Creativity DOES Spur Creativity!

You may recall that I spent last week on a home-based, DIY sewing retreat. In my sewing/laundry room. In my cellar. In part it was to get rid of some sewing work that was hanging over my head. In part it was due to the weight of run-of-the-mill chaos on my shoulders. In part it was because I thought spending time on one kind of creativity would benefit my writing, because creativity spurs creativity.

This retreat worked on all counts. 

The Benefit To My Writing

Last week I came up with various ideas for my work in progress. I will admit that early most mornings I spent a little time reading a chapter of that. But the bulk of my days involved sewing. The writing "work" that did came about as a side benefit should help a great deal with moving forward on this manuscript.

What we're talking about here are breakout experiences, which occur when you've absorbed material about some project/work problem and then moved away from it. They can happen while driving, showering, walking, or doing anything that either engages your mind minimally or in a different way from the original project. 

I came away from this retreat not only with new work material but with new energy, as if getting back from a vacation that involved some relaxation. 

I can't claim this retreat was modeled on what I think of as traditional writers' retreats--go into a cabin and write. I've never been to one of those. The few writers' retreats I've attended were called retreats but were actually short conferences with all the time committed to presentations of some sort. 

This was modeled more on retreats my sister has attended for rubber stampers. Those appear to be intensive work times, with people sitting at long tables with materials they've brought with them and working all day, into the evening. The photograph I saw of one of those events had a sweatshop quality to it.  Those people generate work.

I will definitely do something like this again, creating a retreat around some kind of necessary creation, when I'm at a struggling point with a project and/or feeling overwhelmed. 

EDITED To Add:

A Sewing/Writing Parallel

Last week's sewing included binding some pieces from a quilt I'd taken apart last year to make wall hangings and using some of my extensive collection of old denim to make shopping bags. The engineer at my house referred to all that as "creative repurposing."

Repurposing is something I've done with writing, too, reworking older pieces. Earlier this month I did it with You Are the Parents of Sixth Graders. Act Like It, humor for adults that began years ago as a short story for middle grade readers. 

Time Management Tuesday: A Creativity Mantra To Stimulate New Work

A little over a week ago, some Facebook friends and I were discussing my mantra "When I am exhausted and overwhelmed from too many tasks, I choose one to complete. One that can be completed." Or, to put it in a less unwieldy manner, "Finish something."  

As a result, friend Susan Barlow--yoga and tai chi instructor, historian, and serious walker--sent me the poem The Poet's Occasional Alternative by Grace Paley, which appeared on The Writer's Almanac last month. The poem, she felt, reminded her of our discussion, because it dealt with "doing one do-able thing and allowing that to be enough."

In an attempt to respect the holder of the copyright on this poem, I'll just give you some samples and urge you to seek it out yourself for the full reading experience. It begins:

I was going to write a poem
I made a pie instead      it took
about the same amount of time
of course the pie was a final
draft      a poem would have had some
distance to go  

 

Towards the middle Paley says:

the pie already had a talking
tumbling audience among small
trucks and a fire engine on
the kitchen floor

 

She ends with:

 

I decided to
settle this morning for a re-
sponsive eatership      I do not
want to wait a week      a year      a
generation for the right
consumer to come along

From The Poet’s Occasional Alternative by Grace Paley in Begin Again. © Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000

Susan happened to send this to me on a Tuesday when I had no Time Management Tueday post, because I had spent the day with a young man, freeing other family members who were building a playset in his backyard. The day before, when I could have been writing the post, I had made pumpkin custard to bring to him. Because, as Paley said of her pie, pumpkin custard is a sure thing. Time Management Tuesday, not so much. 

Touching, Gail, But What Does It Have To Do With Time Management For Writers?

Here's the thing--cooking for people like Paley and me, who don't cook for a living--falls under the category of "unnecessary creativity," which I first wrote about back in 2013 in relation to an essay by Todd Henry.

Todd writes about what he calls "Unnecessary Creation," which he believes "is essential for anyone who works with his or her mind." He's talking about creative acts--making something, anything, that didn't exist  before--that are unrelated to an individual's work. "...something about engaging in the creative act on our own terms seems to unleash latent passions and insights." In other words, creativity spurs creativity. 

That was certainly the case for Grace Paley, whose pie-making inspired a poem. My custard--and reading Paley's poem--inspired a blog post. One of my objectives for this year was to start some eating essays. I'm inching toward that with this piece. Making that custard was time well spent.

