The Internet abounds with advice on how to be creative.
Google “creativity,” and in less than a second 475 million results will appear. Definitions of the word alone go on for pages and reflect many different perspectives. Certainly, this is refreshing, though I think there is not a more vexed term in the English language right now.
Too often, I’ve met people who assume that creativity has mainly to do with the arts. But I also associate creativity with business people, with scientists. For example, depictions of a heliocentric solar system and string theory represent some of our most compelling ideas about our universe to date. They must have also taken a great deal of imagination. They came from staring and staring at the evidence, but also from day dreaming and asking, “Could it be that…?”
Creative people really know their field well, but they also are not afraid to look at things from another angle than the one they’ve been given. They are not afraid to bring in ideas from other fields and connect them to what they are thinking about. They are not afraid to admit to what they don’t know.
The Many Shades of a Word
I’d like take this a step further. I’d like to suggest that there is a yin-yang to creativity. In other words, along with really knowing our field and engaging in work, creativity might also involve moving from the fast to the slow lane. To be creative is to slow down.
Simply and rather unscientifically, creativity also involves the art of loafing. For all of the driven, type A personalities who might happen on this, for all who feel they must conform and who are brought in by corporations to be the first, the exceptional, I want to celebrate the art that Walt Whitman celebrated in “Song of Myself” when he claimed to “loaf and invite” his soul. I want to suggest that the way of creativity is the way of interested, relaxed play.
This doesn’t mean that creativity is being lazy any more than being creative means being a troubled goth type–another misread on creativity. In its most potent forms, this is a view that we’ve learned to associate with genius. But this is a left-over from the romantic period of our cultural history, when we held that to be genius was also to be troubled and anti-social. It doesn’t have to be that way. It just appears that we get romantic about a condition that we don’t allow ourselves to feel very much.
But again, to argue for the slow lane isn’t to suggest that creative people are lazy. I do know that creative work happens after hard work, and I don’t mean to suggest otherwise. My best insights have come after working and then suddenly seeing a breakthrough come from that hard work. This morning that happened. I was doing research for my novel. At first, roadblocks in my story appeared. Suddenly, after going over and over the research, I had a breakthrough and have a new direction, a new character in the book.
That breakthrough came, yes, after the hard work of research. But it also came after putting aside the research and thinking from another angle as I sat in an easy chair.
A Message from Big Brother
George Orwell was insightful, I think, to show his protagonist Winston Smith in the sterile, dull world over-seen by Big Brother. This is a present without a past, a community without loneliness (except when sleeping) but also without individuals, without any roles other than those assigned by one of the ministries; this is a culture where conformity is the highest value to attain. In this setting, Winston Smith has a romantic longing for some other place and a few hours of solitude and rest. It is solitude and rest that Big Brother is most prone to invade and prevent, because in that solitude (Walt Whitman–“I loaf and invite my soul”) an alternative point of view is there in the horizon of thoughts, an alternative to Big Brother.
The last I checked, cell phones had gotten pretty intrusive. Facebook seems to have a lot of data on us.
But we don’t live in Oceania, and I can turn off Facebook and my cell phone and stare into thin air at will without the thought police talking to me from behind a framed picture on the wall.
So here’s the program. Do this today in the middle of your work. If you are writing, working on a painting, creating an ad, set it aside for ten minutes. Loaf for a few minutes. Day dream.
Then return to it.
At the very least, jot down the thoughts that come to you.
That’s the point today. Creative work comes from intense concentration and work. And it comes out of relaxed play.
This is life in the slow lane.