Creativity Tweets of the Week – 10/29/10

Below are some inspiring articles and blog posts on creativity I promoted this week on Twitter @on_creativity:

• “‘Wicked’ Author Explains Methods,” The Dartmouth: Gregory Maguire explains his creative process, which involves envisioning illustrated scenes before creating them in writing.
• “How Do I Keep Going?” MindRecipes: Brenda Freeman provides an exercise to help maintain motivation, helping one to understand the importance of “why.”
• “Acclaimed writer Aimee Bender’s creative process begins with boredom,” Louisville Courier-Journal: The bestselling author forces herself to be “bored” to open her mind to unconventional ideas.
• “Four Ways to Get Your Creative Groove On,” MENG: Sarah Miller Caldicott encourages creatives to be independent-minded, inner-directed, unique, and embracing of ambiguity.
• “What if We Started All Over Again?” A Big Creative Yes: Dan Goodwin encourages us to imagine ourselves to focus first on basic needs to determine what we really need to create.
• “A Creativity and Innovation Catechism,” Wally Bock’s Three Star Leadership Blog: Wally offers four commandments on creativity and innovation.
• “Preparing for Art Every Day Month,” Creative Every Day: Leah Piken Kolidas explains the campaign she’s created where people focus on doing one creative act every day for a month.
• “First Time Writer Gigs,” C. Hope Clark: A useful guide to getting published.
• “Students Decorating Shoes, Backpacks to be Sent to Haiti,” Cape Coral Daily Breeze: Meghan McCoy shares an inspiring local story.
• “Uncapping Creativity: How Do You Use Your Sharpie?” Associated Press via Fort Wayne News-Sentinel: Examples include coloring prom dresses and marking an infant to tell twins apart.
• “Grow Up,” Reflections of Me: A poster with an inspiring Picasso quote on the inner child.

Receive links like these in real time on Twitter!

Allowing Ideas to Percolate

TAKEAWAY: Sometimes you need to allow your ideas to “percolate,” so your thinking, studying and observing can “gel.”

Imagine a young woman arriving at Vermont’s Middlebury College in the 1950s, discovering the joy of printmaking. Now imagine that woman, more than 50 years later, still going strong, making highly valued, award-winning prints and inspiring younger generations.

You don’t have to imagine this woman. Printmaker Sabra Field is very real, and I had the pleasure of interviewing her this summer in her studio and home on my 35-state trip across the United States.

She shared with me some true wisdom on the articulation of ideas and on the nature of creativity in our modern world. I’ll share some of that here, and you can see a video interview with her at the bottom of this post.

Sabra Field is a force of nature. She lives the furthest from a paved road in the entire state of Vermont, a home she purchased in the 1970s. Her art, however, is global, sold through top galleries and shown in exclusive shows. Some of her most noted prints capture the bucolic charm of her adopted state, but as you can see from the prints behind her, she is a world traveler and everything she’s seen is reflected in her work. Even things she dreams.

Her art is a reflection of her life experience, and as a result the ideas for her prints, as she puts it, “percolate in my head for I don’t know how long.” A striking series she did not too long ago titled “Cosmic Geometry” (also shown in the video) “was fifty years in the making,” she told me:

“The thoughts and the looking and the studying and the being and the traveling over a long period of time makes something gel.”

I asked Sabra about the meme circulating that creativity is on the decline. I don’t personally buy that myself, as I have debated with one of the authors of the infamous Newsweek article, but I wanted Sabra’s take. She took strong issue with that premise:

“I think there’s an explosion of creativity. You might not find it exactly where you’re looking for it. Think of the Italians. People say, ‘Oh, where is Leonardo today?’ Well, he’s designing clothes, and housewares, and they’re brilliant.”

I pretty much got lost trying to find her home, and wondered if my rental car was being damaged by all the gravel and rocks being thrown up from the tires as I sought to find her (it wasn’t, not visibly anyway). But I would have happily traversed far more hazardous terrain to have been able to spend time with this remarkable woman.

