The Saturday Creativity Quote — the gift of creativity

With much of the world preparing to celebrate Christmas, or having just celebrated the Solstice or Hanukkah, I thought about the gift of creativity — not just in the arts, but in our lives. Working artists spend a lot of our time struggling with our creativity, bemoaning its limitations, wondering how to expand it and best use it. And so I’m sharing a few quotes from my collection that focus on the gift.

“One of your gifts as a writer is that you are a sensitive witness to the Universe.”
– novelist and teacher Johnny Worthen

“To meet everything and everyone through stillness instead of mental noise is the greatest gift you can offer to the universe.”
~ Eckhart Tolle

Change is a constant in your career. The gift is doing the work.
– musician Mike Mattison

“An insight is an unexpected shift in the way we understand things. It comes without warning. It’s not something that we think is going to happen and that’s why it’s unexpected. It feels like a gift and in fact it is.”
– Gary Klein, an expert on decision-making, quoted in Wired to Create: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind by Scott Barry Kaufman & Carolyn Gregoire

Thank you, friends, for sharing the gift of your creativity with the rest of us.

Saturday Creativity Quote — a case for the generalist

book cover, Start More Than You Can Finish by Becky Blades

You know the old saw “jack of all trades and master of none.” Did you know the rest of the line? Me, neither. According to my friend Becky Blades, writing in Start More Than You Can Finish: A Creative Permission Slip to Unleash Your Best Ideas (Chronicle Books, 2022), the proverb goes like this:

A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one.”

She goes on to say this: “A case for stARTistry [Blades’ term for people who dive into creative work] is a case for generalists. It’s a case for learning something about a lot of things—to allow us to bring more ideas to life. David Epstein, author of Range: Why Generalist Triumph in a Specialized World, says ‘Our greatest strength is the exact opposite of narrow specialization. It is the ability to integrate broadly.’”

That is the heart of creativity: to bring together divergent ideas and images to create something new, something that reflects you and your view of the world.

Go on. Get started!

Saturday Creativity Quote – “restarts”

book cover, Start More Than You Can Finish by Becky Blades

I’ve been sharing snippets from my friend Becky Blades’ book, Start More Than You Can Finish: A Creative Permission Slip to Unleash Your Best Ideas (Chronicle Books, 2022). She emphasizes that a project involves constantly restarting ourselves, not because we’re lazy or bad or can’t finish what we start, but because we often have to stop and reconsider what we’re doing. When we write a novel, the idea we had at the beginning may change as we go along, and we realize ‘no, it’s not that; it’s this.” In my experience, that shift can happen almost too quickly to notice, or it can require a break. Sometimes a longgg break, while we learn craft and skills we didn’t have before. Then we reignite the spark and “restart.”

“You see, not finishing is not always a focus problem; often, it’s a reignition problem. ‘Finished’ is made, quite simply, from day after day of going back to the work. Masterpieces are made by stopping deliberately and starting again. Of reactivating passion and imagination. Imagine, rinse, repeat.”

— Becky Blades, Start More Than You Can Finish: A Creative Permission Slip to Unleash Your Best Ideas (Chronicle Books, 2022)

Saturday Creativity Quote – more on the importance of starting

book cover, Start More Than You Can Finish by Becky Blades

I’ve been talking the last few weeks about getting started and the fear of failure, quoting one of my recent reads, Start More Than You Can Finish: A Creative Permission Slip to Unleash Your Best Ideas by Becky Blades. Blades describes the creative process as an amalgam of imagine-think-decide-act, not necessarily in that order. (My words; forgive me, Becky, if I’ve mangled your premise.) I had just committed — to myself — to writing a short story, knowing only the theme of the target anthology, the word limit, and where I wanted to set it when I read this:

“Deciding to create a thing we’ve imagined is more complicated than choosing between two things. It’s placing a bet on our future selves to make future choices[;] to balance facts and feelings with yet-to-be-known risks and rewards.”

Yes, yes, yes. Experience can give us a sense what ideas will pan out, even if we don’t know how they will play out. As we take bigger risks — what if my commitment had been to a novel, not a short story? — we’re making a bigger bet and may not have that sense. .

Take the bet.

Saturday Creativity Quote

As you know if you’ve read my Food Lovers’ Village mysteries, the most interesting people come to Northwest Montana, whether to Jewel Bay or its model, Bigfork, the village where we live. One is Becky Blades, who summers here. She’s a delight, a writer, artist, and former marketer and entrepreneur whose most recent book is Start More Than You Can Finish: A Creative Permission Slip to Unleash Your Best Ideas (2022, Chronicle Books).

