Archives For creativity

Finding Creative Inspiration in Unexpected Places

April 19, 2013 — Leave a comment

UN Secretariat BuildingIt’s time to wrap up the short series of posts I’d begun about found “Artist Dates” in New York City. Julia Cameron describes Artist Dates as “assigned play,” and while she provides specific guidelines, I use the idea in a looser way. What is important is finding time and opportunities for—or just noticing—creative inspiration in our daily lives, whether at home or away.

The last couple of examples of creative inspiration that I want to share have to do with seeing something familiar in a new way and the importance of making time for sustained reading.

On the final day of our weekend in New York, my son and I once again were going to try to catch the free Game of Thrones exhibition, but, on our way, we decided to walk past the United Nations. Our son is a political science major who will be entering law school in the fall, and he’s always been interested in the history of the UN. It was a sunny, crisp Monday morning, and as we got closer to the UN complex, I suddenly realized that we might be able to go inside and get a tour, which we did in lieu of standing in line for GoT.

Our Italian tour guide, Francesca, couldn’t have been more welcoming and informative, and our group was itself a mini-UN of several nationalities. I was expecting to enjoy myself and exercise my brain a little, which I did, but I wasn’t expecting to be inspired creatively until we came to a wall where each article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has its own artistic space, written in an innocent child’s font and simply illustrated:

Human Rights Wall

Declaration of Human Rights

I’ve read these articles before and even once indexed a book about their creation, but the display drew us all in to linger on one or two individually rather than as part a long list of words. It was a gift of attention and focus as, to use Dan Pink’s terms, we switched from linear, textual L-directed thinking to a more design-centered and meaningful  R-directed thinking.

We never did make it to that Game of Thrones exhibition, but I got my Song of Ice and Fire fix nonetheless as I made substantial progress in reading the fourth book in the series, A Feast for Crows. It’s the kind of book that I need to read in long stretches, not short bursts, because my middle-age brain quickly forgets the many characters and settings, and the long, relaxing evenings in our hotel room and hours spent both on planes and in airports were the perfect opportunity turn page after page after page. Like Susan Cain’s family, ours is a family for whom reading is a “primary group activity,” where “you have the animal warmth of your family sitting right next to you, but you are also free to go roaming around the adventureland inside your own mind.” Nothing recharges my creative batteries faster.

Where have you found creative inspiration lately?

Photos of Universal Declaration of Human Rights wall made available by Jordan Lewin under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic License.

 

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Top Psychology Today Posts

April 9, 2013 — Leave a comment

While sketching out upcoming posts for “Creative Synthesis” at Psychology Today, I decided to see what readers seem to like and whether there is a pattern. The top post there in terms of views is “What Does It All Mean?” (about existential bibliotherapy):

baseball crowd

“The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya shows how easily bright and creative young people can find themselves standing on an existential precipice, asking important questions that have no easy answers. Such questioning can be triggered by something as normal as a baseball game, as Haruhi explains to the book’s narrator, Kyon:

‘During elementary school, when I was in sixth grade, my whole family went to watch a baseball game at the stadium. I wasn’t particularly interested in baseball, but I was shocked once we got there. There were people everywhere we looked. The ones on the other side of the stadium looked like squirming grains of rice packed together. I wondered if every last person in Japan attended this game.’

She asks her dad how many people are at the game and later does the math to learn what a tiny percentage of the country’s population were all of those people in and around the stadium: ‘Not only was I just one little person in that sea of people in that stadium, but that sea of people was merely a drop in the ocean.’”

Here are the next four most-viewed posts:

Is there any topic about creativity or psychology that you would like to see explored?

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Being creative for the long haul

April 4, 2013 — Leave a comment

Be sure to head on over to friend and colleague Katherine Wikoff’s blog to read her latest post, “Hawks Do Not Share”: Re-considering Zelda Fitzgerald:

“In creative fields, it’s all about the work.  One of the first things we learned in graduate school, in fact, was:  You’ve got to protect the work.  You need to protect the time slot in your schedule during which creative work can happen.  That’s hard.   It means the work has to come first, get just about the highest priority, be placed at the very center of your existence, and everything else revolves around that.

Establishing a successful, long-term “creative” life requires that you sustain a boring, routine “real” life.  It’s that maintenance that’s tricky; otherwise, the spark flares too brightly and burns itself out.” Read More

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Artist’s Date, New York Weekend Edition: It’s a Boy!

April 2, 2013 — Leave a comment

My family and I traveled to New York this past weekend for an impromptu Spring Break vacation—the last before our son graduates from college—and, for me, it also was a much needed extended Artist’s Date.

Julia Cameron, author of the highly influential The Artist’s Way and several other titles, describes an Artist’s Date as time to “woo our own consciousness,” to “enchant” ourselves, and to refill “our inner well.”