A Creativity Mantra

Knowing that one type of creativity can lead to another,  I now have a second mantra.  "When all else fails, create something."

 

Are Personal Retreats Worth The Effort?

Retreat Reading Spot

Oh, come on. That question must be clickbait. Six days of doing whatever you want to do, whenever you want to do it, with no phone calls or e-mails about problems and when the weather is too bad to drive to a restaurant you just walk across the road to a lodge to eat dinner next to a fire? Of course, a personal retreat is worth the the planning, the packing, and the five-hour drive.

But What About Professionally?

Retreat Reading

Well, remember, the big activity on my retreats is reading. Yes, I spent 5 hours snowshoeing one day, snowshoed to a chapel another day, and to a bierhall still another. I made my annual visit to Bear Pond Books. That still left me enough time to read:

• 3 UVM alumni magazines
• 3 back issues of Writer's Digest
• 1 back issue of Carve
• The new issue of Seven Days
• 30 pages of A Room of One's Own (I forgot I planned to read it during Retreat Week until Thursday.)
• Maybe a third of Champlain's Dream by David Hackett Fischer (Hey, it's a big book.)
• The last few chapters of The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
• All of In a Dark, Dark Wood by Ruth Ware (My purchase at Bear Pond Books where something almost always jumps off the shelf at me.)
• 9 short stories (4 in that issue of Carve)
• 4 essays (2 in Carve)

Again, What About Professionally?

Travel Journal

Well, I also generated 9 pages of journal notes. Unfortunately, many of them related to a new project that's not part of my goals for this year. But I also got a few ideas for agents to research as a result of reading all those Writer's Digests. I've also got some lengthy notes for an entirely new essay and came up with an approach for another subject that could result in both a short story and an essay. Maybe flash.

So I guess I could say my reading-retreat week fired up some creativity. I've had similar things happen on just a regular vacation. The extra reading and the removal from my usual environment and the next thing I know I'm writing something in a journal.

 Retreat Reading View

Creativity doesn't always get its due. It's sort of an up-and-down thing. Right now it's down while we're focused on discovering readers and making that first sale and giving our main character something to want and then keeping it from her and the Hero's #@!! Journey.  Comparatively, creativity is kind of soft and squishy and maybe even a bit woo-woo. Except it's not. Creativity is how we generate new material. Without it, we're just staring at flickering computer monitors and virgin journal pages.

So if you go on a personal reading retreat, it jump starts your creativity, and you go home all excited because you have a handful of ideas and a book buzz on, how can that be anything but worth the effort? 

How Creativity Happens

The Readers And Advocates Program

Where I toyed with an idea.

I'm sure you all recall that on Sunday I went to a Build Your Readers and Advocates program. As a result of the morning session, I began to toy with an idea relating to the picture book I've been working on for months and will, no doubt, be working on the rest of my life.

 

 

Add Writers' Group

Came up with an idea while with woman on right.

Then Monday night I went to my writers' group with that picture book manuscript that I had thought, until I printed it, was in pretty good shape. But by the time I was stapling it together, I was unhappy with the lack of voice. And reading the thing aloud made clear there were some structural problems. (Little aside--Writers' groups hear your awful work.) I came up with an idea for a big revision.

Add Tuesday Morning's Workout

Here's where breakout happened.

Actually, for a couple of years now some of my workout time has gone to yard work, because ours is kind of overgrown. (And that, lads and lasses, is another example of a multiplier--a task that addresses two goals.) So I was dragging a rake through the periwinkle Tuesday morning when I had a  breakout experience. Which was:

If I was going to do the big revision I'd decided to do at writers' group on Monday, anyway, I could revise in such a way that I could use the idea I was toying with at the workshop on Sunday!


Bringing together different parts of your life or different experiences to make something different...X + Y = Something New.

This Weekend's Unnecessary Creativity And Necessary Podcasts

This stuff doesn't make itself, you know.

Yup, I was back in the kitchen for a couple of hours today. I worked long enough to listen to two podcasts. And, yet, we had leftovers for dinner.

What Did Sherman And Jess Have To Say?

I listened to Episode 5 of A Tiny Sense of Accomplishment with Sherman Alexie and Jess Walter (which appears to have stopped production last October). I chose it because it was called Why Do You Always Write About White People? something that I do, indeed, do. The hosts were going to discuss "how and even if writers should write about other races, genders and cultures." This is an interesting issue, I think, in children's literature because of the very legitimate push to include more diverse stories in children's publishing. I don't see a lot about whether just any of us can write them, though, and whether we should be trying to write outside our ethnic identity.