Ideas are Plentiful, Choosing is the Key

TAKEAWAY: Ideas are Plentiful, the Key to Success is Knowing Which Ideas to Pursue, and When to Move On from an Idea that Isn’t Taking Flight

Pulitzer-Prize winning author Michael Chabon stepped to the podium, facing an audience of thousands of writers. I knew I’d hear poetic prose and brilliant turns of phrase, but what I didn’t expect was receiving valuable insight on the nature of ideas and creativity. I left the presentation feeling as high as a dreamy child with pockets brimming with treasure after a sunny day of collecting shells on the beach.

Okay, that last line was a bit flowery, but it was my amateurish attempt to capture the elegance of Chabon in his presentation earlier this year at the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) Annual Conference in Denver.

Chabon shared his wisdom on ideas and the creative process, but he also made clear that he wasn’t an artist who created art merely for the sake of it. “I want to make art that I can sell for cash money,” he said to appreciative laughter and applause.

He said his presentation would be a Q&A, but then proceeded to ask all the questions himself, questions he is asked repeatedly, questions he has come to find a wee bit annoying.

His favorite/not-favorite question? “Where do you get your ideas?”

His response was to the point. Ideas, he said, are plentiful, if you open yourself to possibility. His metaphor was that if an idea is symbolized by a light bulb, he is constantly walking through rooms brimming with bulbs, all hanging from the ceiling at eye level, all bright and intoxicating.

Chabon has no problem finding ideas. His challenge is discerning which of these beaming lights is the one to dedicate the next several years of his life to pursuing.

As a writer who has produced award-winning novels, novellas, short stories and essays, Chabon has done a stellar job of picking not only the right ideas, but ones with variety. He has also learned which should occupy a lot of his time and which are better suited to a quick take.

The hardest lesson he’s learned, and is still learning, is when to walk away from an idea.

He said that when he does finally choose an idea to devote himself to, he quickly becomes enamored with it. The idea is the greatest idea ever. The idea will be the one to take him to another level of creative accomplishment.

But that isn’t always the case. A stubborn man, Chabon will keep working an idea, trying new routes, new avenues to making the idea come alive. But, sometimes, there is no avenue that will bring that shiny beacon of light from potential to actual.

Did he offer insight on how to choose the right idea, or when to walk away from an idea that isn’t coming to fruition. No. He said he still hasn’t mastered those tricks himself.

But he emphasized that all creatives must recognize the variety and choice of ideas before them, and must also know that not every one chosen should have been chosen.

I remind myself of these lessons daily. When in that ballroom, I was just beginning to plan my trip across the country to interview creatives of all stripes. I wanted to hear their stories, but the trip itself was an idea I was trying to take to fruition. The trip is now complete but I’m still exploring, trying to find the right path to fully realize what the trip meant to me, and what it can mean for all creatives as a source of inspiration.

Starting Down the Road

You’ve stumbled across a project of self-indulgence. This blog will chronicle my renewed path, an artist’s road toward an art-committed life.

The road metaphor is not an accident. In the summer of 2010 I spent six weeks driving through thirty-five U.S. states. Along the way I interviewed more than forty artists and creators — creatives, as I’ll be referring to them in this blog — about their rights under copyright, about their art, about creativity, and about living an art-committed life. A complete collection of the five-minute video interviews I produced can be found here.

I began the trip as a journalist, wishing to capture their thoughts to share them with the world. Along the way, the trip also became about me, and about the dormant creative inside me.

Thus the self-indulgence. I am no longer merely a chronicler of other’s stories. Their stories have become a part of mine.

In future posts I will share experiences from the road. I’ll introduce readers to the artists I met. I’ll share how their stories and their sharing affected me. And I’ll offer insights on creativity and the creative process, building on what I do on Twitter with my on_creativity account.

So forgive my self-indulgence, and enjoy.