In a recent newsletter from
Brain Pickings, Maria Popova looked at the notion of creativity.
Brain Pickings has a free weekly interestingness digest. It
comes out on Sundays and offers excellent articles from the week. The original article can be read at
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/09/06/what-is-creativity/
Bradbury, Eames, Angelou, Gladwell, Einstein,
Byrne, Duchamp, Close, Sendak, and more.
“Creativity” is one of those grab-bag
terms, like “happiness” and “love,” that can mean so many things it runs
the risk of meaning nothing at all. And yet some of history’s greatest
minds have attempted to capture, explain, describe, itemize, and dissect
the nature of creativity. After similar omnibi of cultural icons’ most
beautiful and articulate definitions
of
art,
of
science, and
of
love, here comes one of creativity.
For
Ray Bradbury, creativity was
the
art of muting the rational mind:
The intellect is a great danger to creativity … because
you begin to rationalize and make up reasons for things, instead of
staying with your own basic truth — who you are, what you are, what you
want to be. I’ve had a sign over my typewriter for over 25 years now,
which reads “Don’t think!” You must never think at the typewriter — you
must feel. Your intellect is always buried in that feeling anyway. … The
worst thing you do when you think is lie — you can make up reasons that
are not true for the things that you did, and what you’re trying to do
as a creative person is surprise yourself — find out who you really are,
and try not to lie, try to tell the truth all the time. And the only
way to do this is by being very active and very emotional, and get it
out of yourself — making things that you hate and things that you love,
you write about these then, intensely.
Long before he was became
the
artist we know and love, a young
Maurice Sendak
full of self-doubt wrote in a letter to his editor, the remarkable
Ursula Nordstrom:
Knowledge is the driving force that puts creative passion
to work.
In
writing back, Nordstrom responded with her signature blend of
wisdom and assurance:
That is the creative artist — a penalty of the creative
artist — wanting to make order out of chaos.
Portrait by Lisa Congdon for our Reconstructionists project.
Click image for details.
Bill Moyers is
credited with having offered a sort of mirror-image
definition that does away with order and seeks, instead, magical chaos:
Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous.
For
Albert Einstein, its defining characteristic was
what he called
“combinatory
play”. In a letter to a French mathematician, included in
Einstein’s
Ideas and Opinions (
public library), he writes:
The words or the language, as they are written or spoken,
do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical
entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs
and more or less clear images which can be “voluntarily” reproduced and
combined.
There is, of course, a certain connection between those elements and
relevant logical concepts. It is also clear that the desire to arrive
finally at logically connected concepts is the emotional basis of this
rather vague play with the above-mentioned elements. But taken from a
psychological viewpoint, this combinatory play seems to be the essential
feature in productive thought — before there is any connection with
logical construction in words or other kinds of signs which can be
communicated to others.
Portrait by Lisa Congdon for our Reconstructionists project.
Click image for details.
For
Maya Angelou, a
modern-day
sage of the finest kind, the mystery and miracle of creativity is
in its self-regenerating nature. In the excellent collection
Conversations with Maya Angelou
(
public library), which also gave us her
poignant
exchange with Bill Moyers, Angelou says:
Creativity or talent, like electricity, is something I
don’t understand but something I’m able to harness and use. While
electricity remains a mystery, I know I can plug into it and light up a
cathedral or a synagogue or an operating room and use it to help save a
life. Or I can use it to electrocute someone. Like electricity,
creativity makes no judgment. I can use it productive or destructively.
The important thing is to use it. You can’t use up creativity. The more
you use it, the more you have.
Tom Bissell, writing in
Magic
Hours: Essays on Creators and Creation, also
celebrates this magical quality of creativity:
To create anything … is to believe, if only momentarily,
you are capable of magic. … That magic … is sometimes perilous,
sometimes infectious, sometimes fragile, sometimes failed, sometimes
infuriating, sometimes triumphant, and sometimes tragic.
But there might be something more precise and less mystical about the
creative process. In
Uncommon Genius: How Great Ideas Are Born
(
public library), the fantastic collection
of interviews with MacArthur “genius” grantees by
Denise
Shekerjian, she recapitulates her findings:
The trick to creativity, if there is a single useful
thing to say about it, is to identify your own peculiar talent and then
to settle down to work with it for a good long time.
Shekerjian interviews the late
Stephen Jay Gould,
arguably
the
best science writer of all time, who describes his own approach to
creativity as
the
art of making connections, which Shekerjian synthesizes:
Gould’s special talent, that rare gift for seeing the
connections between seemingly unrelated things, zinged to the heart of
the matter. Without meaning to, he had zeroed in on the most popular of
the manifold definitions of creativity: the idea of connecting two
unrelated things in an efficient way. The surprise we experience at such
a linkage brings us up short and causes us to think, Now that’s
creative.