There were no hard and fast solutions here. But it got me thinking about the Writing Strategies for Fiction program I presented a couple of weeks ago. The first strategy I discussed was Write What You Know, which means different things to different people and a great deal to me. How does writing about other races and cultures fit in with that?

And Who Is She?

I listened to the Longform Podcast's interview with Brooke Gladstone, because I'd heard of her but that was it. So, who is she? She's a host of On the Media, a radio program covering media analysis.

My big takeaway from this podcast is that Gladstone is interested in On the Media pieces/interviews that relate to a bigger concept, to the greater world. This interests me because, years ago, it was how I saw personal essays defined, and it was what interested me about them.

This afternoon I ordered Gladstone's book The Influencing Machine. I'll let you know how reading that goes.

What I Do In The Kitchen

As my legions of Facebook friends know, I am prone to binge cooking on weekends. I consider cooking unnecessary creativity. It's creative work unrelated to my writing work. I indulge myself with it in the belief that creativity will spur creativity.

I am not one of those people who wants her cooking space open to the whole neighborhood. I am very happy in the kitchen by myself. But I do like sound when I'm cooking, either music or, the last couple of years, podcasts. I horde podcast links in my bookmarks. Quite honestly, I am never going to sit for a half hour, staring at my computer screen and listening to someone talk. (Though I did sit for more than 15 minutes staring at my computer screen and listening to Mindy Kaling give this speech.) So I try to multi-task with podcasts while I'm being unnecessarily creative, even though by doing so I am risking brain damage and my already shaky career, because I'm never going to listen to these things otherwise and the links will just pile up and up on my hard drive.

The Longform Podcast

So on Saturday afternoon, I listened to the Longform guys' podcast with Meghan Daum because I recognized her name, and she's an essayist, a type of writing I'm interested in. Daum had some interesting things to say about the personal essay and whether writers refine them enough before publishing. The Longform podcast deals with nonfiction writers and editors. I'll definitely check it out again.

I also started to listen to Longform's interview with Kurt Andersen because I liked his book, Turn of the Century, which isn't nonfiction, and I've heard him on Studio 360. But someone came into the kitchen, and since I could get him to help with the chicken parm, I gave up on the podcast.

That's the risk you take with podcasts.

A Tiny Sense of Accomplishment

I had to cook again on Sunday afternoon because I got such a late start with my Saturday binge. So that day I listened to the first A Tiny Sense of Accomplishment podcast, hosted by Sherman Alexie and Jess Walter. I almost listened to this on Saturday, because I like Alexie's work. But in the description of the program it said these two might discuss professional basketball. I took that as a warning. But when I tried A Tiny Sense of Accomplishment out on Sunday, they talked about kids' recreational sports instead. And not until the end of the show.

The really great section of this podcast was Alexie and Walter talking about dire author appearances they've made. Maybe you have to be a writer to enjoy that kind of thing, because when I repeated the stories to my husband at dinner, he said things like, "So he didn't get paid?" Which totally missed the point.

I'll be listening to A Tiny Sense of Accomplishment again, too.

Time Management Tuesday: Replay On Unnecessary Creation

This past week, three family members finished creative work unrelated to our day jobs. This inspired me to reach into the archives, while I'm busy working on a wedding rehearsal dinner talk/toast, and repost Summer Reading--Spending Time On Any Kind of Creativity from August 13, 2013.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Business Intelligence Analyst

I  know that many people probably perceive focusing on managing time as very noncreative. What about art? What about literature and music and those fields that are, I think, rather stereotypically considered creative? Shouldn't we be focusing on something like that?

I have a very practical attitude toward creativity. Creativity is simply the act of making something that did not exist before. Whether we're talking painting a landscape or baking a cake or writing a novel or building a house, we are talking creativity. Making something that did not exist before takes time. Big, big connection between time and creativity, in my humble opinion.

