.

It’s possible to have a fine game, and even get a decent score, without thinking about the targets. You can also get by in a creative project without having any target you want to hit. But this approach can lead to a wishy-washy result.

Having some form of target to aim for–whether that’s a specific word count for writers, or a tonal scheme for painters–keeps you focused, and adds creative tension that helps push you through to a better result.

Just like the drop-down targets on a pinball machine, it can be good to reset your targets if you achieve them midway through the creative process. And keep them small. Often on a pinball machine there will be three or four targets together; sometimes they can be knocked over with just one or two well-placed hits with the ball.

If you keep creative targets within your project simple and achievable, then you get a sense of accomplishment over and over as you keep resetting them and re-knocking them down.

The Drain:

If you see a pinball player looking down at that narrow area between the flippers while howling with despair, their ball has just gone down the drain. Eventually, no matter how good you are, you are going to lose the ball.

Oh, this is all-too-easy to relate to creativity.

Ideas can suddenly slip right through your fingers. Sometimes they just implode. When you go over the blog post you spent all of last night working on and it reads like an alien’s manifesto, or when that picture you just drew of your neighbor’s dog looks way too much like an arthritic banana, your creative idea has just gone down the drain.

It’s okay when this happens. Just like in a pinball game, you can’t keep that silver ball rolling around infinitely. At some point you’re going to lose focus for a moment–or hit a skill-wall, or sneeze–and you’ll see that flash of silver slip between the flippers before your fingers can react.

The fact that you’re going to lose the ball at some point is part of the tension that keeps you locked in and enjoying the game. As with pinball, when a creative idea or project goes down the drain, you check the scoreboard, take a breath, plant your feet and launch a new ball.

Tilt:

When you shove a pinball machine around too much it just shuts down on you.

Manufacturers know that people will get overexcited and lose it while playing their game. They want people to get overexcited. But they don’t want their machines getting busted up, so the tilt function is built in as a protective device.

It can be easy to get a creative vision and pursue it relentlessly, to the point where we forget to look after ourselves. Exhaustion, hunger, burnout–they are all easy to fall into when we lose ourselves in a creative process.

Like it does for the pinball manufacturers, it pays to build in a ‘tilt’ device: a prearranged signal to yourself that you’ve pushed too hard and it’s time to shut down.

You could set an alarm for hourly breaks, set meal times, or set finishing-up times. You might even check in with someone regularly, someone who knows you and can give you a heads-up when it looks like you’re pushing a bit too hard.

I remember when you tilted the KISS pinball machine there was an evil cackling ‘bwahhaahhahha’ sound as the lights went off. Don’t let this happen to you. That’s not a sound you want to hear in real life.

*****

Pinball machines are fun. Creativity is fun. Being creative is difficult at times, but it’s also a process filled with electricity, exuberance, and flashing epiphanies.

How about you? Have you experienced the creative process as a pinball-like cacophony of bells, lights, and frantic movement? I’d love to hear from you in the comments!

The World In All Its Brilliance

// February 2nd, 2010 // 11 Comments » // chagall, creativity, curiosity

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In Paris I went to neither the art academy nor to the professors. The city itself was my teacher, in all things, in every minute of the day. The market folk, the waiters, the hotel porters, the farmers, the workers. They were enveloped in something of that astounding atmosphere of enlightened freedom that I had never come across anywhere else.

Marc Chagall

Do you ever have moments where the veil just falls away and the world as it is right now presents itself fresh and new?

My wife and I were out doing errands the other day and pulled up at a stoplight outside a cafe. A woman on a bicycle was propped beside our car waiting for the light to change. A couple walked, arms linked, in front of the stopped traffic. In the cafe every table was occupied, at least those visible from the street, and on each table there was at least one laptop open. One man looked through the window, checking out the woman on the bike.

I was struck by how particular this scene was to this moment, to this corner of the city, to the people present, and the activities they were doing. It was a grey Seattle day which threw a soft light over everything, and beneath the bustle of activity everyone seemed relaxed. Things moved in slow motion.