I didn’t follow all rules for an Artist’s Date, because I was not alone. One could argue that practice in attending to and controlling our inner experience while in the midst of others is even more important than doing so by ourselves. In any case, my inner well is most definitely refilled, and this is the first of a short series of posts in which I’ll describe each “date” in turn.

Saturday at the Met: Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity

I am hopeless when it comes to fashion.  Unlike my mother, who had an artist’s eye for color and design, I seem to have little patience or talent for combining clothes in any aesthetically pleasing way. If it’s cotton and it’s comfortable (i.e., not scratchy), I’m good. I continue to wear my favorite jeans and sweaters long past their “best by” dates, and most of the time I probably look more like an almost 50-year-old graduate student on a budget than a working adult.

However, my handicap didn’t stop me from enjoying and being inspired by the “Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity” exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The following video captures some of the exhibit’s beauty and scope:

What I liked most about the exhibit was seeing works by artists with which I was familiar but in a new light, with new areas of focus and new perspectives to consider. For example, am I the only person never to have noticed that the child sitting in the middle of in this well-known portrait by Renoir of Madame Georges Charpentier and her children is her son rather than a daughter?

Pierre-Auguste_Renoir_094

My son’s response: “refreshingly egalitarian.” The Met explains, “Following the fashion of the time, his hair has not yet been cut and his clothes match those of his sister, Georgette, who perches on the family dog.”

Tomorrow: Artist’s Date, New York Weekend Edition continues with a stroll down Library Way.

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The Unapologetic Hobbyist

March 12, 2012 — 5 Comments

“Find something you’re passionate about and keep tremendously interested in it.” – Julia Child

Do you have any hobbies?

Before you answer, take some time to think about how you feel about the question. When we make time on a regular basis for our hobbies, we might be accused of having too much time on our hands, being frivolous, or ignoring other, more important responsibilities. However, I am clearly most happy and creative when I make time in my life for hobbies, even when that means I must delegate, postpone, or even drop altogether other tasks, or when my hobbies require time alone rather than with other people.

We can begin to think about the role of hobbies in our lives by remembering childhood hobbies. I went through a series of hobbies when I was young: stamp collecting, complete with a starter kit of stamps ready to place in a binder; coin collecting (alas, no starter kit for that one); collecting every newspaper account of the Minnesota Vikings and pasting them all in a scrapbook with notes and captions (this was more successful). Over time, however, I’ve learned that collecting as a hobby isn’t something that gives me much satisfaction.

Some childhood hobbies I think I would have enjoyed more had I had more skills of time management and planning. I’ve always wanted to learn to be more proficient at drawing, but I mistakenly thought that I could doodle once in a while and somehow magically get better. Piano lessons were a similar though slightly more successful experience. When I was young, I hadn’t made the connection between working diligently to learn the basics in order truly to enjoy a certain level of mastery. Sure, I moved through the John Thompson piano grades and played well enough to accompany my high school chorus, but, because I wasn’t giving this hobby my all—I treated it a chore rather than a passion—true enjoyment from it remained elusive. I often “crammed” my practice into the last couple of days before a lesson, so the experiences of both practicing and learning new material were more stressful than relaxing.

I learned to knit and crochet from my mother and grandmother, but I never thought of these activities as hobbies until I became an adult. Why is that, I wonder? My enjoyment of needlework now comes mainly from tweaking patterns, working with the highest quality yarns and crochet threads I can afford (mainly for the feel of them against my fingers), and making gifts for friends and family, such as this pair of socks for my niece.

I remember going through a period as a child when I consciously took up hobbies, then I didn’t think about hobbies for a very long time, perhaps because college and graduate school, marriage and motherhood filled my time. Or did aspects of these activities become hobbies?

In any case, I find myself now thinking of hobbies again, knowing I need to integrate them into my life more, wondering how to enhance the enjoyment of the ones I have, and asking if I want to take up any new hobbies.

  • What hobbies did you have as a child?
  • Have any of them continued to be a part of your life?
  • Are hobbies important to your sense of well-being?
  • Have you ever felt guilty for making time for hobbies?
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Hanging On to Our Creativity

March 10, 2012 — 4 Comments

Do you want to know how to be more creative or how to help children to hang on to their creativity? See my latest Psychology Today piece, ”Be More Creative Today.”

Psychology Today image

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Wanna Play? Choose your favorite LEGO design

February 3, 2012 — 3 Comments

When was the last time you played, really played, as in tuned out the rest of the world and joined your hands and imagination for the sake of nothing more than fun?

Earlier this quarter, just before the holiday break, I gave small groups of students in my Creative Thinking class piles of assorted LEGO pieces and asked them, in one 50-minute class period, to design the “newest and best LEGO set” that would fly off the shelves. They also needed to give their creation a name and narrative description. This exercise integrates several of Dan Pink’s six senses described in A Whole New Mind (the class textbook): Design, Play, Story, Empathy, Symphony, and Meaning.

