A short and cheerful guide to creativity.
We all enjoy being creative, but many of us question what it means and if we are qualified to call ourselves ‘creative.’
In 'Creativity - A short and cheerful guide', John Cleese assures us that we can be and shares tips on how to improve our creativity.
"Wherever you can find a way of doing things that is better than what has been done before, you are being creative."
The book begins with my top tip when faced with a creative dead-end or a problem that is difficult to solve... sleep on it.
"...if I put the work in before going to bed, I often had a little creative idea overnight, which fixed whatever problem it was that I was trying to deal with. It was like a gift, a reward for all my wrestling with the puzzle."
The unconscious mind.
He goes onto explain why this works. It is because your unconscious mind is beavering away in the background; triggering new thoughts, sorting through ideas and retrieving bits of information.
"This intelligent unconscious of ours, then, is astoundingly powerful. It allows us to perform most of our tasks in life without requiring us to concentrate on them. Without it, we couldn't function at all. There'd be much too much to think about."
Go and play.
He shares a study made by Donald MacKinnon in 1959 who asked a number of well-known architects to describe what they did from morning to night. He made two discoveries that marked creative types out:
1) They deferred creative decisions until the last possible moment so that their ideas could ferment.
2) And they liked to play. They had the "ability to get enjoyably absorbed in a puzzle: not just to try to solve it so that you can get on to the next problem, but to become really curious about it for its own sake."
MacKinnon summarised his study as follows:
“The evidence is clear: the more creative a person is the more he reveals an openness to his own feelings and emotions, a sensitive intellect and understanding, self-awareness, and wide-ranging interests, including many which in the American culture are thought to be feminine.”
(This quote and a more detailed analysis of Donald MacKinnon’s groundbreaking study into creativity can be read on the Brain Pickings website. If you haven’t come across this website before, I recommend giving yourself time to immerse yourself in its ideas).
Is it a good idea?
As a new idea forms there comes a time when you need to decide if it's a good idea.
This is when you let your unconscious mind go and bring in your critical, logical mind to assess it and see if it's worth pursuing.
Yes? Then allow the creative (unconscious) process to kick in again, let the idea iterate and at various stages bring in the logical mind to evaluate it. If it passes, you have a good idea and you have been creative.
Creative block.
You can't be creative all the time. Sometimes you will go through fallow periods. That's fine. They are "an inseparable part of the whole creative process."
Just get some ideas down. Any ideas. It doesn't matter if they are any good. If nothing else they will free your mind to look elsewhere.
But it's more likely that there will be something there. A layout, a structure, a plot may emerge form which you can build on.
Anyone can be creative.
All you need is to allow ideas time to evolve. Walk away and let your unconscious take over. Give yourself time to play, to explore and be curious. Never, ever stop learning. At key stages analyse your idea and iterate. And be patient.
That's all. Simple.
