Being bored…is not a bad thing for children, according to Yasemin Kamalı, a clinical psychologist at Medipol Mega University Hospital…“An individual who is not bored does not create anything,” she [said]. Kamali said children should be encouraged to participate in group activities, instead of spending time on their computers, tablets and smartphones.

“Boredom Encourages Creativity in Children,” Daily Sabah

Forget about kids for a minute–what about you? Are you allowing yourself to be bored? Or are you picking up your phone at the first flutter of boredom?

Let’s start with a quick & dirty rundown of brain waves.

Your brain has all these neurons, right? Billions of them. They communicate with each other by using electricity (This is happening inside of you right now. If that freaks you out, push away from the bong.) When one mass of neurons communicates with another mass, the synchronized electric pulse creates a brain wave, which can be picked up on an EEG.

There are five different kinds of waves, but I’m only going to talk about one of them here, because it has been associated with creativity: alpha waves. Alpha waves roll when your brain is idling (think: daydreaming, or “wakeful rest”).

“The amount of alpha waves increases when the brain relaxes from intentional, goal-oriented tasks,” says Professor Øyvind Ellingsen from NTNU in Science Daily. “This is a sign of deep relaxation, — but it does not mean that the mind is void.”

Neuroimaging studies by Malia F. Mason and co-workers at Dartmouth College NH suggest that the normal resting state of the brain is a silent current of thoughts, images and memories that is not induced by sensory input or intentional reasoning, but emerges spontaneously “from within.”

“This default activity of the brain is often underestimated,” says Ellingsen. “It probably represents a kind of mental processing that connects various experiences and emotional residues, puts them into perspective and lays them to rest.”

“Brain Waves and Meditation,” SCIENCE DAILY

What’s the connection between alpha waves and creativity?

Highly creative thinkers—people who consistently make novel associations, connections, and re-combinations—exhibit more alpha activity. Andreas Fink, professor of biological psychology at the University of Graz, found that when a task required more creativity and when a subject’s thinking got more original, the brain showed more alpha activity.

Which brings me to my big question: Can you boost your alpha activity, thus amplifying your creative ability?

Fink had the same question, so he undertook a study in creativity training. He split a group into two halves. Half the group got training in divergent thinking, which consisted of exercises in word association and writing challenges that encouraged people to make connections. The other half received no training. In the end, the researchers “actually saw and measured increases in the alpha activity of the trained group. Here, for the first time, was hard evidence that creativity training could alter brain function.” (The Secret of the Highly Creative Thinker, Dorte Nielsen) 

Creativity training isn’t the only way to affect this change; mindfulness meditation is another way to boost alpha waves.

Studies show that alpha waves are more abundant during meditation than during simple relaxation. Why? Back to Ellingsen: “Spontaneous wandering of the mind is something you become more aware of and familiar with when you meditate.”

Now let’s get to the third way. The scary way. The reason you probably clicked on this post in the first place. You can amplify your creativity by juicing your brain with electricity.

A new study by the University of North Carolina (UNC) School of Medicine recently identified the first evidence that a low dose of electric current of 10-hertz can enhance the alpha brain wave activity and boosts creativity by 7.4% in healthy adults.

Alpha Brain Waves Boost Creativity and Reduce Depression, Psychology Today

The author of the study, Flavio Frohlich, acknowledges that some people might be tempted to try this on their own to amplify their own creativity (what could go wrong?), so he offers a note of caution:

“We don’t know if there are long-term safety concerns. We did a well-controlled, one-time study and found an acute effect. Also, I have strong ethical concerns about cognitive enhancement for healthy adults, just as sports fans might have concerns about athletic enhancement through the use of performance-enhancing drugs.”

Alpha Brain Waves Boost Creativity and Reduce Depression, Psychology Today

I don’t know, Flavio. Your analogy doesn’t really hold up for me. Creativity ain’t exactly sports. Is there competition? Sure, I guess. #capitalism But that competition is rarely as simple and direct as it is in, say, a football game. Often a creative person is competing against a problem or time, not against other creative people.

To show you what I mean—and to grapple with some ethical concerns—here’s a thought experiment. Let’s say there’s a viral outbreak in Uganda. Airborne ebola, a real nightmare scenario. It’s spreading rapidly and it looks like it’s about to become a global pandemic. The World Health Organization puts together a crack team of scientists to work on a vaccine. They make rapid progress, but then they get stuck.