Last week, I mentioned a well-known watercolorist, Iain Stewart, saying you had “to be willing to ruin a painting,” and author and teacher Jane Friedman writing about the fear of failure. Becky’s premise is that starting projects is valuable in and of itself — regardless of whether we finish or see them as successful — for a variety of reasons; I’ll touch on a few over the next few weeks. Meanwhile, contemplate this:

We are not the sum of our failures and missed opportunities, or our unfinished work. Nor are we made only of our big wins, the handful of things that turned out just like we wanted.

We are the sum of the imaginings we ignite and our ideas acted upon. We are the curiosities we chase and the potential that they illuminate in us.

We are the sum of our starts.”

— Becky Blades, Start More Than You Can Finish (emphasis original)

The Saturday Creativity Quote

tulips

“Only when the brain is confronted with stimuli that it has not encountered before does it start to reorganize perception. The surest way to provoke the imagination, then, is to seek out environments you have no experience with. They may have nothing to do with your area of expertise. It doesn’t matter. Because the same systems in the brain carry out both perception and imagination, there will be cross talk.”

— neuroscientist Gregory Berns, MD, PhD, in a 2008 article, Neuroscience Sheds New Light on Creativity

The Saturday Creativity Quote — provoking the imagination

Word "Fresh" stenciled on a background of greens and yellows, acrylic paint on canvas
FRESH, acrylic on canvas by Christine Vandeberg (used with permission)

“Only when the brain is confronted with stimuli that it has not encountered before does it start to reorganize perception. The surest way to provoke the imagination, then, is to seek out environments you have no experience with. They may have nothing to do with your area of expertise. It doesn’t matter. Because the same systems in the brain carry out both perception and imagination, there will be cross talk.”

–neuroscientist Gregory Berns, MD, PhD, in a 2008 article titled Neuroscience Sheds New Light on Creativity

So when you’re stuck, do something new, something different. Big or small, change creates new paths for thinking.

Writing Wednesday — Staying Creative and “The Rules”

Recently, a list has been circulating on Facebook titled “33 Ways to Stay Creative.” (I wasn’t able to trace its origins; when the “My Modern Met” blog of the Metropolitan Museum of Art shared it in 2011, they couldn’t find the author, either.)

I love this because it’s concrete and specific — these are things we can actually do, and too often don’t. It reminds us that creativity doesn’t just happen by accident; we can feed and nurture it, to better feed and nurture ourselves.

My friend Elaine Snyder, an amazingly creative buckskin clothier, commented that she’d add to #24 “test the rules,” because they can provide insight. And that got me thinking about writers, often beginners, who complain about “the rules” without actually digging for that insight Elaine mentioned. Take, for example, the complaint about “the rule” against adverbs. “Adverbs are perfectly fine,” they say. “X uses them and everyone praises X’s writing.”

This “rule,” and almost every other rule about writing, is really a guideline, a good practice grown from experience. At its core, it’s a reminder to choose every word with care and intention. When you’re tempted to use an adverb, for example, ask yourself first if you’ve used the right verb. Truly think about the action you’re describing, the person taking the action, what they’re feeling at that moment, their motives and inner conflicts, their physical capabilities, the setting—the entire situation. When you find the right verb, you might not need an adverb. If you decide you do need one, like the much-acclaimed X, then it will have been a deliberate choice, not a lazy fallback. You may write an entire story without a single adverb—or you may let them fall drippingly, deliciously, bountifully off every character’s tongue.

So the next time you find yourself griping about “the rules,” test them. Follow, flaunt, fall somewhere in between. See what happens.

And revel in the creativity of it all.

The Saturday Creativity Quote

Morning Mist, photo by the author

“Before you can write anything, you have to notice something,” novelist John Irving said. And in these difficult times, when many of us are walking around — six feet apart — feeing as though a Band-Aid had been ripped off our entire body, leaving us raw and exposed, we wonder how we can create. Because the act of creativity requires some belief that what we do serves us and the world, that it answers questions about life and guides us forward. And right now, that belief isn’t easy.

So “since feeling is first,” in the words of the poet e.e. cummings, start there. Notice what you’re feeling. Just notice it. Don’t burden it with the obligation of action — not yet. When you’re ready, give that feeling to a character if you write. You don’t have to write about a pandemic; let the emotion tell you the story. Let it drive the character. Give the feeling a color or a shape if you paint, a sound if you sing or play, a movement if you dance. Let the feeling guide you.

The Saturday Writing Quote — on creativity

I’m continuing my month of sharing quotes I found in Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World, by Adam Grant (2016).

“Originality is what everybody wants, but there’s a sweet spot. If it’s not original enough, it’s boring or trite. If it’s too original, it may be hard for the audience to understand. The goal is to push the envelope, not tear the envelope.”
– Rob Minkoff, b. 1962, American filmmaker whose films include The Lion King and Stuart Little