Creativity

Key Concepts

The unconscious mind does a lot of creative work for you

“This is how I began to discover that, if I put the work in before going to bed, I often had a little creative idea overnight, which fixed whatever problem it was that I was trying to deal with. It was like a gift, a reward for all my wrestling with the puzzle. I began to think to myself, ‘It can only be that while I’m asleep, my mind goes on working at the problem so that it can give me the answer in the morning.’” (p. 10)

“So I began to realise that my unconscious was working on stuff all the time, without my being consciously aware of it.” (p. 19)

“Put simply, you can’t ask your unconscious a question, and expect a direct answer—a neat, tidy little verbal message. This is because your unconscious communicates its knowledge to you solely through the language of the unconscious.” (p. 28)

“And the language of the unconscious is not verbal. It’s like the language of dreams. It shows you images, it gives you feelings, it nudges you around without you immediately knowing what it’s getting at.” (p. 29)

Creativity comes from play

“The conclusion he [psychologist Donald McKinnon] came to was that there were only two differences between the creative and the uncreative architects. The first was that the creative architects knew how to play. The second was that the creative architects always deferred making decisions for as long as they were allowed.” (p. 40)

“When MacKinnon talks about ‘play,’ he means the ability to get enjoyably absorbed in a puzzle: not just to try to solve it so that you can get on to the next problem, but to become really curious about it for its own sake. He describes this kind of activity as ‘childlike.’” (p. 41)

First, we need to interrupt our own judgments 

“But perhaps the biggest interruption coming from your inside is caused by your worrying about making a mistake. This can paralyse you. ‘Oh,’ you say to yourself, ‘I mustn’t think that because it might be WRONG.’” (p. 48)

“Let me reassure you. When you’re being creative there is no such thing as a mistake.” (p. 48)

“The reason is very simple: you can’t possibly know if you are going down a wrong avenue until you’ve gone down it. So, if you have an idea, you must follow your line of thought to the end to see whether it’s likely to be useful or not. You must explore, without necessarily knowing where you’re going. As Einstein once pointed out, if we know what we’re doing when we’re investigating something, then it’s not research!” (p. 48)

And then we need to tolerate being uncomfortable

“A word of warning. When we’re trying to be creative, there’s a real lack of clarity during most of the process.” (p. 59)

“It is, however, very important that when you first have a new idea, you don’t get critical too soon. New and ‘woolly’ ideas shouldn’t be attacked by your logical brain until they’ve had time to grow, to become clearer and sturdier. New ideas are rather like small creatures. They’re easily strangled.” (p. 62)

“‘Tortoise Mind.’ ‘Hare Brain.’ They need each other. But keep them separate!” (p. 65)

Creativity requires uninterrupted time

“The greatest killer of creativity is interruption. It pulls your mind away from what you want to be thinking about. Research has shown that, after an interruption, it can take eight minutes for you to return to your previous state of consciousness, and up to twenty minutes to get back into a state of deep focus.” (p. 46)

“You create boundaries of space to stop others interrupting you.” (p. 49)

“You create boundaries of time, by arranging, for a specific period, to preserve your boundaries of space.” (p. 50)

There will always be unproductive times of the creative process

“When Graham Chapman and I started writing together we would get terribly frustrated and despairing when we hit a fallow period—sometimes a whole morning or even a day when we produced nothing really good. But then we noticed that, despite this, we had a consistent average: every week we wrote about fifteen to eighteen minutes of good stuff. All we had to do was to sit there, whether it flowed or it didn’t, and by Friday evening we would have enough. We came to understand that the blockages weren’t an interruption in the process, they were part of it.” (p. 83)

“Brevity is the soul of wit.” 

1. “Cut anything that is not relevant (there will be more than you think). 

2. “Don’t repeat yourself unless you really want to.” (p. 90)

Ask for feedback, but don’t take suggestions 

“If you are an experienced writer, and you show people your work, there are four questions you need to ask:

1. “Where were you bored?

2. “Where could you not understand what was going on?

3. “Where did you not find things credible?

4. “Was there anything that you found emotionally confusing?” (pp. 100-1)

“Once you have the answers to these, then you go away, decide how valid the problems are...and fix them yourself. The people you have asked will probably suggest their solutions too. Ignore these completely.” (p. 101)

Quotables

“But this simply isn’t so. Creativity can be seen in every area of life—in science, or in business, or in sport. Wherever you can find a way of doing things that is better than what has been done before, you are being creative.” (p. 3)

“In acting, the moment you have to think what you are going to say next, there’s a little less energy for the acting itself, because it’s being siphoned off by the conscious mind for the purpose of remembering.” (p. 24)

“He [Bill Goldman] once told me that when he was working on a particular scene he’d write down the key idea behind it on a piece of paper, and then stick the note right in front of his nose on the computer. If he realised his mind had wandered too far, he would glance at the note and that would bring him back to what he was trying to achieve.” (p. 53)

“I think this basic rule applies everywhere: you are most likely to be creative in an area that you already know and care about.” (p. 72)

“The general principle is this: the bigger the leap, the longer the creative period is likely to be.” (p. 77)

“Playing…keeps you ‘fresh.’” (p. 82)