How would you feel about juicing those scientists?

I wouldn’t even hesitate. Would you?

Another thought experiment: What about “personal use” for art?

How would you feel if you found out your favorite painter was regularly running current through her brain?

How would you feel if you were a novelist and you found out that a fellow novelist, who just inked a big contract for a three-book deal, was juicing her brain? Would Frohlich’s sports metaphor apply then?

On a personal level, I’ll admit that I’m tempted to try this kind of brainhacking—but I’ll never do it, for the same reason I won’t drink or take any drugs while I’m writing. Because what if it really works?

Then I would either have to continue to use it (knowing that it’s probably damaging me, and also feeling ashamed that I’m not good enough without a crutch) or I would have to stop (knowing exactly where my potential is, and feeling the shortfall in every writing session for the rest of my life).

No thanks. I’ll stick to meditation.

In July I’ll be teaching at the Midwest Writers’ Workshop. Recently they asked me a few questions for their newsletter. Here’s one:

Since you are an author and an editor, what do you see as the common traps for aspiring writers?

I’ll give you one that’s been on my mind lately: overestimating the amount of talent it takes to write a book, and underestimating the time and effort and sheer persistence that it takes.

(This miscalculation isn’t exclusive to the writing world, by the way. See also this article with a very explain-y title: “People Underestimate the Value of Persistence for Creative Performance”)

Here’s a weird disconnect. If you tell people that it takes ten years of devoted work to reach mastery of a skill—not greatness, but mere mastery—they will nod and say, Right, that makes sense. But if you tell them that means it could very well take them ten years or more to write a novel, no matter how good their idea is . . . well, you can see the despair on their face.

But the thing is, you’re allowed to enjoy those ten years (or however long it takes). Actually, you better enjoy it. If you find that you don’t actually like writing all that much—if you’d rather be a person with a book than a person who writes—hit the eject button early and save yourself a ton of suffering.

If you can’t say the phrase It’s about the journey, not the destination without reflexively doing the jack-off motion, allow me to offer an alternative. This comes our way from barbecue pitmaster Alex George, who is opening a new restaurant in Indy.

“It’s not about being a master,” George says. “It’s the struggle of trying to get there.”

Indy Star

Struggle usually carries a lot of negative baggage, but I like the way he reframes it. As I’ve written in the past, struggle doesn’t have to mean misery. If you struggle, it doesn’t mean that you suck.

Scaling a mountain is a struggle. Raising children is a struggle. Getting through grad school is a struggle. 

Every meaningful thing you’ve ever done in your life has been a struggle. 

As with those other struggles, creating something can be a difficult pleasure.

And I hope you find pleasure in it, because here’s the thing: there is no arrival. No actual destination, no moment of “being a master.” We’re chasing the horizon, my friend. The struggle is all there is, so you better learn to enjoy it.

Grades provide an incentive. It’s not their only purpose, but let’s be honest: for a lot of students, an A is the carrot at the end of the stick that is the course. Grades help to create the conditions for students to be engaged and do their best work—right?  

Maybe that’s true for some classes. But in classes where students are expected to do creative work, grades may actually have a harmful effect on student work. 

In general, if people are expecting that their creativity output is going to be judged or evaluated, they are less creative (Amabile, 1979, 1996) and they feel less competent (King & Gurland, 2007).

Creativity 101, James C. Kaufman

So that’s the bad news. 

Now here’s the worse news. 

“[N]eurotic, introverted people did particularly poorly when they thought their work would be evaluated.” 

Creativity 101, James C. Kaufman

But wait: It gets worse. 

[T]here may be a key gender difference in evaluation and creativity. J. Baer (1997) asked eighth-graders to write original poems and stories and either told them they wouldn’t be evaluated or that they would be (and emphasized the evaluation). The poems and stories were rated using the Consensual-Assessment Technique, and there was a significant gender-by-motivational-interaction effect. For boys, there was virtually no difference in creativity ratings under (either condition), but for the girls these differences were quite large.   

Creativity 101, James C. Kaufman (emphasis mine)

Taken all together, here’s one possible meaning: the system of giving grades in creative classes favors confident, extroverted boys. 

Do we really need one more fucking system that favors this group?

Do we really want to reinforce this part of the status quo?

I don’t. 

But I also can’t pretend to have a neat and tidy solution. If I tell my university that I’m going to stop giving grades in my creative writing classes, they’ll say, Cool. We’ll stop giving you paychecks. 