Manage Your Day-to-Day 's section on creativity includes an essay by Todd Henry called Creating for You, and You Alone. Now, remember, Manage Your Day-to-Day doesn't deal specifically with writers or artists but with all types of "creatives," people who need to come up with something that didn't exist before as part of their work. This particular essay deals with people who work creatively in their jobs, but need to stay on a particular creative task. Exercising other aspects of their creativity is difficult for them, though doing so might be good for their day job, in addition to anything else they want to do with their lives.                                             

Why am I interested in this essay when I write here for writers who presumably create for themselves all the time? Well, actually, we don't. Many writers have traditional day jobs that require creativity of

Reading Specialist

them quite apart from the creative work they want to do for publication. Creating for themselves has to happen in addition to that. I also know writers who do work-for-hire, writing specific nonfiction books, for instance, for a particular publisher or writing volumes for series fiction. Earlier this year I met an illustrator who had "auditioned" for and won a rather nice assignment illustrating some children's books for a known cable chef. She expects to be tied up with that job for two years. For  many working writers and illustrators, this really is an issue.

Writer

 
Todd writes about what he calls "Unnecessary Creation," which he believes "is essential for anyone who works with his or her mind." He's talking about creative acts--making something, anything, that didn't exist  before--that are unrelated to an individual's work. "...something about engaging in the creative act on our own terms seems to unleash latent passions and insights." In other words, creativity spurs creativity.

He suggests creating a list of creative projects to work on in spare time, (I know. What's that?) then setting aside a specific time each week or day (Hell, I'd be happy with time each month) to make progress on it. The point of Unnecessary Creation is that any kind of creativity has value. For those writers I know who are trying to get to other types of creative work, that might be what goes into their spare time set asides. Or maybe not. Maybe simply engaging in any creative act will unleash the insights they need to get to the Unnecessary Creation they really want to move on. Creativity encourages creativity.

Creativity Or Creativity

I began this quilt top (for real, marking, cutting, sewing, not just thinking about it, which began last year) at the end of January. I finished it today, four days before my self-imposed deadline. There's still more to do to finish the whole quilt, but I got as far as I planned to get when I planned to get there.

Why am I mentioning this here? It relates to a post I'm doing on Tuesday, and a post (or something) I hope to do at some point comparing quilting to writing. Because, seriously, an empty work counter is a lot like an empty word processing file. And reaching a point like the one I hit today feels a lot like finishing a draft.

The Weekend Writer: Some Reading For You

37 Books Every Creative Person Should Be Reading from BuzzFeed.  Among them:

Manage Your Day-to-Day

Bossypants

The Power of Habit

I think there are a couple of others on that list I read back before I started blogging.

Time Management Tuesday: When To Do What

The Best Time to Write and Get Ideas, According to Science by Kevan Lee at Buffer suggests that when considering managing time we might want to keep in mind when we do things. Some times are better than others for particular activities.

Creative vs. Analytical Work

 

We've discussed here that willpower can be depleted. Our biggest store of self-discipline is early in the day. We try to duplicate that morning boost of willpower experience by breaking our day into units, so that we keep starting over again. The Unit System! Lee suggests that that early period of the day is best for creative work because that's when the prefrontal cortex of the brain is most active. A "study looked at morning and evening MRI scans and observed that mornings showed more connections in the brain—a key element to the creative process." He says this study also indicated that "analytical parts of the brain (the editing and proofreading parts) become more active as the day goes on."

Conclusion? Writers who have a number of projects underway may want to work on the ones that involve generating new material earlier in the day and the ones that require revision-like activities later.

Don't Care For Mornings? Try A Routine During Another Part Of The Day.

 

What about those of us who don't see ourselves as morning people? Set your time and stick with it. "Routine," Lee says, "reinforces neural circuitry, and the more you work at the same routine, the stronger those connections become." So you can compensate for not using what scientists consider the best creative time by maintaining a routine.

As For Me

 

I like to do a sprint in the morning before I actually get started working. Stopping after a short, intense burst of work gives my mind something to dwell on while I'm doing the less challenging activities involved with getting ready for the day. After reading The Best Time to Write and Get Ideas, According to Science, I'm going to be sure that that sprint involves new writing and not editing, research, or formatting manuscripts. I can do that much later in the day.

The Cupcake Project: The Value Of Writing Every Day

My long-suffering Facebook Friends heard me go on at length yesterday about the 120 plus or minus cupcakes I had to ice and box up. During a roughly 6-hour period I also made an additional two-dozen cupcakes that didn't need icing as well as some mini-meatloaves and asparagus for dinner.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, Gail. But did you do any writing?

I did some yesterday morning. And that led to something happening yesterday during my cupcake binge.