That moment will never be repeated exactly again.

Well it’s Seattle, so the clouds will probably be repeated. Never in that exact same way, though.

The woman on the bike will never lean in just that way, in just that spot, watched by just those eyes as she waits for the light to change. The relationship between the couple crossing the road will never be quite the same again. Tomorrow it may be deeper, or fonder, more fraught, or finished.

The man looking out the window might never see the woman bike-rider again. Or he may see her tomorrow, run down the road and ask her out. In a few weeks someone might even sit in the cafe reading their favourite blogs on an ipad instead of a laptop.

The light changed and we drove off. The moment of seeing, of really seeing that little scene, dropped away and a veil slipped back over the world.

I don’t remember much at all of the rest of the trip. I was caught up in my own thoughts–or conversation–for most of it. We probably stopped at a few more lights at which nothing really caught my eye, and soon enough we were home again.

But that small moment outside the cafe stays with me. It was just a plain moment, but bright in its plainness.

I read recently that when visitors came to Chagall’s studio they had to wait for him to throw on a pair of pants, because he painted naked. That nakedness shines through in his paintings, too.

I love this gesture of casting away what stood between him and his canvas.

Brief moments where I see the world clearly make me realise how muffled my view usually is. It makes me wonder if sometimes I walk around like a guy wearing a pair of pants over my head.

I’m not sure we’re even built to see the world in all its brilliance all the time. I’m sure we gather that mental clothing around us in self-protection, but I’m also pretty sure I go through life a little overdressed.

One payoff that comes from building a creative practice is that the discipline in showing up regularly to create ensures we’ll hit roadblocks and stop signs that occasionally strip away our mental clothing, forcing us to see things as they really are, if only for that brief moment as we scramble to throw our pants back on.

5 Unhelpful Questions For Your New Creative Project

// January 26th, 2010 // 8 Comments » // Uncategorized, creativity, curiosity

At the start of a new creative project do you ever find yourself facing down a barrage of shaky thoughts designed to prevent you from even beginning?

I certainly do. Sometimes the starting line can feel like the finishing line where, just as one last burst of energy is required to break the tape at the end of the race, a similar burst of energy is often required just to break self imposed barriers at the start of a creative journey.

These barriers often appear as questions, which is a big clue: it’s almost as if they’re designed to divert me from creative action and send me elsewhere looking for the magic answer that will make things go smoothly.

Here is a small selection of those questions from my head:

1. Do I Have Everything I Need?

Possibly the sneakiest question, and often the first to come up for me.

Here’s where the part of me that’s scared to create offers to ‘help’ by planting a doubtful seed which gives the option of ‘preparing’ rather than ‘creating’.

It’s sneaky, because sometimes we do need to gather a few things, research, prepare ourselves before we sit down to create.

But more often we need to just sit down and write/draw/sing/strum/move–whatever the action is that moves us into our creative project.

And if we don’t have everything we need? I’m often surprised when caught without my note book or preferred art supplies at how innovative I can be on the spot.

I’ve written snatches of poetry on napkins, sketched with coffee and fingers, made impromptu toys for my sons with cardboard boxes, formula tins. I’ve seen amazing Aboriginal cave art in Australia that was accomplished with sticks, spit, and crushed rock.

2. OMG! Where Did I Put The Map?

That fearful part really wants you to lay the path out exactly, wants to know where this is all leading. Because if the distance from point A to point B is comprehensively mapped out and all the dragons are banished to the edge of the page then nothing scary (ie: creative) can happen.

True creativity is always about discovering something new, no matter how incremental that discovery may be. If that newness is missing, then nothing has been created.

Needing to know the exact layout of the terrain means eliminating any risk of tripping over the unknown. Safe, but definitely not creative.

I think this is why planning, or having an exhaustive outline for a creative project is so tempting–it gives a sense of security. But writing an outline or hanging onto a predetermined plan for your project shuts out opportunities for new learning and creative growth.

It’s O.K. to have a sense of where you might want to go, but more important than that is a willingness to go where the creative project asks you to go.