My bosses might have a similar reaction if I told them I was going to give all my students an automatic A, as Michael Martone does at the University of Alabama.

I am fortunate that I “teach” elective classes. The writers who sign up, sign up, I assume, because they want to write . . . On the first day I tell them they all get an “A” (there is nothing they can do to change that). I also tell them that they may find this class difficult. I point out to them that what all their schooling has mainly taught them to do is try to figure out as soon as possible what I want so they can get what they have been taught to want, an “A.”

But, I tell them, and this is the difficult part, I don’t want anything.

I will have several students drop when confronted with the problem of having to know what they want.

It has been a huge relief and quite generative to practice this kind of experiential learning. I no longer worry the control of the class, using carrots and stick of grades to promote behavior, to motivate them. Control means to roll against. I am rolling with. I give free rein, and I am along for the ride.

Magical Thinking: A Conversation with Michael Martone by Kristina Marie Darling, Tupelo Quarterly

I could ask students to do a certain amount of work and to judge them on whether they’ve completed that work—but completion ain’t engagement, and engagement is what I’m after. 

Clearly, I don’t have any answers here. Maybe you can help me think of some. For now, I think it’s important to recognize who this system favors (the same guys it always favors), who is getting ground under its wheels (everyone else), and to start looking for the reset button. 

In July I’ll be teaching at the Midwest Writers’ Workshop. Recently they asked me a few questions for their newsletter. Here’s one:

What is your writing process like?

I don’t have one.

Or, rather, I don’t have just one. My process depends on the type of project, the reason for writing, the time I get to work on it, and probably a thousand other factors I can’t consciously discern.

For example, my process for writing this response is different than my approach for my current novel project, which is different than my approach for my last novel project, which is different than answering a hundred emails in an hour, which is different than—

You get the idea. Each project calls for something different. I have a mental junk drawer full of strategies, and I’m always on the lookout for new strategies. That way, if a certain combination doesn’t work, there’s always something else I can try. Flexibility is key. Flexibility and an experimental spirit.

That said, certain threads run through my creative practice, no matter what I’m writing. Daydreaming. Making notes. Showing up to the page (almost) every day, and finding ways to lower the pressure and boost the joy.

Some creativity researchers claim there are three components to creativity. Some argue for four. But almost all can agree on two key determinants, according to James Kauffman, professor of educational psychology at the University of Connecticut and the author of Creativity 101.

Novelty

“Creativity must represent something different, new, or innovative,” writes Kauffman. How new? How different? That part is debatable, but there has to be some degree of newness. But novelty alone doesn’t equal creativity.

Utility

“Creativity must also be appropriate to the task at hand.” If someone asks you for directions to the mall and you respond by crawling into a garbage bag and making chirping noises . . . well, that’s novel, but irrelevant. Thus, not creative. (This component makes me think of the term from the writing world: “rhetorical situation.” When writers talk about rhetorical situation, they’re talking about things like audience, purpose, the context in which their work will be placed—all the stuff that will help them shape their work to be meaningful and appropriate to the situation.)

X=Multiplication

This isn’t addition. That times sign is there for a reason. Both determinants need to be there. If either one is zero, the whole equation is zeroed out.

This equation isn’t the final word in determining creativity, of course. It gives rise to huge questions like, Who determines whether a creation is appropriate? and What if there is no clear task at hand? But I would argue that’s half the value of any framework for understanding—to serve as a springboard for good questions.

One final note: This post draws heavily on Creativity 101, as you can no doubt tell. The book is like a glacier lake: clear and deep. James Kauffman is a decorated academic, but he writes like an actual human—a really funny and interesting human, at that. I’m going to be using the book in my first-year seminar on creativity in the fall, and if you’re interested in this kind of thing I commend it to you, as well.

In Efficient Creativity: The Six-Week Audio Series Julianna Baggott talks about a creative practice called “musing” as a way of developing scenes. You give your imagination a task (e.g. A man is trying to put a toddler in a child seat while the kid throws a fit) and then you let the scene play like a movie in your mind while you watch what happens. (Speaking of movies: You know the trope where the sheriff lets the bloodhound sniff the missing kid’s sock, and then the bloodhound is pulling on the leash, hot on the trail, and the sheriff can barely keep up? Musing is kind of like that.)

Why muse? Baggott gives several compelling reasons. If you want to hear all of them, you should listen to the audio series. The first episode — AS IF by Magic — is available for free at SoundCloud.

