This novel was given up for dead. After writing a couple of fast and loose drafts, I came to the conclusion that it was…irredeemable. So I stuck a hard copy in the closet to quietly decompose. A year or so later, after abandoning the next project, I was feeling desperate. What if I never finish a project again? So I hauled out the hard copy, read it over, and found that:
1) it wasn’t nearly as bad as I’d feared, and more importantly
2) I now had some ideas about how to make it better.
What’s the lesson here? Maybe it’s: Kill your darlings if you must, but remember where they’re buried.
This one’s a group activity. I just ran this challenge in my class the other day. After putting them into groups of three, I gave them the following directions:
GOAL: For your group to get as many paper airplanes over the finish line (~10 feet away) as possible. RESOURCES: 10 sheets of paper. Your own ingenious minds. RULES: You can’t physically cross the start line, which we will assume extends around the planet, like the goal line in football. Take 10 minutes for planning & making.
Other than that, I offered no guidance. When they asked me questions—Can we do this? Can we do that?—I referred them back to the directions: What do the rules say about that?
As you might expect, most groups folded ten sheets of paper into ten conventional airplanes and attempted to sail them across the finish line. In my first class, the leading group flew 11 planes across the finish line (because they had torn their sheets of paper in half and made 20 planes). Then we moved onto the debrief, which is where this challenge becomes interesting.
Debrief: How much time did you spend on planning? On making? Take another look at the rules. What assumptions did you make?
Most groups had spent almost no time planning. They jumped right into folding the sheets of paper into planes without thinking about alternatives.
They also made a bunch of assumptions that weren’t encoded into the directions. For instance, they assumed the planes had to fly across the line—but the directions say nothing about flying. They also assumed that planes had to look a certain way.
Then we moved onto round two, with the following directions:
Round Two:
Try again. Question your assumptions. Practice divergent thinking. Be wily (which is what I say because I can’t say “think outside the box” without rolling my eyes). Oh, and one more rule: You can’t repeat or replicate an approach that was already done in the first round (by any team).
10 minutes for planning and making. Grab 10 fresh sheets of paper. GO.
I won’t reveal the approach taken by the winning team (practice your own wiliness, you voyeur) but I will tell you the high mark went up from 11 to…740.
One final thing: As the class cleaned up the planes, I asked each group to tell us one thing they learned that day. If this challenge was just an hour o’ fun, it wouldn’t be worth much. But if they could make it a lesson about creativity that could translate to other challenges, it could be worth a lot. Oh, and the lessons couldn’t be a clichè (Think outside the box!) or something they already knew before the start of class.
That’s it. Feel free to steal & adapt this challenge for your own setting. If you do, drop me a line (and maybe a picture!) to let me know how it went, all right?
An exercise from The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron:
Priorities List for yourself your creative goals for the year, for the month, for the week.
Okay, Julia. I’ll do it.
I do love me some index cards.
This is by my desk at my office. Will it be inspiring or oppressive? We’ll see. But I like the idea of my creative goals being ever-visible and unforgettable, instead of closed up in a notebook.
While we’re on the topic of The Artist’s Way, this article in The Cutsums up how I feel about this book. “Everything about the book is mortifying, and it totally set me free,” writes Meaghan O’Connell. “Its ridiculousness is matched only by its effectiveness. Embrace it. Hide the book when you aren’t using it; read it when no one else is around. It’s fine.”
Madeline Miller is the author of CIRCE and THE SONG OF ACHILLES, which won the Orange Prize for Fiction. On Tuesday, September 10, 2019, she talked with students and teachers and citizens at the Efroymson Center for Creative Writing at Butler University. Since you couldn’t make it, I took notes for you (you’re welcome). Quotes are as precise as I could make them, but keep in mind that she talks fast and I write slow.
When you’re [writing] a retelling, you can be successful by getting close to the material or getting far away. Faithfulness is not a measurement of success. I work very close to the material, but also (in writing CIRCE) I felt free to push back against Homer.
photo credit: Nina Subin
If a male is struggling [in a story], that is considered plot. If a woman is struggling, people say, “There’s nothing happening in this chapter.”
The difference between writers and non-writers are that writers go back again and again. My old classics teacher used to say that the people who succeeded in classics were the people with the highest tolerance for failure. I think the same is true for writers.
My husband is a master carpenter. When I asked him if master carpenters make fewer mistakes than regular carpenters, he said no–but they recognize [the mistakes] more quickly. It’s the same for writers as they gain experience.