While I was revising a chapter yesterday morning, I realized that a lot of what I was reading was similar to what I'd read in the chapter before. I felt that the new chapter was necessary because it dealt with the protagonist's parents' response to what he was doing. But this is a mystery, and the details being discussed had all appeared in the chapter before. If I couldn't come up with a new significant step in the story, I might need to eliminate a section. If I eliminated a section, I might be left with a hole in the plot that would need to be filled.

While I was working on cupcakes, the significant step I needed came to me. I had a breakout experience. With breakout experiences it's easy to focus on the breakout, because that idea/thought is so important. But the breakout can't come without some input first. You take in information, work to a point at which nothing more is happening for you, then let your brain relax with a totally different activity. Like icing and fancying up cupcakes.

So the work/input is important, maybe the most important part of the process.The more you work, the more opportunities you have for breakout experiences. Conversely, the less you work, the fewer opportunities you'll have for those breakouts. Writing every day won't insure a daily breakout experience, but it increases your opportunities for having them at some point.

In fact, writing every day helps make it possible for you to keep working when you're not, technically, working because you're relaxed brain is doing something with the material you provided it with earlier in the day.

Time Management Tuesday: Summer Reading--Spending Time On Any Kind Of Creativity

I  know that many people probably perceive focusing on managing time as very noncreative. What about art? What about literature and music and those fields that are, I think, rather stereotypically considered creative? Shouldn't we be focusing on something like that?

I have a very practical attitude toward creativity. Creativity is simply the act of making something that did not exist before. Whether we're talking painting a landscape or baking a cake or writing a novel or building a house, we are talking creativity. Making something that did not exist before takes time. Big, big connection between time and creativity, in my humble opinion.

Manage Your Day-to-Day 's section on creativity includes an essay by Todd Henry called Creating for You, and You Alone. Now, remember, Manage Your Day-to-Day doesn't deal specifically with writers or artists but with all types of "creatives," people who need to come up with something that didn't exist before as part of their work This particular essay deals with people who work creatively in their jobs, but need to stay on a particular creative task. Exercising other aspects of their creativity is difficult for them, though doing so might be good for their day job, in addition to anything else they want to do with their lives.

Why am I interested in this essay when I write here for writers who presumably create for themselves all the time? Well, actually, we don't. Many writers have traditional day jobs that require creativity of them quite apart from the creative work they want to do for publication. Creating for themselves has to happen in addition to that. I also know writers who do work-for-hire, writing specific nonfiction books, for instance, for a particular publisher or writing volumes for series fiction. Earlier this year I met an illustrator who had "auditioned" for and won a rather nice assignment illustrating some children's books for a known cable chef. She expects to be tied up with that job for two years. For  many working writers and illustrators, this really is an issue.

Todd writes about what he calls "Unnecessary Creation," which he believes "is essential for anyone who works with his or her mind." He's talking about creative acts--making something, anything, that didn't exist  before--that are unrelated to an individual's work. "...something about engaging in the creative act on our own terms seems to unleash latent passions and insights." In other words, creativity spurs creativity.

He suggests creating a list of creative projects to work on in spare time, (I know. What's that?) then setting aside a specific time each week or day (Hell, I'd be happy with time each month) to make progress on it. The point of Unnecessary Creation is that any kind of creativity has value. For those writers I know who are trying to get to other types of creative work, that might be what goes into their spare time set asides. Or maybe not. Maybe simply engaging in any creative act will unleash the insights they need to get to the Unnecessary Creation they really want to move on. Creativity encourages creativity.

In the month or two since I read Todd's essay, I've been posting pictures of my Unnecessary Creations at my personal Facebook page.

Time Management Tuesday: Beginning Our Summer Reading With Creative Vs. Reactive Work

Summer reading...a seasonal joy. Today we begin a discussion of one of my summer reading books, Manage Your Day-To-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus & Sharpen Your Creative Mind, edited by Jocelyn K. Glei. Glei is the editor-in-chief for a website called 99U, which tries to provide a " "missing curriculum" for making ideas happen." 99U is related to another website, Behance, a "platform to showcase and discover photography, graphic design, illustration, and fashion." Thank you for that, Wikipedia, because while I could get the gist of what was going on at Behance, I like to have things written out for me, and I couldn't find a clear statement of purpose at the Behance site.