I’ll give you one reason here. It’s the one that really appealed to me: Musing is a way to revise really quickly.

Some of us (read: me) figure out a scene by actually writing it. I almost never get it quite right the first time, so I end up re-writing it. And re-writing it. And re-

You get the idea. This takes a long time, as you can imagine. But musing allows you to play the scene like a movie in your mind, and then re-wind it and play it again differently, and to do that over and over until it feels right—which is a hell of a lot faster than writing the whole thing five or seven or thirteen times.

Who wouldn’t want to fast-forward through their bad ideas to get to the good stuff? I was ready to muse. I thought I would be good at it right away, a natural. After all, daydreaming is my jam.

It didn’t work. I tried and tried . . . but the bloodhound of my imagination would go about three steps, freeze up, and start glitching. Maybe the sheriff had him on a choke chain, I don’t know.

I think I was afraid. Afraid that my imagination might dream up something good that I would forget before I could get it down on the page.

So I adapted. I compromised, meeting halfway between musing and drafting. I gave my imagination the task, cut it loose, and ran behind it taking shorthand notes on its steps.

Then I re-wound it to the beginning, set my imagination loose again, and took notes on its new path. And then again and again until it felt right. Here’s what the first two paths looked like:

It’s illegible, Bryan. I know. I get the feeling that even if I could read your shitty handwriting, I wouldn’t understand anything about this scene. That’s because those notes aren’t for you. They’re for me—the future me who will reconstruct that daydream into an actual draft. My goal was to be as scant as possible so as not to lose the bloodhound or slow it down.

And now I offer these approaches up to you. Try musing. If that doesn’t work, try my method of directed daydreaming + shorthand notes. And if that doesn’t work, mutate a different variation on this theme. Whatever you try, let me know how it goes, all right? I’m deeply interested in this stuff.

In the middle of a meeting about redesigning the creative writing curriculum, one faculty member asked a big question, a showstopper of a question, maybe the question: “What’s the purpose? Like, what are we preparing these students for?”

The one thing we could all agree upon was that the degree was not some ticket you could redeem for a book, much less a career as a professional writer. No overpromising here.

So, fine. That’s what the program is not. But what is it? What were we trying to do here?

We didn’t come up with any answers in that meeting. The conversation shifted, but the question stuck with me. And, as usual when I walk around with a question lodged in my heart, the universe has started giving me answers. Like this one that I came across in Big Magic:

The rewards (of writing) could not come from the external results—I knew that. The rewards had to come from the joy of puzzling out the work itself, and from the private awareness I held that I had chosen a devotional path and I was being true to it.

BIG MAGIC, Elizabeth Gilbert (emphasis mine)

A devotional path: I had never thought about a writing practice in those terms, but it resonates with me. It speaks to the way I approach my writing and my teaching. Let me show you some ways to walk this devotional path. Maybe one of these ways will work for you; maybe you’ll find a different way. None of us can say where this path will take any given student, but we can help them learn to walk it.

That sounds nice and all, Bryan, but what’s the point of all that walking? Toward what end?

A fine question. We shouldn’t promise a destination, but we should define a purpose. A few years ago, I read an article from Stanford’s d.school that talked about “purpose learning,” which focused more on students’ missions than majors. This purpose-oriented mindset connects what the student is studying to the effect she wants to create. For example:

The second part of a purpose-learning statement—the part that follows a phrase like so that or in order to—is really interesting to me. So what could a purpose-learning statement for a creative writer look like? A clue for a possible answer can be found in this blog post from Lee Martin, author of The Mutual UFO Network and other books.

Make your writing part of your identity—what you do is who you are—but never allow your success or your lack thereof to be a factor in how you value yourself. Do what you do for the love of it. Do it because you have to. Write because you know you’d be less human if you stopped.
 

“Ten Precepts for the Writing Life,” by Lee Martin, from his blog.

Humans are the story-telling animals, as Jonathan Gottschall writes. Learning how to write stories and poems and essays—it’s the most human thing you could be doing. And what is a liberal arts education if not learning how to be more human?

So here’s one answer to the big question. Tentative, raw, and far from the only answer, but hopefully an improvement on the awkward silence of the meeting. Writing is a devotional path. We can help you learn to walk that path for the rest of your life, becoming more human with each step.

Further reading: Anna Leahy makes the case.