Failure can be an excellent teacher—if you can figure out where you went wrong. But how can you locate missteps? This article from Forbes offers a simple three-part protocol to conduct a post-mortem on a project to guide a creative revision. (Note: if you’re thrown off by the word “inefficiencies,” you might substitute “problems” or “failures.”)
The IGA Framework The inefficiencies, glue, alternatives (IGA) framework involves three five-minute sessions of sitting with your eyes closed. For this exercise, you’ll need a piece of paper folded into three equal parts, a pen or pencil, a timer, and a comfortable, quiet place to sit. Here’s the three-step approach for recognizing challenges, understanding why they exist and discovering creative solutions.
1. Choose a recent project you’ve worked on, either completed or in progress. Then set a timer for five minutes, close your eyes and reflect on the most notable inefficiencies that arose during this project. As you discover them, open your eyes and write them in the “inefficiencies” section. Ideally, you’ll have more than one.
2. Choose one inefficiency to address. Before setting the timer for another five minutes, set your intention: Your goal is to understand the glue that held this inefficiency together. A few questions to ask yourself could be: • Why did this inefficiency persist? • Has it happened before? • What was my role in it? Try not to let blame dominate this session. The goal is to pinpoint the glue so we can melt it (find a suitable solution). Write a few relevant notes in the “glue” section.
3. In this final five minutes, you’ll brainstorm potential solutions to the inefficiency, capturing what comes to you in the “alternatives” section.
“Three Creativity Exercises to Spark Employee Innovation” by Cameron Conaway
“Does listening to music stimulate creative thinking or stifle it?” asks the author of this recent article in Time. As it turns out, it might depend on what kind of thinking you’re doing—divergent or convergent.
Divergent Thinking
According to the authors of “Background Music Stints Creativity,” published in Applied Cognitive Psychology, divergent thinking is “a strategy whereby multiple creative ideas are produced and appraised within a short period of time in order to generate potential solutions for a given problem.”
Think: brainstorming. Coming up with a lot of different ideas.
Convergent Thinking
Convergent thinking, on the other hand, is about “the connection of different ideas to determine a single, correct solution to a problem.”
Think: decision-making. Hunting through the haystack of ideas to select the single best one.
So when does music help?
If you’re trying to come up with a lot of creative ideas, music can stimulate your divergent thinking.
A 2017 study in the journal PLOS ONE found that listening to “happy” music—defined as classical tunes that were upbeat and stimulating—helped people perform better on tasks that involved “divergent” thinking…“We can only speculate why happy music stimulates divergent thinking,” says Simone Ritter, coauthor of the PLOS ONE study and an assistant professor at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands. One theory put forward in her study is that the stimulating nature of lively music somehow energizes the brain in ways that promote a “flexible thinking style,” which leads to unconventional or innovative ideas.
But if you’re trying to find the one right answer, you might want to take off your headphones.
In the study that led to “Background Music Stints Creativity,” the researchers used a test called the Compound Remote Associates Test. It’s the kind of test that has right answers and wrong answers, thus measuring convergent thinking. They had subjects listen to different kinds of background music while taking the test, and found that all types of music “significantly impaired CRAT performance in comparison with quiet background conditions.”
Their finding jibes with my experience, but I can’t relate to the study about happy music and divergent thinking. If you blared happy music at me while I was trying to think, I’d only be able to come up with ideas about how to smash your speakers.
Years ago, I read an interview with Ethan Canin and Elizabeth Stuckey-French in The Southeast Review that has done more to shape my process than any other single influence. Here’s the heart of it:
Excerpted from The Southeast Review, Volume 27, Number 2: The Lie that Chokes the Reader: A Conversation with Ethan Canin and Elizabeth Stuckey-French
Forrest Anderson: I wanted to ask you about planning your own material. . . (You seem) to suggest that you don’t plan your books. Are you a mapper?
Ethan Canin: I’m an explorer, but then a mapper. I have no idea where a novel is going. I don’t know the plot. I don’t know the characters.
Elizabeth Stuckey-French: You don’t do any planning ahead of time?
