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!

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.

*****

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.

The Pyjama-Clad Dragon Slayer

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

Illustration Friday: Hatch

// December 11th, 2009 // 6 Comments » // illustration friday

Learning To Rest Is Learning To Trust Myself

// December 4th, 2009 // 9 Comments » // creativity

The Ice Frog

// October 19th, 2009 // 6 Comments » // creativity

We all know the story of the frog in the pot.

A frog dropped into a slowly heating pot of water is unable to notice the rising temperature and, not knowing to jump out of the pot, is boiled alive. It’s a great metaphor to illustrate the necessity of action in the face of impending doom.

When working on creativity issues a more common scenario arises at the opposite end of the spectrum, where the doom is not impending but ancient history. This situation is often the starting point for people when they begin to consciously work at being more creative. It calls for a new frog metaphor entirely–The Ice Frog.

The Ice Frog has arrived in your life when the warm pulse of creativity has slowed, then been frozen, by long periods of doubt and inaction.

My most memorable encounter with the ice frog began as I left a job many years ago with laughter ringing in my ears after after telling my manager and assistant manager that I was resigning to have a shot at becoming a professional cartoonist.Over the next year or so there were lots of rejections, I actually failed to get a single cartoon published. But it was the the disbelief and laughter of my bosses that I carried inside my head throughout that period which eventually gave birth to the Ice Frog.

After 12 months I gave up and got another (lower paying) office job and did very little drawing. For a long time.

The chilling pronouncements of those around us, when taken on board, can eventually freeze any outward creative movement Those who face this barrage often hold fast to their creative impulses by going underground, isolating themselves from further criticism. Which would be fine, except often these critical outside voices become stamped into our consciousness with enough force that they often reincarnate. Usually as a part of us that takes on the role of a savage inner critic.

Just as a frog freezes first on the outside and then through to it’s core, the inner critic is the mechanism through which our creative inspiration hardens and stills.Energy is blocked. To the point that even when the impulse is there, the physical form is frozen solid. Writer’s block, painters block, stage fright, any form of demobilizing panic, this is the point where serious work needs to be done.

The Ice Frog is not just physically frozen, but also frozen in time. The real loss here is not just the current capacity to create but the lost opportunity of creative growth that could be happening. The gaining of greater and new technical skills, and understanding of our chosen art-form that we would have attained had we been creating.

Ice also distorts vision. From inside this frozen state there can be a sense that things will always be this way: stuck, blurred, fractured into disorienting shapes. It becomes easy to believe that you may never create again.

This is false. Creativity is an inner quality that can be pinned down or buried, but is always capable of being brought back to life. So, how do we bring the Ice Frog back to life?

Warmth. For me it was the warmth of my own attention, my own presence, to my creative practice.

Reading Frederick Frank’s ‘The Zen of Seeing’ was what began ‘defrosting’ my own Ice Frog. It helped me find a willingness to build a new relationship to creativity that wasn’t based on outside evaluation of my art. I began to draw just for the sake of drawing. My sketchbooks from that time contained page after page of sketches my own feet, coffee cups, tottering book piles. I just sat there, present to my own circumstances and drew what I found. With whatever ability I had. This was enough.

Building up this warm, attentive relationship to my drawing feels so right to me. I’ve read of other approaches for addressing creative stuckness and they so often come across as the equivalent of smashing the Ice Frog with a hockey stick, or taking to it with an ice pick. That just seems so counter productive to me. The energy of that response is too close to that of the people around us who so often devalue and belittle our creativity int he first place. Sure a solid hit with the hockey stick might get you some sense of  movement, but what quality of movement? The ice pick might get through the ice and reach the frog. But at what cost?

I kind of like that those sketches so often focused on my feet. How fitting that the warmth began it’s return through the extremities and worked it’s way inward. Over time more and more creative energy opened up as the blood began to flow through my creative body, my Ice Frog. My love for drawing and cartooning returned and soon I was drawing nearly every day again. It was a long time before I started putting any of my work out there for others to see, but the road back had begun.