Would you help me to choose the winner? They are all winners, of course (and the students hold copyright to their designs), and the exercise is ungraded, but a little competition can be fun.

Which is your favorite? Click on the small photos within the poll to see a larger image, and scroll down to read descriptions of each set.

[polldaddy poll=5905796]

Avatar 2: Revenge of the Barbarians

The exploration of this newly discovered planet has gone horribly wrong. In the air and ground, the natives have had enough. Their attacks have begun to drive the futuristic Mec warrior and exploration plane out of the forest. Who will prevail in this planet-changing battle?

Battle of the Living Dead: Zombies’ Last Stand

In the Battle of the Living Dead, who will prevail? You control the fate of the zombies and their home land, Neptune. Will the zombies savage their saloon from attack and fire? Or will the aliens’ sheriff base hold its ground? In Zombies’ Last Stand, the adventure is up to you.

LEGO Space Race

Pick one of four unique space vehicles with powerful weapons to destroy your enemies and win the space race.

The Shabang: LEGO Mini Golf Course

LEGO’s mini golf course, “The Shabang,” is ready for action! It comes with creative courses, including a skate park, windmill, and the challenging 9th hole, The Dragon. When you grow tired of hitting the green, you can relax at the food court or take a drive on the golf cart. “The Shabang” is a hole-in-one when it comes to fun!

The Ultimate Treasure Hunt

In a galaxy far, far away, there exists a group of revered treasure hunters. This quest is not for the weak. Travel to Treasure Island at your own risk. You have been warned…

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Make a Date with Your Emotions

January 7, 2012 — 2 Comments

“Personally, I experience the greatest degree of pleasure in having contact with works of art. They furnish me with happy feelings of an intensity such as I cannot derive from other realms.” ~ Albert Einstein

“The excellency of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeable evaporate.” ~ John Keats

Have you ever felt overwhelmed by intense feelings, unsure how to describe them or what do to with them? Or do you feel the need for an emotional kick start to your day or life to remind you of how good it is to feel?

For anyone who strives to create, taking the time to be in the presence of art of any kind is part of our emotional education. What matters is not so much that we write an essay or blog post about a trip to an art museum or can explicate poetry or describe the history of an art movement, but that we allow ourselves to feel the intensity inherent in creativity. Sometimes that intensity mirrors and validates our own. Other times it inspires us to make room for more emotional depth and creativity within ourselves.

Let’s take a page from Julia Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way and many other books about creativity, and give ourselves an Artist Date this week—an hour or two when we immerse ourselves in some kind of art experience to recharge our creative energy and restock our emotions. Cameron suggests we do this alone, but we can do it with family or friends, too, as long as we don’t get caught up in evaluating our experience or talking about it too much. The goal is simply to feel:

“The Artist Date is a once-weekly, festive, solo expedition to explore something that interests you. The Artist Date need not be overtly ‘artistic’– think mischief more than mastery. Artist Dates fire up the imagination. They spark whimsy. They encourage play. Since art is about the play of ideas, they feed our creative work by replenishing our inner well of images and inspiration.” ~ Julia Cameron

My Artist Date this weekend is to catch the Impressionism: Masterworks on Paper exhibit at the Milwaukee Art Museum before it leaves. How about you?

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Dan Pink: “We are our stories”

January 4, 2012 — Leave a comment

“We are our stories. We compress years of experience, thought, and emotion into a few compact narratives that we convey to others and tell ourselves. That has always been true. But personal narrative has become more prevalent, and perhaps more urgent, in a time of abundance, when many of us are freer to seek a deeper understanding of ourselves and our purpose.” ~ Dan Pink, A Whole New Mind

A Whole New Mind

I am currently using A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future (Riverhead Books, 2006) as the main text for a college creative thinking class (thank you to my friend and colleague, Katie, for the suggestion). My challenge in this class is to capture the attention of very busy engineering students long enough to convince them that reawakening their creativity can improve not only their quality of work but, more important, their quality of life. Throughout the years, I’ve tried several other, more traditional textbooks for the course, but A Whole New Mind is, hands down, the most inspiring and effective resource I’ve found (and, as a bonus, it’s easy on the students’ pocketbooks and backpack loads!).