Okay, back to Manage Your Day-to-Day: Neither this book, nor 99U, deal specifically with writers. However, they do both deal with "creatives" and share a premise that the creative world tends to focus on idea generation, not so much on idea execution. Manage Your Day-to-Day is a series of short essays by and interviews with people working in creative fields. All the chapters deal with idea execution. Glei says in her preface, "Our goal was to come at the problems and struggles of...work from as many angles as  possible."

What do we need to execute ideas? We need to manage time. Over the past year and a half, we have been coming at the problems and struggles of managing time from as many angles as possible here at Original Content. Some of the ideas in Manage Your Day-to-Day are angles we can try to apply to time.

For instance, in the essay Laying the Groundwork for an Effective Routine Mark McGuinness talks about "reactive work," work that involves "responding to incoming demands and answering questions framed by other people." Reactive work, he says, takes time away from creative work.

Now, I believe McGuinness is writing primarily about people working in traditional offices or within organizations in which they are expected to interact regularly with other employees, report to others, and/or have others report to them. Interaction is hugely time consuming and tends to snowball into more work. Most writers work by themselves. Little interaction, little reactive work. Right?

But how much time are we truly spending on creative work these days? Promoting ourselves and specific works and long-term marketing in general cuts into creative work. Marketing and promotion has become our reactive work. We publish a book, and we have to react to that with contacting sites and bloggers to whom we must react still more, if they react to us. A RFP for a conference workshop arrives, we react to it. An inquiry comes in regarding an appearance at a school, we react to it. Last week I happened to see a write-up on a literary journal. I dropped everything and reacted to it by doing a quick revision of a short story and submitting it. As reactive work goes, that's not bad, but it wasn't the creative work I was expecting to do that day.

McGuinness says, "The single most important change you can make in your working habits is to switch to creative work first, reactive work second. This means blocking off a large chunk of time every day for creative work on your own priorities..."  

Blocking off a chunk of time could mean saving a unit or two every day for creative work. Another way to block time is to think of a week as a unit and saving the early part of it for the creative work and letting the reactive stuff wait. I've been suffering from reactive marketing creep, myself, and found that I was going weeks and months without real writing because so much time was going into promoting Saving the Planet & Stuff. I've started trying to limit Mondays and Tuesdays to writing and Fridays for marketing.

There are two issues to consider here: One is putting creative work before reactive work, of course, but the other is to first train yourself to identify reactive vs. creative work. If  what we're doing is reactive, should it be our top priority?

Time Management Tuesday: Will Spending Time Being Creative Make Me More Creative? And What Is Creativity, Anyway?

 I ended last week's post with the question "Does creativity lead to creativity?"  I think it's a significant question (I would. I asked it.) because it relates to the whole writing every day issue. Writing every day does make it easier to stay in a project, as Sussman said in the article I quoted last year. It encourages break-out experiences, which are creative acts. But does doing creative work regularly actually make people more creative? Is it like working a muscle that gets stronger with use? Because if it does, then maybe those of us who aren't able to write every day really ought to be making a bigger effort to find time to do so.

Perhaps we should first consider what creativity actually is. Over the years, I've heard many people limit the term to the arts. Only writers, artists, and musicians could be creative. However, many people create things where a thing didn't exist before. And coming up with a solution to a specific problem when no solution existed before is a creative act. Evidently PBS did something on creativity and flow as part of series called This Emotional Life. That program's definition of creativity is "the ability to generate new ideas and new connections between ideas, and ways to solve problems in any field or realm of our lives."

But can we get better at generating new ideas and new connections between ideas by spending time generating new ideas and new connections between ideas? You can find lots of tip-type advice on how to become more creative--things along the lines of listen to classical music and don't watch TV. (Lots of people are down on TV as being a creative act, by the way, which is intriguing because the material on TV was created by somebody. Even programming that strikes us as uncreative, such as the multitude of real housewife programs and the twenty-somethingeth home design show, was created by somebody. We have to remember that the first creepy little girl beauty pageant show was a new idea. I'm not saying it was a good one. Also, the whole classical music  is good and TV is bad thing is not a new idea. Not a creative suggestion, I would suggest.) But the closest thing I'm finding that might be said to address my question about time spent creating influencing creativity is the 10,000 hour rule popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers.

Gladwell wrote that it took 10,000 hours of work to achieve mastery in a field. (Some argue that he was talking about mastery at an extreme level, so most of us wouldn't need to practice quite that much.) Lisa Cron in Wired for Story refers to the late Herbert Simon's estimate that it takes 10 years to master a subject, by which point a person would have absorbed around 50,000 pieces of information. (Kind of makes you wish you'd started keeping track of all that learning, doesn't it?) But weren't both these people talking about skill and knowledge rather than creativity? Is there an impact of all that work on a person's ability to generate new ideas?

