Creativity and Action

I came across the title of a book called, Never Check E-mail in the Morning, by Julie Morgenstern. After reading the reviews I decided that this wasn’t the book for me. However, the title offers quite a challenge for avioding distraction.

Of course, the bold and the brave can get down to it and will be able to ignore the phone, and email. I do both of these things when I’m engaged on a commercial writing project because I’ve sold time to someone else who gets my full attention. So why is self-discipline for my own writing more difficult to honor?

The work of creation is work. It’s about regular action. It’s a habit, a custom. But habits, like obsessive email checking, can be mindless and monstrous as Shakespeare says (I do believe he refrained from checking his email or he wouldn’t have been so prolific.):

Assume a virtue, if you have it not.
That monster, custom, who all sense doth eat,
Of habits devil, is angel yet in this,
That to the use of actions fair and good
He likewise gives a frock or livery,
That aptly is put on.

Hamlet Act III, Scene IV

Getting the habit to block out uninterrupted time is necessary for concentrated work. Sales managers understand that salespeople can’t make customers buy. The results are not in the salesperson’s control, but her actions are. It’s the same with any creative discipline. You show up and do it. Sometimes the results are appalling. Sometimes they are mediocre. Sometimes, just sometimes, they are wonderful.

Steven Pressfield’s inspiring and insightful little book, The War of Art, is about battling resistance, although he spells it with a capital R. Resistance takes many forms and certainly one of them is to check email in the morning. The act of checking email is an invitation to be distracted. For me, the morning time sacred. It’s when I can write at my best. Or at least that’s the story I tell myself.

I am susceptible to the stories I tell myself too (more about this later). And right now I’m going to tell myself that I shall not check my email until mid-morning. Let’s see…

Tags: Creativity by Christopher
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First, thanks to all for the participation on the intuition question. I’m sure we’ll come back to that. How something comes into being is one of those mysteries of life. Why it comes into being is equally as mysterious.

Thrownness

Martin Heidegger coined the term “thrownness.” He thought humans are completely shaped by the culture they are thrown into. While we are born with capacities, it’s through our interaction with environment that possibilities are realized-or not. There is evidence to support our innate ability to use language will atrophy if not nurtured by onset of pubescence.

But whether or not we can understand how ideas burst into being, or the how the illusive nature of any electro-chemical state in the brain can be reproduced, we can perhaps get better at looking and listening for emergence. In other words, it seems reasonable to understand the likely environment, or way of perceiving changes in personal mood, energy, focus, curiosity, action, and awareness of an external environment that will lead to a creative act.

Language is the medium of thought

When we speak we don’t think first in some kind of meta-language that gets translated into language. Language is the medium of thought. I’ll modify that to be, language is the medium of conscious thought. There are those processes incubating of which we are not yet aware. As we discussed earlier, this is the wellspring of intuition.

It’s curious how, when writing, we see our words on the page or screen often with surprise. It’s as if someone else wrote those words. Isn’t this idea embodied in the Muse? She is the one who speaks and the writer is merely the channel, or so it seems. Many fiction writers report their characters having a life of their own. What happens next is suggested by what has gone before. The writer is listening to his or her Muse.

Serious imaginings

Children play “let’s pretend.” Actors take on roles as if they were someone else. Economists and planners consider “what if.” All of these things require imagination and the ability to imagine something that does not yet exist.

We don’t necessarily have to shine the laboratory light on the mystery of how emergence works. But we can learn to be better prepared to listen to what is emerging by working with and developing our imaginative faculties. If ever, “Use it or lose it,” were true, it’s true when it comes to imagination.

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And just for good measure, here is Wikipedia’s definition of emergence.

Tags: Creativity by Christopher
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