Ethan Canin: Zero. My last novel—America, America—started with a scene. I was despondent, which is pretty much standard, and I was looking through this file of aborted things. . . I found the scene of this guy on a sailboat. This girl jumps off the back into the lake. That one seemed decent. I started with that. Then, I had to make up a wealthy family, and a working class kid. So, I kind of came up with a novel, sort of a novel. . . Once it’s kind of sketched in, then I map it out. I make a huge storyboard and I try to fit the scenes together. . . It gets to be sort of a logic puzzle as to how to put it together at the end.
Elizabeth Stuckey-French: What’s a storyboard?
Ethan Canin: I take a big sheet of what they call extruded polystyrene, which is rigid foam insulation. . . It’s 4×8 but it weighs about six ounces. I get multicolored index cards, and each color corresponds to a plot. Since you can’t hold an entire novel in your hand, it’s the only way I can begin to look at it. I can look at it and say, “There’s not enough of the orange plot. About halfway through, the reader may be forgetting about the orange plot.”
Elizabeth Stuckey-French: What do you write on the cards?
Ethan Canin: I write in big letters so I can see across the room what the scene is about. . . . I write a couple of distinctive words that are in that scene . . . Then I write a psychological precis of it — Clara is flirting with Cory — and then I write some other logical dictate: “This has to follow a scene where we first meet Clara, but it has to precede the scene where Cory makes out with his sister or something.” I’m trying to organize it. . . you forget there are lots of logical dictates to a story that you don’t really see when you don’t have a storyboard.
“Write what you know” is an old and tattered piece of advice that has fallen out of favor in recent years—and for good reason (so limiting! What about imagination? What about following your curiosity toward what you want to discover?).
But I’m not lining up to beat this dead horse, which already looks like carpaccio. I’m here to share an interesting twist on this old piece of advice. It comes from The Poet’s Companion by Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux.
“Write what you know” is still an excellent place to begin. Start with that, and let yourself move out from what you know into the larger questions.”
p. 24
Start with what you know. Simple, powerful, and not limiting. This idea connects with their other thoughts on beginnings, offered earlier in the book.
Few of us begin to write a poem about “death” or “desire.” In fact, most of us begin by either looking outward: that blue bowl, those shoes, those three white clouds. Or inward: I remember, I imagine, I wish, I wonder, I want.
p.21
This is a good reminder that “what you know” might be something simple and concrete in view, but it also might be your own mind, your own heart. But just because you start in a familiar place doesn’t mean you have to stay there. Whether you’re writing poetry or fiction or nonfiction or whatever, you can sail outward (or deeper inward) to discover new territory.
In The Secret of the Highly Creative Thinker, Dorte Nielsen contends that the key to creativity is an ability to make unexpected connections. “Highly creative people are good at seeing connections,” she writes. “By enhancing your ability to see connections, you can enhance your creativity.”
I thought of Nielsen’s argument when I read this article: “The Vehicle of the Future Has Two Wheels, Handlebars, and is a Bike.” The article walks the reader through the recent flurry of innovations in bike-sharing systems: from docking stations to dockless bikes to dockless e-bikes that allow you to show up to your meeting without looking like you just finished a mountain stage in the Tour de France.
Interesting stuff, but the part that really sparked my mind came at the very end:
Best of all, the bike-tech revolution reminds us that innovation isn’t always about the totally new. It’s often just as powerful to blend a robust, old tool that works well with a bit of new tech to make it better.
“The Vehicle of the Future Has Two Wheels, Handlebars, and is a Bike” by Clive Thompson
#connection. I can practically hear Dorte Nielsen crowing in triumph. For today’s exercise in creativity, let’s try the same move:
Old Invention + New Tech
Set a timer for five minutes. Jot down as many combos of old inventions + new technology as you can. (Go for quantity. Some will be silly, some may be horrifying: just get it down and keep going)
For a bit of a foothold on this exercise, consider the following list of old inventions:
Dirigible
Ballpoint pen
Zipper
Vacuum cleaner
Ejector seat
Compass
The modern factory or warehouse
I’m curious to see your ideas. Would you leave one or three or eight of them in the comments? Here, I’ll get it rolling with some of my sons’ ideas:
Jet-bikes
TV-toaster (“because it’s boring to wait for your toast.”)
Vape-organ (every time you press a key, vape fog blows out the pipes)
Drone-dirigibles (for big deliveries)
Dirigible-trains (okay, this one is kinda cheating, because it combines two old inventions. Picture a mini-dirigible attached to each car so the whole train can go through the air “like a beautiful sky-snake.” Bonus points for the trippy image.)
