Creative Creativity: Inspiration and Tools for Creativity

My Head is Like a Factory: Creativity in the Industrial Age

I ran across this chraming poem by Butler Brannan in an old magazine on Google Books. Oringinally published in 1901, it compares creativity to a factory. The brilliant bit is that it acknowledges that we don't always control what the final product of that factory will be.  I think we've all had days when our heads produced nothing but hair.

My head is like a factory,
the windows are my eyes;
The Furnace is my mouth, - you see
I feed it meats or pies.

And when its Hunger I appease
My Head will do its share,
Sometimes producing Rhymes like these
And sometimes only Hair.

Songwriting Ideas From Wikipedia - Black Francis Interview

Black Francis, lead singer of the Pixies and incredibly prolific solo artist as Frank Black, gave the Village Voice an interview on his creative process. A lot of it is specific to songwriting, but I thought this snipped was universally valuable. Beware, if you this your creativity is a fragile flower, his method might seem a little mechanical. All I can say is that I have used this exact method before and it works.

 

In the case of Svn Fngrs I had no idea what I was going to write about, but I was really up to the gut to try to go above and beyond the call of duty. And so I was under the gun and I was like, 'Okay, what the hell am I going to write about here? What am I going to write about?' And I literally just started doing the random article search function on Wikipedia. And I did this for quite a long time late one evening in a very tired state, and somehow I stumbled upon the article for demigods. And I was like, 'Oh, demigods.' And then, of course, 'Okay, well what is a demigod? And who was a demigod? What do they mean by demigod?' And, of course, on something like Wikipedia one article has other links in it and suddenly you’re off, you know. So the Internet has become a really great resource for me because I’m not a deep researcher. I just want to have an impression. I just need to find out some facts. I’ve already got my little concept going. My little concept is already in place, but I just need some facts so when I rhyme “phone” with “zone” my couplet - well, hopefully it has some artistic merit on its own, regardless of what it’s about or if it’s about anything - but if it happens to be about something, it’d be nice if it was sort of backing up some cool fact about the subject. It’s satisfying, I think, for the listener and it’s satisfying for me.

Douglas Adams On Creativity and Inspiration

Douglas Adams is one of the great comedic writers of the last 100 years. He wrote for Monty Python and created the enduring Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy series. He was also a great thinker. I have collected a few quotes of his that relate to creativity. My favorite quote is the one about beliefs: "If you don't change your beliefs, your life will be like this forever. Is that good news?" An excellent question. 

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.

Having been an English literary graduate, I've been trying to avoid the idea of doing art ever since. I think the idea of art kills creativity.

The world is a thing of utter inordinate complexity and richness and strangeness that is absolutely awesome. I mean the idea that such complexity can arise not only out of such simplicity, but probably absolutely out of nothing, is the most fabulous extraordinary idea. And once you get some kind of inkling of how that might have happened, it's just wonderful. And . . . the opportunity to spend 70 or 80 years of your life in such a universe is time well spent as far as I am concerned.

Writing is easy. You only need to stare at a piece of blank paper until a drop of blood forms on your forehead.

A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.

He was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher... or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.

It is a rare mind indeed that can render the hitherto non-existent blindingly obvious. The cry 'I could have thought of that' is a very popular and misleading one, for the fact is that they didn't, and a very significant and revealing fact it is too.

Let us think the unthinkable, let us do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.

See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise you will only see what you were expecting. Most scientists forget that.

If you don't change your beliefs, your life will be like this forever. Is that good news?

You live and learn. At any rate, you live.

Eliminate Other People's Imagination

Nick Mamatas, controversial writer and editor, was asked by someone whether or not they had the potential to be a great writer. He posted his answer and it's a fascinating discussion of good versus great, the value of practice and turning on the pilot light of imagination.

The whole answer is worth reading and debating, but I wanted to point out one particular bit because I think it has a universal truth that applies to all creative work.

The goal of the practice is to negate the negation -- to eliminate the use of other people's imaginations instead of your own. You must negate and negate and negate until there is nothing left but you, your right hand, and that woodchipper. Do you think it is clever and responsible to find "balance" in your life by keeping a day job and writing every other weekend? You should cultivate a loathing for yourself, for such advice, and for the pathetic circumstances of existence -- bills and kids and private property, that makes that advice seem so sound. Do you think "real artists" run around from lover to lover, living off the fat of the land and friendly patrons one might meet in midnight cafes? Embrace the reality that you are a hopeless poseur playacting the neuroses of a couple prominent writers and zillion awful pigs from the last century. All that has come before is worthless, except for those few people you realize were using their own imaginations and not the mass imagination, and their work.

