Saturday Creativity Quote — more from Paul Lynch

Posted on March 30, 2024 by admin

Jeffrey Brown : “You have written about the role of the novel today and I guess a concern about whether it can still be valued, even important, have a place in our society.”

Paul Lynch: “Yes. It goes back to what I call the whisper in the ear. I mean, the novelist can whisper in the reader’s ear, and that’s a beautiful conversation. There’s also whisper in the ear that you have with yourself. But we live in a time where technology has done something to us.

We are no longer, for many of us anyway — unless you cultivate it and shape it, we are not in tune with ourselves. We’re not hearing the voice in the ear. And it’s harder to read fiction too. And I think that a culture that cannot hear itself think is a culture that is in serious trouble. …

And I like that idea of fiction just being a little bit more dangerous, a little bit more engaging, pushing into — seeking this hidden charge of things and giving the reader maybe a little bit more electricity, but doing it respectfully.”

— Irish novelist Paul Lynch, winner of the 2024 Booker Prize for the novel Prophet Song, interviewed by Jeffrey Brown on the PBS Newshour

Saturday Creativity Quote — Paul Lynch

Posted on March 23, 2024 by admin

“I’m interested in this idea of the personal cost of events.

And I think that, if you go back through literature, you go through a great book like The Iliad, it foregrounds the politics. It foregrounds the heroics and the great characters. But if you take The Iliad and you turn it inside out, you arrive at [the protagonist of his novel, Prophet Song] Eilish Stack. You arrive at the individual living the ordinary life and how the individual is caught up within the cogs, the machinations of this enormous thing that’s unfolding. …

I’m really interested in the problem of grief, not grievance. I’m interested in the idea of the political of what is lost, how fragile this world that we’re in is.”

— Irish novelist Paul Lynch, winner of the 2024 Booker Prize for the novel Prophet Song, interviewed by Jeffrey Brown on the PBS Newshour

Saturday Creativity Quote

Posted on March 16, 2024 by admin

cover of paperback edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, showing a man and a boy on a raft on the river

“If I’d a knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn’t a tackled it.”
— Mark Twain, in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Some days are like that. Just keep going. Remember, you can do anything for 15 minutes, and that might be enough to write a page, write a chorus, or plan the colors for a new weaving

Saturday Creativity Quote — on flow

Posted on March 9, 2024 by admin

Rushing water between two large sedimentary rocks

Flow. We know it when we feel it, but what is it? How can we cultivate it? A new study done at the Drexel University Creativity Research Lab used brain imaging to study jazz guitarists working on an improvisation and summarizes the results this way:

“The findings reveal the creative flow state involves two key factors: extensive experience, which leads to a network of brain areas specialized for generating the desired type of ideas, plus the release of control — “letting go” — to allow this network to work with little or no conscious supervision.”

I like this so much, not just because it rings true, but because it also tells us what we can do to experience flow more often and more readily: practice the work, whether it’s chord structures or writing dialogue, creating new pathways in the brain, and practice giving up conscious control of the process and the results.