Filling the Creative Well (The Creativity Series)

Once again, one of my Triberr mates has stepped up to share their POV on creativity. Toby Neal lives a wonderful life in Hawaii, a place I’ve love to return to (hint hint). What a place t surround yourself with beauty.

The Creativity Series: Guest Post

Filling the creative well: Toby Neal

Creativity flows from depth of exposure to sensory input. Let me say that again: creativity flows from depth of exposure to sensory input.

Without sounds we’ve known, where would music come from? Without images we’ve seen, colors we’ve boggled at, shapes we’ve felt, where would new works of art come from? And, without stories, legends, fairy tales, poetry, and even journal articles, where will original narrative spring from?

New work arises from the bones of old—just as new life arises from a remix of DNA.

I’ve written before about the marvelous, magical brain and how it’s always cooking things up (Idea Mining) but with a dearth of exposure, how can new ideas emerge? In a hectic, overstimulated world with too much of one kind of input (like electronics) from whence will rise the next Michelangelo? Without time—time to wander, and putter, and percolate on rich sensory input, who could give birth to genius?

And by this, I’m not talking about retreating for six months to Esalen in Big Sur, meditating naked—(though that could be fun) I’m talking about walking in nature for awhile, letting the eyes wander where they will, picking out the butterflies trying to fly while they mate (not graceful) and the mynah bird chasing a cockroach.

 Breathing deep that smell of moss under a tree, a smell like the underside of a mushroom, cool and slightly sour.

Listening to rain falling, the parrot next door screaming “Pretty bird!” and cars honking.

Processing it. Something will emerge later from what is deeply felt and fully experienced.

I am, right now, primarily a writer (of all my creative dabbling.)  Two days ago I finished Black Jasmine, my third complete novel and best first draft to date (in my optimistic opinion, though my daughter tells me I say that of all of them.)

I am suffering the aftermath of creative overdrive, a mildly depressive state like oncoming flu. Nothing feels quite right, nothing tastes quite right, and quite frankly life looks pretty empty with nothing but fascinating work, loving family, good friends, life in paradise and rewriting in my near future.

Bleah, and bah humbug. I miss my characters. I miss my book, the constant nagging obsession of it.  I’m annoyed I feel this way, finding it neurotic and even narcissistic, and I wonder if I should go to therapy. Oh yeah, I’m a therapist. I hope that means I’m okay, but I’m far from certain of it.

I wonder if I’ll ever write again.

I apparently suffer from being a writer.

But now is the time to fill the creative well, trust the process, know that new ideas are already bubbling in the substrata of my busy brain…they just need more to feed on. Like busily multiplying bacteria, they need stuff to digest.  I need to throw a few bodies into the creative well for my rabid imagination to stew upon. No doubt, you do too.

Slow down enough to process the sensory input around you, and let it fill your creative well.

 Toby Neal was raised on Kauai in Hawaii and makes the Islands home after living elsewhere for “stretches of exile” to pursue education. Toby enjoys outdoor activities including bodyboarding, scuba diving, photography and hiking as well as writing. A mental health therapist, she credits that career with adding depth to the characters in the Lei Crime Series.

The Initial Spark (The Creativity Series: Guest Blog)

The Creativity Series: Guest Post

The Initial Spark: Derek Flynn

 

Stu wanted a post about creativity and the first thought that struck me was the initial act of creativity. As writers, we all know about the second and third and sixteenth drafts, and the critiques and so on, but what about the initial spark. What about that moment when you first pull the words out of the ether and put them together into a sequence that (hopefully) makes sense?

This set me thinking about writers going back a century ago, and their initial act of creation. It’s very different from writers today. Even just going back to the Forties or Fifties – before the advent of television and certainly before the advent of the internet – a writer sitting in a room was not bombarded with any of the things that they are now. There was no sensory overload. The writer sat – as many writers still do – with a pen and paper, or at a typewriter, but the mind worked differently.