If you've been around here much, you will realize that I'm not done with this. But I've accepted that I will need to move on to a new time management topic next week while I'm continuing to obsess on this creativity business.

Time Management Tuesday: Can Finding More Time To Work Spur Creativity?

Writers are often advised to write every day. In fact, we've discussed that issue here, when I brought up the points that writing every day means, presumably, generating more work, as well as encouraging flow and break-out experiences.

Personally, I have never been able to maintain a daily writing practice. On weekends, it's difficult for me to even maintain an exercise practice because of the extra people I need to and actually often even want to deal with, forget about getting away to write. And for many years now, I haven't been able to work five days a week during the workweek because of various family commitments.

Last week was not one of those weeks.

For reasons that are beside the point, I was able to work five days last week. I was here, anyway, for five days. I was home, working every day of the week. My guess is that this was the first time since 2009. Last summer I was often down to two days a week, and I'd been doing only three, at best, since the beginning of last December.

My week of work was somewhat disappointing. I didn't realize until last Thursday that last week was going to turn out the way it did, so I didn't have anything specific planned. I might have used last week as its own unit of time and planned something special to accomplish during it, if I had known it was coming up. On top of that, I had no electricity for nearly two hours on Wednesday, I wasn't feeling well late Wednesday afternoon and most of Thursday morning, and I lost another two hours on Friday to shoveling snow. By Friday evening, I was feeling I'd lost a great opportunity.

Then things started getting interesting on Saturday.

All I had time for that morning was a shortened stint on the treadmill where I tuned in to a panel discussion on MSNBC. But while walking and watching I came up with an idea I could use in the workshop presentation I'd been working on last week. On my way to visit an elder just a couple of hours later, I came up with some ideas for a response to an appearance request I'd received Friday afternoon. While talking with a family member on Sunday, I came up with still another idea I might be able to use in the workshop.

Three ideas in less than forty-eight hours when I wasn't working at all. (Well, I did run from the treadmill to the word processor to jot down that first bit for the workshop.) But I had been working previously. And I had been working what was for me a lot.

All those ideas could be described as break-out experiences, since they dealt with work I was already involved in, and break-out experiences are described in The Break-out Principle a method of  maximizing creativity. I've had other experiences when managing to do even a little work on a weekend had a positive impact on the next week's work. And I've also had vacations when I've been able to do more journal work and found myself coming up with far more material than I usually do. And that would be new material, not solutions to problems, as with the break-out experiences.

On the subject of creativity, John Cleese has talked about the need for time to ponder and believes that taking more time to ponder leads to more creative work. I wasn't clear on how much time he was talking about or what kind of pondering. So what I'm wondering is, will just putting in more time on creative work, pondering one particular issue or not, lead to more creativity?

Does creativity lead to creativity?

Time Management Tuesday: Time For Creativity

During my working life, I've tried to whittle down the time involved with what I call life maintenance, especially the routine things, so that I'd have more time for my creative work. In fact, there were points in my life when that was my entire interest in time, just to make more of it for my creative life.

Monty Python's John Cleese looks at time and creativity from a different angle in 5 Factors to Make Your Life More Creative, which is available all over the Internet and not just at Brain Pickings, where I found it. At the 5:45 point in this twenty-year-old lecture, Cleese begins to talk about "creative discomfort," which he describes as the discomfort a  person feels while trying to work out a creative problem. Some people may go with the first solution they come up with in order to get themselves past that discomfort, even if the solution isn't particularly original. More creative work is done, he claims, by those people who can tolerate the creative discomfort and stick with a problem longer.

"More pondering time," as he puts it, makes more creative work. "Give your mind as long as possible to come up with something original."

Of course, how long is "more" or "as long as possible?" I will research this subject, but I'm guessing there is no set number of minutes or hours. Creative people have to somehow recognize that the material they've produced is, indeed, original.

I think this is a particularly interesting point to consider for writers because of the popularity of serial books, particularly in children's literature, and because of the increasing number of e-book writers in all genres. Those types of books need to be turned out rapidly.