As you can see, Mamatas is not out to make any friends. Even if you disagree with him, what he says is worth thinking about. How much of what you do is just you? How much is just everything that came before you projected on to you? What do you need to do to grind away the inessential, unoriginal parts of your creativity?

By the way, I just read Nick's book Under My Roof and thought it was great. Also, his submission guidelines for Clarkesworld are extremely funny.

Link to answer

Advice For Completing Projects

Warren Ellis, novelist and comic writer, wrote a great post about the best way to complete a project that people will want to consume. He frames it around Joss Whedon's Dr. Horrible web project

Part of his point is that you have to earn people's trust before they will pay attention to something big. Instead of starting with a huge epic or a full length feature, start with something small and manageable and build.

The three strongest points he makes are, "Be Short, Be Bold and Get It Done." Later in the article he adds, "Be Great."

He adds:

I can’t tell you how many new hopeful comics writers I meet who have never finished anything in their lives because their intended first project is a hundred-episode epic that creates a whole new universe or three. And I tell them all the same thing: you’re screwed. No-one will want it. Not until you’ve written something short, capable of being produced on a budget, and finished. Your epic may be worldchanging, but no-one will ever know because no publisher will gamble that kind of money on an unknown. And that’s before you get to the vagaries of the attention economy.

I think this is fantastic advice, especially with web content. I know people who won't even start a video on youtube if the length is over five minutes. Produce enough brief, memorable stuff and people will flock to your longer, more complex stuff. Build an audience, create desire with tiny savory snacks before you serve up a meal.

Also, limitations can be a powerful way to inspire yourself. Challenge yourself to Be Brief, Be Bold and Get It Done!

Read the whole article here

Improvise Your Way To A Better, Faster First Draft

One of the major schools of improvisational acting (improv) developed not as an exercise for actors, but as a tool to help creative writer's develop new material and overcome blocks. Improv itself is really the art of trying to present a first draft of a play that's so good it's worthy of an audience. It doesn't always work, quality wise, but with improv you always get something.

Without an audience, you have the ability to go back and perfect your draft until it's fantastic. Instead of this making writers feel free to do whatever they want in their first draft, many people have difficulty even completing a first draft. It occurred to me that these rules might help writers free themselves up while writing.

Following these simple, basic rules of improv will get you a completed first draft and, over time, improve the quality of your first drafts of both fiction and non-fiction. There are great stories that break all these rules, so they really aren't rules so much as suggestions. In my opinion, it's better to break one of these rules in a second draft rather than the first.

1. "Yes, and..."

This is the most basic rule of improv. In fact, this is improv in two simple words. The idea behind these two words is that you always accept what came before and add something new.

In acting, the "yes" part of the phrase means not denying what someone else does or says. In terms of sitting and writing your draft, this means that as soon as something is down on the sheet of paper it is part of the story. There is no going back and switching around details because you got a better idea, it's down in ink. I think more things were written this way before the word processor, but now it's always easy to go back and change.

Now, let's talk about the "and." This addition to the phrase points to not repeating things over and over again. Each sentence should add something to the story or move it forward. So, you accept everything that has already happened and add something new. Each sentence should expand the world of the story or move it forward.

Taken together, they create an unstoppable force creating a world and telling a story.

2. C.R.O.W.

This is an acronym for the most basic parts of a story that need to be established fairly quickly for a reader to want to continue with the story. They stand for character, relationship, objective and where. Withholding one of these pieces of information too long results in a twilight zone story where everything is just killing time until a last minute piece of information changes everything that happened before. You're much better off giving your reader this information and letting the story follow its natural path. It belongs at the beginning of the story.

WIthholding this information will make your audience lose patience with you.

3. Start in the middle of the action.

Try to start with characters that already know one another involved in an action. Starting with a a couple leaving a dry cleaners with a stolen wedding dress and tuxedo being chased by the shop owner is far better than starting with two characters who have never met sitting on a bench. Strangers need to introduce themselves and have no emotional connections, which means more work for you and more patience from your readers.

4. Listen

I know you're not listening, you're writing. So, really this one should be "read yourself carefully." Everything you need to tell your story is right there. Often, people don't figure out what they're writing about until later drafts. Reading as you write will allow that process to speed up.

Also, have your characters listen to one another and really respond to what's said to them.

5. Details

Be as specific as possible in your details. If a character is reading, he isn't reading a book, he's reading Bridges of Madison County or Highlights Magazine or a copy of the Constitution. Every detail is important. Training yourself to be as specific as possible in your first draft will charge what you write with meaning.

6. Justify

There are no mistakes, justify what you write. If there is confusion or contradiction explain it. Repeated mistakes are a theme! However nonsensical something is in your story, make it natural and real. Justify justify justify. If it truly doesn't belong, cut it out in the second draft.