Many writers probably still sit quietly writing and don’t have all this external flotsam coming in, but I would imagine that’s increasingly less common. There’s this constant multi-tasking going on. Previously, if a writer got to a point where they needed to research something, they would have just made a note – “Need to research that” – and gone back to the writing, or gone off and picked up an encyclopaedia. But the speed which we can research something now is amazing. And, of course, this is not always a good thing. Because while you can research 18^th century Parisian townhouses in a couple of Google clicks, this doesn’t make up for the two hours subsequently lost reading about the Three Musketeers. (No idea how I got to that page!)

For a long time – probably since the first person sat at a desk with parchment and a writing implement – writers pretty much sat at their desks and wrote. And they still do, but there are different ways of going about it now. I often use a Dictaphone, and it’s a much more off-the-cuff, stream-of-consciousness way of writing. So, I can be dictating whilst looking at something else, and all these ideas are coming at me, and I can stop and research, and so on. And oftentimes I’m just throwing down random ideas, rather than necessarily keeping on a constant train of thought.

It’s an interesting way to work. It’s not a way that I used to work. And, funnily enough, when I dictate while I’m out walking, I actually write more “conventionally” because I’ll get on a roll and I’ll start to write an actual whole scene. When I’m at my desk dictating, oftentimes another idea pops into my head because of something I’ve just seen on the computer and I’ll go off on a tangent with that. And I know there are writers who would gasp in horror at the idea that you would write with all this going on around you, but I think that’s the difference between the initial writing and the later edits. I would find it impossible to edit and rewrite that way; for the later drafts, I have to work from hard copy and the computer has to be shut off.

But it’s the initial phase that I’m interested in, and that initial phase of creation has certainly changed radically for writers in recent times and I think will continue to do so.

 

 

Derek Flynn is an Irish writer and musician. He’s been published in a number of publications, including The Irish Times, and was First Runner-Up in the 2011 J. G. Farrell Award for Best Novel-In-Progress. His writing/music blog – ‘Rant, with Occasional Music’ – can be found here: http://derekflynn.wordpress.com and on Twitter, he can be found here: http://twitter.com/#!/derekf03

 

Fly Like A (Creative) Eagle: Creativity Series (Guest Blog)

When I put out the call for guest blogs about creativity, I knew I did not want to just have one type. Over the next month or two I do have creative people, educators, business people, and students who be entering the adult world of un-creativity soon enough.

Golden Eagle is a young woman whose blog The Eagle’s Aerial Perspective is intelligently written, varied in scope, and she has a huge following. She remains anonymous due to the vagaries and dangers that lurk on the Internet. Don’t let that dissuade you from becoming a fan of her page.

The Creativity Series Guest Blogs

I can’t help but wonder where we’d be without creativity: Golden Eagle

It may not always follow the rules, it can put up obstacles for seemingly simple problems, and it isn’t often a straight line from A to B—sometimes it takes a looping, vermiculated path from A to J to M and then to B—but the trip through the land of creativity is important.

The initiator of the journey can be anything; it’s up to the circumstances and, often, a simple idea from the person doing the creating. Once an idea begins to realize, that’s where the adventures begin.

The experience of using energy in a productive way can often be enjoyable, and, indeed, meaningful. Thinking outside of the box is necessary for new ideas and is one of the reasons creativity is so significant, for different and unique ways of doing things have driven society in many directions. The world would be a different place if everything people did was for getting things done and nothing else.

In many cases, of course, there is a call for maximum efficiency and function over form, or just getting a job done, and then creativity is understandably of less regard—you wouldn’t want a crucial bit of machinery to be put together with artistic flair, for example, or a serious matter dealt with in a way that has too many risks.

Creativity is integral when it comes to individual expression and finding ways to differentiate from the masses, in any medium. In the end, it’s a way of coming up with something unique and distinct, and at the same time, often shows a passion and an energy that might not have otherwise been there.

Do you see creativity as important?

I blog at The Eagle’s Aerial Perspective.

The Golden Eagle is the pseudonym of a Chinese-American girl who loves to write, read, blog, and learn; her favorite genre, and the one she most often writes in, is Science Fiction.