The Creative Process

A great opportunity of a writing class/assignment is the chance to explore the creative process. Of course there's any number of media you could use, but they often require natural talent (e.g., sports), expensive equipment (filmmaking), or years of practice just to get the rudiments (musical instrument). Whereas in writing you are born a linguistic genius (you begin to learn language even before you are born, you can make all the sounds of all the languages of the world as an infant, and you will automatically and effortlessly learn all the languages you hear regularly. Only children horribly locked in closets for years do not learn language, and if they have only minimal exposure to spoken language, they'll make up their own, especially if confined with another child). On the other hand, years of training by teams of researchers of high powered computers have produced very meagre results in terms of language use (because computers have little knowledge of the real world, not to mention no body). So for a buck and a half, you have all you need to explore the creative process.

Creativity has usually been seen as kind of mysterious, but if you follow creative people around, patterns emerge: One of the most accessible writers on the subject is Roger von Oech. He quotes a Nobel Laureate in physics on the essence of creativity: looking at what everyone else is looking at and seeing something different. This might in fact account for the crackpot reputations of geniuses, but though this be madness, there is method to it, quite literally. Creative people look at something from many points of view until one strikes them as interesting [note that the only training we get in the creative process in school is the scientific method, which omits HOW we come up with a hypothesis, though of course observation is an important part of what we're talking about, necessary but not sufficient).

The techniques for looking at something in different ways are called heuristics (which comes from the same word that Archimedes yelled as he ran buck naked through the streets of ancient Athens when he solved the problem of telling the king that a crown was real gold wo\ithout destroying it[ baths and vehicles seem to release ideas] eureka, which is the stare motto of California, not It's the Cheese). Any of the prewriting techniques are heurstics, but some are more powerful in producing new ideas, whereas the the simplest and most common ones (listing and freewriting) often just allow a writer to collect commonplace notions on a topic, which is the opposite of creativity. The most advanced ones are How to be Brilliant handout. Von Oech sats that the creative process can be usefully divided into four roles: explorer, artist, judge and warrior.

The explorer breaks out of routine and gets fresh ideas by going odd places. This leaving your turf can be geographical or in terms of discipline. In a way students are lucky because math majors are made to take art and psychology, and vice versa, but if you see this as a burden to be escaped as quickly as possible with minimum effort, you'll be limited in your ideas, since the great breakthroughs are often made by people who synthesize two very different ideas (Freud was forced out of studying physiology because he was Jewish, but then applied its models to the mind).

Once the explorer collects ideas/experiences/info, it's the job of the artist to play with them. We all do this naturally as children, but school too often has the function of making everyone think the same way. The artist passes the best ideas on to the judge, who decides to send them back to the artist or even the explorer, or on to the warrior for action. Note that it's important to keep creation and judging separate because judging shuts down ideas (in fact many people have a sort of gremlin voice that tells them their ideas are no good as they are produced, which is a common form of writer's block). The judge role is seductive because it's safe: all the other roles require some courage, so some people make a lifestyle out of it (you probably know someone who always shoots down everyone else's ideas, but rarely offer up one of their own). The warrior makes the idea real.

So what does this tell us about the creative process that professional writers use and why it works? What does it suggest about why the typical method used by beginning writers or students doing a term paper is not successful?

Resources:

Creative Center of the Universe website http://www.gocreate.com/

How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci book summary

The Intuitive Edge book summary