1. Serial books are "episodes" in a longer story. Readers are left dangling at the end of each episode. Getting them to come back for the next installment means getting that installment out rapidly enough so that they haven't lost interest. With serials for children and young adults, you also don't want the next installment to come out so long after the last published book that your readers have aged out and will no longer be interested for that reason.

2. Writers who self-publish e-books and are actually able to make some money at it often are able to do so because they have a number of e-books available. E-book readers (and I speak from experience here, being an e-book reader, myself) can impulse buy directly from their Kindles/Nooks/etc.. We enjoy moving on to the next book by a writer we like. A self-published e-book writer may not be a best seller for any one title, but can pull in some more income by having a number of titles selling at the same time.

In both these cases, writers need to get the next book published, sooner rather than later. What does that mean in terms of Cleese's point about the need for "pondering time" in order to come up with more creative work?

Ah, time and creativity. Another aspect of time management for me to obsess on.

"Ideas Are Probably In The Air"...Like Cigarette Smoke

I am not much of a Rod Serling fan. However, I like this clip at Brain Pickings very much. In it Serling says that ideas come from "every human experience." He goes on to make the point that "the hardest thing on Earth" is to put ideas down. By which he means to do something with them.

Yes, getting from an idea to a completed piece of work is often brutal. To be honest, it's almost always brutal.

Another Good Blog For Writers

I stumbled upon another good blog for writers. My favorite part of C.S. Larkin's Live Write Thrive  is her guest post category Writing for Life.

I found both Larkin's and Janice Hardy's sites through the most recent Carnival of Creativity.

I Have One Word For You--Birdhouse

I blew off all kinds of responsibilities to go hiking today, hitting four state forests in nine and a half or ten hours. The work never stops, though, because during one of my turns to drive (I read when I'm not driving--don't know where I am or what's going on) I noticed these bizarre tall poles along the side of the road in front of two houses. On the top of the poles were a variety of little wooden birdhouses. (Or they appeared to be wood from the road.) They didn't look very functional. The word "decor" comes to mind.

They'll be going into the 365 Story Project in a couple of weeks.

I am grateful to have come up with an idea that I'm quite certain I can use for a handful of segments. But I can't help but wonder--I was on the road or in the woods for around nine hours. Why the birdhouses? Why did that become an idea and not something else?

The Power of Walking

I just start reading Chi Walking again, which I first began last fall. I was on a treadmill and stationary bike binge this past winter, and, since I read when I'm on those pieces of equipment, I really don't care about chi so I gave up the book. But the weather here in southern New England has been fantastic these past two weeks, and the road has been calling me. So I'm outdoors walking, which led me back to the walking book.

Now, if I'm understanding this chi walking thing correctly, it involves mindful walking and focusing your mind. And engaging your core. If I'm going to engage my core while walking, I'm going to have to focus my mind.

Here's the thing, though: walking is also good for creativity, for forcing breakout experiences. When you find yourself blocked with writing or some other kind of mind problem, if you can release your mind while doing some kind of automatic physical activity, you'll often BAM! have some kind of freaky epiphany that is, at least, the beginning of a solution if not a complete solution.

When I was writing A Year with Butch and Spike, I used to just get up and take off up the street in the middle of the day trying to force a breakout experience. Though I hadn't heard of the term at that point, I sure knew the experience.

So this afternoon I'm reading a bit of the chi book and worrying that if I'm walking along doing all this focusing, I'm never going to have breakout experiences, which I rather desperately need or I'd never finish writing anything. After dinner this evening, I went for a walk, focusing on keeping my core engaged, leading with the upper part of my body, and keeping the trunk of my body in the shape of a C. I got to the end of the street, noticed that that nasty little dog that was barking at me this morning wasn't out, and turned around to head home.

BAM! I had not one, but two breakout experiences (or perhaps we should just say thoughts) relating to The Durand Cousins. I was still quite a way from the house and worried sick that I was going to forget them. Which meant, of course, that I was no longer focusing on my core. But I got home and since we had three computers up and running most of the day, I was able to find a free one and make some notes.

The chi walking guy says that learning to focus on your walk will teach you to focus on other things in your life. God knows, I would love to see that happen. Of course, I've been hoping for something like that to happen with the taekwondo classes, and I've been doing that for nearly five years with no substantial decrease in the amount of time I waste on-line and playing solitaire each day.

Still, I'm a self-improvement junky. Nothing excites me like something new to try, even if it only relates to cleaning the shower or organizing the pantry. And with this new walking program, we're talking chi!