If you’re surprised and thrilled by where your art takes you, then your reader/viewer/listener is more likely to feel surprised and thrilled too.

3. Can I Do It As Well As They Did?

If I listened to that one every time it came up I’d be a grown man sitting in a crib. Unfortunately, I’ve listened a lot. It’s a pointless question, comparison is not the point of creativity. Creativity is.

The best antidote I’ve ever seen for this question was reading a Gary Larson collection (the ‘Far Side’ cartoonist) that had a brief history of his cartooning career. He showed some of his first cartoons that ran in local newspapers way before he took off. The drawings were crude and a bit amateurish, but you could see the seeds of his unique style and great sense of humour in them already.

The important thing wasn’t whether his cartoons were as skillful as a Charles Schulz, or as funny as Bill Watterson, it was whether or not he was creating his own unique viewpoint and style, at whatever level he was at, which is what eventually made his work seem so effortlessly brilliant.

4. Will Everybody Like It?

It’s the most natural thing in the world to want everybody to like something that’s important to you. You’re bravely putting yourself out there in an art-form you’ve come to love and want to work at.

But this is entirely the wrong question to be asking at the start of the process. Probably in the middle and end too, but especially at the beginning. It’s like setting the handbrake, bricking your wheels and slashing your tyres all at once. You’re guaranteed a fast trip nowhere.

I used to post a lot of poems up on poetry critiquing sites, I liked it when the poems got a good reception, but I always learned more when people let me know what didn’t work.

The best response I ever got was when a whole lot of people loved a poem I had posted and another significant group absolutely hated it. To me, the fact that people were strongly engaged with the poem, some of them to the point of being pissed off, was more important than what they thought of it.

5. Will It Be Perfect?

Um, no.

This question is rarely asked via an actual ‘voice’ in my head. It’s more of a visceral question in the form of a general unease, because I know it won’t be perfect and imagine all sorts of consequences: shame, ridicule, low grades, loss of status.

Of course it won’t be perfect. And that’s a good thing. If everything I created was perfect, creating art would be a sterile experience not worth pursuing.

Not only will my creation not be perfect, It’s pretty well destined to fail, at least partially. That’s a good thing too. Failure is the Vitamin F of creativity, it’s good for your heart and your eye, your bones and your soul.

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All of these questions seem to have my best intentions at heart, and in their own way they do. Taking creative action means putting myself out there, and I find that scary. At some level I want to be protected from that.

At the same time I want to be vigilant in keeping focus and diving in as deep as I can when I create. And that involves letting go of any expectations I might have for the end result.

When The Head Rolls Away The Body Rises

// January 3rd, 2010 // 8 Comments » // creativity

As you read this, does your head feel heavy on your shoulders? The head makes up about 5-15% of our body weight, but can feel as if it weighs more.

When creating I often feel the pull to rush upstairs and try to think my way through a project. Sometimes it works too, even if the end result feels a little shoe-horned into being. My head is loud and busy with ideas and opinions on what should be done. Maybe not the greatest ideas or the most shining opinions, but very insistent.

This insistence adds to the physical weight of the head, I’m sure.

When I tune into my body I can sometimes feel the tension rising from the neck as it tries to hold the head up, the compression in my throat as the weight bears down, the forward slump of my frame.

Joanna Macy, in ‘World as Lover, World As Self’, says that we often walk through life as we were a “head on a stick”. To live out our lives within the confines of our skull is  a way of being that is pretty well accepted. The question: “Are you out of your mind?” is pretty telling as a measure of someone’s sanity.

I used to be a member of a Playback Theatre group and every Tuesday night we would meet for rehearsals. Playback theatre is a form of improvised theatre in which audience members stories are played back by the actors. The bulk of the rehearsals were devoted to going into our bodies and working from there.

Training ourselves to move from the feeling body rather than the thinking head was the only way to tap into the intuitive nature of working as an ensemble.

Six different heads all trying to impose their ideas at once would never work. Once you were on-stage and an audience member was telling their story to the conductor, the worst possible thing you could do as an actor was to try and ‘think’ your way through to how you would tell the story.