7. Change

Some of the worst improv scenes are when all the actors refuse to let their characters change. Story is change, if nothing changes there is no story. Don't love your characters so much that it becomes like bad fan fiction where the familar character run through familiar situations and say familiar things and leave ready for the next adventure with no emotional impact at all.

8. The end is in the beginning

Don't pull in some outside force, deux ex machina, to end your story. Look at what initiated the story and find the solution there. Walk backwards into the future figuring out where to go next by examining what has happened before. If a story starts with someone cleaning a gun, someone will probably be shot in the end. If a story begins with a farm boy who wants to be a hero, it will end with that boy either becoming a hero or not becoming a hero.

Automatic Writing - Creativity Tip

Automatic writing has an interesting history. The name contains what it is, just sitting down and writing without trying to influence what comes out with ideas about meaning or story or spelling or even being interesting. It seems to have started with spiritualism, as a means of contacting the dead in the afterlife, in the 1800s. The spiritualist movement was really about women trying to have positions of power in a society that limited them.

So, automatic writing served two purposes. One, the person doing the automatic writing could pretend that the writing was coming from somewhere outside themselves. Two, other people would take it more seriously because they thought the women were just a means for the message to be communicated. By removing the idea of authorship from the writing, both the writer and reader were free to judge the writing for what it was rather than prejudging its source.

The next group to use it were the surrealists who also did automatic drawing. They believe it was a channel to the "genius of creativity" in all of us. Also, they were attracted to the strange images and rhythms it produces.

I don't think automatic writing is a message from another world or the key to your subconscious mind, but it is a useful tool for producing raw material.

Here's a short guide on how to do it.

Find a comfortable place to sit with a flat surface in front of you. Get a pen or pencil and some blank paper.  Clear your head, go neutral, then begin writing as fast you can.  If you find yourself stopping, just use the last letter of the last sentence you wrote as the first letter of the next sentence and keep going. Don't stop to correct, alter or  insert a better idea, this is simply a big dumping ground for you to produce raw material that you can use for whatever you want later.

Write as long as you want, you'll know when it's over.

I recommend putting it aside for a day before reading it. It can be a revelation or a complete disappointment, it doesn't matter because you didn't put any effort into it.

Try it. I promise you'll be entertained. If you feel better pretending that you are channeling a voice from somewhere else, go ahead. That way you don't have to take the blame for what happens. If you decide to do that, you can pretend you are channeling the voices of aliens, fairies, half-dog half-men that live in the swamps of West Virginia, David Lee Roth or President Taft. Maybe it will make it better!

After all, like all good games this has no rules.

 

How To Write Moving Picture Plays

While browsing through the public domain books in the Google library, I found one called How to Write Moving Picture Plays that was written in 1914 by William Lewis Gordon. It has some good advice (Is your climax strong enough?), some common sense advice (Write only on one side of the paper.), and some advice that is now laughably bad.

Here is the first paragraph of the section called "Kinds of Plays to Avoid."

Avoid any scenes or suggestive complications that may offend good taste or morals. Avoid scenes of murder, suicide, robbery, kidnapping, harrowing deathbeds, horrible accidents, persons being tortured, scenes attending an electrocution or hanging, violent fights showing strangling, shooting, or stabbing, staggering drunkards, depraved or wayward women, rioting strikers, funerals, and all such scenes of a depressing or unpleasant nature. Do not make a hero of a highwayman or escaped convict. Do not reflect upon any religious belief, nationality, or physical deformity. Thousands of men, women, and CHILDREN of all classes, nationalities, and creeds witness these pictures daily. We may occasionally see some play depicted which is contrary to the above advice, but they are the exceptions, and are to be avoided. Give your story a clean, wholesome, pleasant tone, leaving the few morbid tales for others to write. These tales of crime are growing less every day, and consequently the photoplay is growing better.

Quentin Tarantino would have no career!

It's a quick, fun, 26 page read.

Ray Bradbury On Your Attitude Toward Writing

Break Writer's Block With Translation

In college I had a professor who told us one of his favorite ways to get past writer's block was to translate a poem into English from a language you don't know. In fact, to do this correctly, you should choose a language you know nothing about. Most people recognize too many Spanish and French words for this to work well.

Instead of looking for the meanings of the words, treat the poem like an object. Look to the shape of the poem and the length of the lines. If you can sound out words, use the sound to help you. If it character writing, look to the shapes and guess the meaning. Look for patterns in the writing and repetition.

Treat it as a real translation. The first time through you should get a rough approximation of the poem. Then, once you have a feel for your "translation," smooth the language and amplify the meaning. Choose appropriate vocabulary. Read it to yourself.

Once you're done, you'll have a completely original work. The professor said that he had several published poems that were actually "translations" from great poets. Don't read any actual translations until you're completely finished, but do read a translation just in case you are too close.