This notion, of course, is not new. In his timelessly insightful 1939
treatise
A Technique for Producing Ideas
(
public library), outlining the
five
stages of ideation,
James Webb Young asserts:
An idea is nothing more nor less than a new combination
of old elements [and] the capacity to bring old elements into new
combinations depends largely on the ability to see relationships. The
habit of mind which leads to a search for relationships between facts
becomes of the highest importance in the production of ideas.
Three years later, in 1942,
Rosamund Harding added
another dimension of stressing the importance of cross-disciplinary
combinations in wonderful out-of-print tome
An
Anatomy of Inspiration:
Originality depends on new and striking combinations of
ideas. It is obvious therefore that the more a man knows the greater
scope he has for arriving at striking combinations. And not only the
more he knows about his own subject but the more he knows beyond it
of other subjects. It is a fact that has not yet been sufficiently
stressed that those persons who have risen to eminence in arts, letters
or sciences have frequently possessed considerable knowledge of subjects
outside their own sphere of activity.
Seven decades later,
Phil Beadle echoes this concept
in his wonderful blueprint
field
guide to creativity,
Dancing About Architecture: A Little Book
of Creativity (
public library):
It is the ability to spot the potential in the product of
connecting things that don’t ordinarily go together that marks out the
person who is truly creative.
Steve Jobs famously
articulated this notion and took it a step further, emphasizing the
importance of building a rich personal library of experiences and ideas
to connect:
Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask
creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty
because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed
obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect
experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they
were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have
thought more about their experiences than other people. Unfortunately,
that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had
very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect,
and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective
on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience,
the better design we will have.
Musician
Amanda Palmer puts this even more
poetically in her
meditation
on dot-connecting and creativity:
We can only connect the dots that we collect, which makes
everything you write about you. … Your connections are the thread that
you weave into the cloth that becomes the story that only you can tell.
Beloved graphic designer
Paula Scher has a different
metaphor for the same concept. In Debbie Millman’s
How to Think Like a Great Graphic Designer
(
UK;
public library), she
likens
creativity to a slot machine:
There’s a certain amount of intuitive thinking that goes
into everything. It’s so hard to describe how things happen intuitively.
I can describe it as a computer and a slot machine. I have a pile of
stuff in my brain, a pile of stuff from all the books I’ve read and all
the movies I’ve seen. Every piece of artwork I’ve ever looked at. Every
conversation that’s inspired me, every piece of street art I’ve seen
along the way. Anything I’ve purchased, rejected, loved, hated. It’s all
in there. It’s all on one side of the brain.
And on the other side of the brain is a specific brief that comes
from my understanding of the project and says, okay, this solution is
made up of A, B, C, and D. And if you pull the handle on the slot
machine, they sort of run around in a circle, and what you hope is that
those three cherries line up, and the cash comes out.
But
Arthur Koestler, in his seminal 1964 anatomy of
creativity,
The Act Of Creation (
public library), argues that besides
connection, the creative act necessitates contrast, or what he termed
“bisociation”:
The pattern underlying [the creative act] is the
perceiving of a situation or idea in two self-consistent but habitually
incompatible frames of references. The event, in which the two
intersect, is made to vibrate simultaneously on two different
wavelengths, as it were. While this unusual situation lasts, [the event]
is not merely linked to one associative context, but bisociated with
two.
I have coined the term ‘bisociation’ in order to make a distinction
between the routine skills of thinking on a single ‘plane,’ as it were,
and the creative act, which … always operates on more than one plane.
The former can be called single-minded, the latter double-minded,
transitory state of unstable equilibrium where the balance of both
emotion and thought is disturbed.
He differentiated between cognitive habit, or merely associative
thought, and originality, or bisociative ideation, thusly:
Twenty years later, creative icon and original Mad Man
George
Lois echoed Koestler in his influential tome
The Art of Advertising: George Lois on Mass
Communication (
public library):
Creativity can solve almost any problem. The creative
act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything.
For
Gretchen Rubin, however, habit isn’t the enemy
of creativity but its engine. In
Manage
Your Day-to-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your
Creative Mind, she writes:
Anthony Trollope, the nineteenth-century writer who
managed to be a prolific novelist while also revolutionizing the British
postal system, observed, “A small daily task, if it be really daily,
will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.” Over the long run, the
unglamorous habit of frequency fosters both productivity and creativity.
[…]
You’re much more likely to spot surprising relationships and to see
fresh connections among ideas, if your mind is constantly humming with
issues related to your work. … By contrast, working sporadically makes
it hard to keep your focus. It’s easy to become blocked, confused, or
distracted, or to forget what you were aiming to accomplish.