Instead, we got to be continually amazed at what came up through the wisdom of our  ’collective body’.

Often a performance would begin with a snatch of improvised music from the musician who was a part of the group, and we would respond with a movement. Whatever movement seemed appropriate. From there the performance would almost create itself. More importantly, the performance would often be a revelation to the performers, the audience, and the story-teller whose story was being played back.

One of the most transforming things I got from my Playback Theatre experience was a deep respect for the creative abilities of my own body, and the relief that came from knowing that.

Douglas Harding wrote a book called ‘On Having No Head: Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious”

The whole book is great, but the insight in the opening few pages is all he really needed to write. He talks about the day he ‘realized’ that he didn’t actually have a head.

What actually happened was something absurdly simple and unspectacular: I stopped thinking. A peculiar quiet, an odd kind of alert limpness or numbness, came over me. Reason and imagination and all mental chatter died down. For once, words really failed me. Past and future dropped away. I forgot who and what I was, my name, manhood, animalhood, all that could be called mine. It was as if I had been born that instant, brand new, mindless, innocent of all memories. There existed only the Now, that present moment and what was clearly given in it. To look was enough. And what I found was khaki trouserlegs terminating downwards in a pair of brown shoes, khaki sleeves terminating sideways in a pair of pink hands, and a khaki shirtfront terminating upwards in—absolutely nothing whatever! Certainly not in a head.

It took me no time at all to notice that this nothing, this hole where a head should have been was no ordinary vacancy, no mere nothing. On the contrary, it was very much occupied. It was a vast emptiness vastly filled, a nothing that found room for everything—room for grass, trees, shadowy distant hills, and far above them snowpeaks like a row of angular clouds riding the blue sky. I had lost a head and gained a world.

I think that’s the best description ever of the relief that can be had from dropping the weight of the head. Do I have a head? Actually, I think I do. But I agree with Harding that when your head sometimes seems to have the weight of an iron ball it can be sweet to just let it go and allow the world to come forward.

There are many ways to create from the body, even in seemingly sedate forms of art. William Wordsworth wrote and revised many of his poems while on long walks, Wallace Stevens composed his poetry while walking the two miles to and from his work  each day. In the world of art the physicality of Jackson Pollock’s painting stands out as an example of letting the head make way for the body’s intelligence to come through.

Here are some things I’ve tried that help me get more into my body:

Mindful bath: I was taught to do this at a stressful time in my life when I suffered from a particularly busy mind. Basically it involved getting into a bath, grabbing some soap and washing myself from the feet up, naming each part of the body as I washed it: “These are  my toes, here is my ankle, … and so on. The combination of being immersed in a warm bath while trying to be mindfully aware of my body is a really powerful exercise.

Writing/drawing with the non-dominant hand: the sheer unfamiliarity this act is enough to bring my awareness down into my hand as I draw or write. Trying out a different way of moving, a new kind of dance for example, also helps to bring me out of an unconscious way of moving to a more aware state.

Juggling: is a great way to get out of the head, I like to do this at the point when I’ve been thinking something over for a long time and just need to wipe the mental slate clean. If you don’t juggle, a mini trampoline also works really well.

Play with sidewalk chalk: I learned the value of this by drawing on our driveway with my son. I like to make huge sweeping lines as I draw, there’s just something really freeing and physically dynamic that really drops me into my body. It’s like a ‘dry’ version of Jackson Pollock style art.

You might like to try some of these (let me know how you go). I bet you have some great ways to bring your awareness into the body and create from there too, I’d love to hear them.

I’ve signed up for  the ‘Creative Every Day’ challenge for 2010. The topic for the month is ‘Body’ So I thought it would be fun to write a blog post each week on the monthly theme. Here’s where you can learn more, and sign up to join the challenge if you like:

http://creativeeveryday.com/creative-every-day-challenge

The Pyjama-Clad Dragon Slayer

// December 22nd, 2009 // 3 Comments » // creativity, curiosity, poetry, reading