The book is highly useful for writers, not only because of its overall creative perspective and inspiration but also for the chapter on “Story,” which stresses the importance of a narrative sense in our new Conceptual Age. Story is one of the six ”high-touch and high-concept aptitudes” or senses that Pink says are crucial for the age in which we live:

  • Design
  • Story
  • Symphony
  • Empathy
  • Play
  • Meaning

Yesterday I shared this TED Talk by Jonathan Harris with the class, which offers a creative perspective on story-telling and, at the same time, incorporates Pink’s other five senses as well:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5lZ9wciZQM]

Once you read A Whole New Mind, you will see the six senses in play everywhere. For example, the chapter on Design offers reasons for why “improving the design of medical settings helps patients get better faster,” an idea used in this promotional campaign by a recently re-designed local hospital:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XULVQ1uz5x0]

One of my favorite and, I think, most successful class assignments is to have students interview someone they know personally—friend, family member, classmate, teacher—and apply the principles of creativity we have explored in class in a written profile of their subject. When I read the students’ newfound perspectives on and appreciation of a girlfriend’s empathy or a father’s knack for story-telling, a mother’s ability to synthesize ideas or a sibling’s sense of humor, I know that the principles of the book had taken hold.

The subtitle of the book is a bit misleading, because Pink resists the black-and-white distinction between left-brainers and right-brainers and, instead, writes about L-Directed thinking and R-Directed thinking, arguing that L-Directed thinking (“sequential, literal, functional, textual, and analytic”) is important but “no longer sufficient.” We must now supplement L-Directed thinking with R-Directed thinking (“simultaneous, metaphorical, aesthetic, contextual, and synthetic”). The best news is that R-Directed thinking skills are ones we can learn and become better at, and the book offers many examples, techniques, and resources for further exploration. 

Dan Pink’s website offers much more information about A Whole New Mind (including discussion guides for business and educators), as well as his more recent Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us and the graphic novel Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need, written in the style of manga. I would also encourage you to watch his TED Talk on The Surprising Science of Motivation and the delightful RSA Animate video on the same topic.

The last video I want to share here, however, is less formal. In it, Pink discusses the journey he took from being a lawyer to a political speech writer to the “dark night of the soul” that led to his doing what he does now. The quotation at the top of this post is from the interview, in response to a question about finding one’s passion:

“I find that question very daunting. What’s your passion? I find that almost paralyzing, in a way. I find it less paralyzing to say, ‘What are you interested in doing next?’”

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gs6rusW_IQ]

This post is an updated version of a review first published in April 2011 on Everyday Intensity.

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Writing in a way that will save your life

November 26, 2011 — 2 Comments
Page after PageThis holiday week I’ve slowly started to re-read Heather Sellers’ Page after Page: Discovering the confidence and passion you need to start writing and keep writing (no matter what). Whenever I find myself in need of direction and sustenance for a writing life, Heather comes through every time:

“Writing as a way of life, writing in a way that will save your life, has a very interesting dynamic to it. To be successful as a writer, you have to cultivate two oppositional sides of your personality: the secret-keeper you, and the public chatty bold you. They’re both in there, and they both deserve the honor of practice.”

I have felt this tug and pull recently: the yearning for secret writing, what Sellers describes as the writing “as if no one will ever know you write”—ever—kind of writing, and the need for a public writing life, where words are shared and discussed and brought off the page into a greater world.

Learning to live with and develop these often conflicting needs is not unique to writers. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of, among other books, Flow and Creativity, tells us that complexity, especially the embodiment of seemingly opposite traits, is necessary for creativity to flourish:

“Creative individuals are remarkable for their ability to adapt to almost any situation and to make do with whatever is at hand to reach their goals. If I had to express in one word what makes their personalities different from others, it’s complexity. They show tendencies of thought and action that in most people are segregated. They contain contradictory extremes; instead of being an ‘individual,’ each of them is a ‘multitude.’” Read More

Interestingly, it’s not the public writing life I need to work on at the moment. No, it’s the secret writing life, the words written every day for my eyes only, words that may or may not eventually be read by others, Young GIrl Writing a Love Letterwords that “count” for the mere reason that they exist. Unless we build that kind of relationship with our writing—the kind where we can be alone together for hours while the world turns round and round, like two lovers content with each other’s company, oblivious to everything else—we will have difficulty enduring the difficult times when either ourselves or our writing has a wandering eye, when we start to get on each other’s nerves and are tempted to call the whole thing off.

The metaphor of writing as lover is from Sellers, and she urges that the only way to make time stand still (and here we are once again reminded of Csikszentmihalyi and his theory of flow) is to fall in love.

How will you woo your writing this weekend?

Tips from Heather Sellers on developing “your secret writing self”:

  • Do exercises for writers instead of just reading them.
  • Stop talking about your writing, how hard it is, what you are doing, and your dreams. Instead, write.
  • Make a space in your life… where no one can enter. It can be as simple as a notebook you carry around, a special pen, a time of day.
  • Practice being quiet. Let other people talk. Listen, like you did when you were a kid, and you openly stared and absorbed everything. Be quiet. Leave some room in yourself for words to reverberate.
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