[…]
Creativity arises from a constant churn of ideas, and one of the
easiest ways to encourage that fertile froth is to keep your mind
engaged with your project. When you work regularly, inspiration strikes
regularly.
In 1926, English social psychologist and London School of Economics
co-founder
Graham Wallas penned
The Art of Thought,
laying out his theory for how creativity works. Its gist, preserved in
the altogether indispensable
The Creativity Question (
public library), identifies the four
stages of the creative process —
preparation,
incubation, illumination, and verification — and their essential
interplay:
In the daily stream of thought these four different
stages constantly overlap each other as we explore different problems.
An economist reading a Blue Book, a physiologist watching an experiment,
or a business man going through his morning’s letters, may at the same
time be “incubating” on a problem which he proposed to himself a few
days ago, be accumulating knowledge in “preparation” for a second
problem, and be “verifying” his conclusions on a third problem. Even in
exploring the same problem, the mind may be unconsciously incubating on
one aspect of it, while it is consciously employed in preparing for or
verifying another aspect. And it must always be remembered that much
very important thinking, done for instance by a poet exploring his own
memories, or by a man trying to see clearly his emotional relation to
his country or his party, resembles musical composition in that the
stages leading to success are not very easily fitted into a “problem and
solution” scheme. Yet, even when success in thought means the creation
of something felt to be beautiful and true rather than the solution of a
prescribed problem, the four stages of Preparation, Incubation,
Illumination, and the Verification of the final result can generally be
distinguished from each other.
But
Malcolm Gladwell, in
reflecting on the legacy of legendary economist
Albert O. Hirscham in his review of
Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O.
Hirschman, doesn’t think the creative process is so deliberate:
Creativity always comes as a surprise to us; therefore we
can never count on it and we dare not believe in it until it has
happened. In other words, we would not consciously engage upon tasks
whose success clearly requires that creativity be forthcoming. Hence,
the only way in which we can bring our creative resources fully into
play is by misjudging the nature of the task, by presenting it to
ourselves as more routine, simple, undemanding of genuine creativity
than it will turn out to be.
But
David Byrne is skeptical of this romantic notion
that creativity is a purely subconscious muse that dances to its own
mystical drum. In
How Music Works (
public library), one of
the
best music books of 2012, he writes:
I had an extremely slow-dawning insight about creation.
That insight is that context largely determines what is written,
painted, sculpted, sung, or performed. That doesn’t sound like much of
an insight, but it’s actually the opposite of conventional wisdom, which
maintains that creation emerges out of some interior emotion, from an
upwelling of passion or feeling, and that the creative urge will brook
no accommodation, that it simply must find an outlet to be heard, read,
or seen. The accepted narrative suggests that a classical composer gets a
strange look in his or her eye and begins furiously scribbling a fully
realized composition that couldn’t exist in any other form. Or that the
rock-and-roll singer is driven by desires and demons, and out bursts
this amazing, perfectly shaped song that had to be three minutes and
twelve seconds — nothing more, nothing less. This is the romantic notion
of how creative work comes to be, but I think the path of creation is
almost 180º from this model. I believe that we unconsciously and
instinctively make work to fit preexisting formats.
Of course, passion can still be present. Just because the form that
one’s work will take is predetermined and opportunistic (meaning one
makes something because the opportunity is there), it doesn’t mean that
creation must be cold, mechanical, and heartless. Dark and emotional
materials usually find a way in, and the tailoring process — form being
tailored to fit a given context — is largely unconscious, instinctive.
We usually don’t even notice it. Opportunity and availability are often
the mother of invention.
For
John Cleese, creativity is neither a conscious
plan of attack nor an unconscious mystery, but a mode of being. In his
superb
1991
talk on the five factors of creativity, he asserts in his
characteristic manner of laconic wisdom:
Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating.
In
Inside the Painter’s Studio
(
public library), celebrated artist
Chuck
Close is even more exacting in his take on this “way of
operating,”
equating
creativity with work ethic:
Inspiration is for amateurs — the rest of us just show up
and get to work.
In his short 1957 paper
The
Creative Act, French surrealist icon
Marcel Duchamp
considers the work of creativity a participatory project involving both
creator and spectator:
The creative act is not performed by the artist alone;
the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by
deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his
contribution to the creative act. This becomes even more obvious when
posterity gives a final verdict and sometimes rehabilitates forgotten
artists.
Meanwhile, artist
Austin
Kleon, author of the wonderful
Steal Like an Artist, celebrates the
negative space of the creative act in his
Newspaper
Blackout masterpiece:
But perhaps, after all, we should heed
Charles
Eames’s admonition:
Recent years have shown a growing preoccupation with the
circumstances surrounding the creative act and a search for the
ingredients that promote creativity. This preoccupation in itself
suggests that we are in a special kind of trouble — and indeed we are.
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