Creativity Tweets of the Week – 10/28/11

Yes, my weekly collection of great links on creativity and writing is back after a several-week hiatus. I don’t have many links to share when I don’t tweet, and I’ve been negligent with my Twitter feed the last couple of weeks. Mea culpa. I still love you.

CREATIVITY

• “The Seven Deadly Sins that Prevent Creative Thinking,” Michael Mickalko, Psychology Today: Sin number 3 is all too common: “We fear failure.
• 

  How visible have my tweets been the last couple of weeks? About as visible as the moon is in this photo, taken in Madison, Wisconsin, during my cross-country road trip.

  “12 Most Satisfying Means of Getting Your Creative Juices Flowing,” The 12 Most: Number 4 is decompressing with something fun. Playing “Mafia Wars” is one suggestion. I guess it’s okay I allow myself to watch my new idol Papi on “Dan LeBatard is Highly Questionable.”

• “The Creative Brain on Exercise,” Jonathan Fields, Fast Company: I know, I know, exercise fuels creativity. Being lazy, I make use of sleep.
• “Why We’re Running Away from Creating Our Most Important Work,” Dan Goodwin, A Big Creative Yes: Don’t think of work as “work,” approach it as affirming. If only Dobie Gillis had shared this wisdom with Maynard G. Krebs.

WRITING

• “Apples to Apples, Please: Narrative Nonfiction and Empathy,” Susan Cushman, guest post on Brevity: Huzzah to Susan for arguing a nonfiction story well told has equal literary value to a fictional story well told.
• “Where do Writing Ideas Come From?” Charlotte Rains Dixon, Wordstrumpet: Just as writing begets more writing, idea-forming begets more idea-forming. You’ll like the photo of the rabbits. (Related: Ideas are Plentiful, Choosing is the Key)
• 

  And how visible are my tweets now? Dare I say as visible as Wisconsin's State Capitol when in downtown Madison? (Perhaps not.)

  “Finding My Way Through the Wall,” Jolina Joy, the Happy Book Blog: On, among other things, finding one’s way back to their creative writing and rocking back and forth while humming the theme from Barney.

• “My Secret for Battling Procrastination,” Jane Friedman: I admire the author so I’m sure this is a useful post, but I confess I haven’t gotten around to reading it yet.
• “Novelists: Stop Trying to Brand Yourself,” Rachelle Gardner, Literary Agent: Focus on the audience for your work and the rest will come. Let me extend that suggestion to all creative writers.
• “Four lies the internet tells you about writing,” James Killick, James Killick’s Blog: An excellent companion piece to Rachelle’s above.
• “500 posts at the Fibro – and a giveaway,” Allison Tait, Life in a Pink Fibro: Go wish one of the most prolific bloggers on writing, and maybe you’ll win a 60-minute writing consultation.

Feel free to help seed my tweet feed by sending me directly links you think creatives would value. I’ll be sure to give you a shout-out.

Dare to be Boring

Learn who won The Artist’s Road creativity-book drawing at the bottom of this post.

“Dare to be boring. Dare to be obvious.”

That was writing advice I received Sunday from creativity consultant Kat Koppett. Kat led a workshop on improvisation and storytelling at the Creativity in Business Conference October 23rd in Georgetown, D.C, produced by Michelle James and The Center for Creative Emergence. That nugget from Kat came while she informed us how we should fill in the meat of our story spine, the heart of the story between the story’s catalyst and its climax.

I came across this funny guy on my cross-country U.S. road trip at the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina. I think he is performing improv, pretending he is a unicorn.

“What is obvious to you may be very significant to others,” she said. Here are two ways this is true:

1. As a reader (or listener) is following your story, they develop certain expectations for what is coming. You may assume some “obvious” detail doesn’t need to be included, but if the reader is eagerly awaiting it and you do in fact provide it, the receipt can be very satisfying to the reader.
2. That detail may seem obvious to you, but each of your readers (or listeners) brings a different background and way of thinking to your story, so it may not be obvious to them at all.

It should be clear that this advice fits into a larger framework, one every storyteller is taught from Day One: Know your audience. This is a key aspect of improv storytelling as well, it turns out. Kat says a skillful improv storyteller masters how to “build a story to give it meaning” and “gauge the audience to make the story relevant to them.”

Do you see parallels between improv and your own creative storytelling?

On a final note, it turns out that of the thirty or so people at Kat’s workshop, I was the one she brought up to improv with her. I have a fair amount of experience with storytelling but very little with formal improv. That said, I’ve been spinning blarney to my children their entire lives, so I hung in there as best I could. It was fun, in fact, and I might just take an improv class at some point.

Now to the winner of a free book on creativity. You’ll recall every commenter on the first-anniversary post of The Artist’s Road entered a drawing, and I generated the winning number using this site. The winner is Certified Kaizen-Muse Creativity Coach Sue Mitchell. Congratulations, Sue!

Has it Been a Year Already?

ALERT: Win a free book on creativity! Details below.

I launched The Artist’s Road a year ago. I didn’t know what my intentions were with it, not on a conscious level. So I welcomed readers with this:

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.

As it turns out that’s been a pretty good prediction on my part. All I knew when I launched it was that if I were truly to commit to living an art-committed life, by proclaiming that to the digital world I’d be more likely to hold myself to it. I’ve spent much of my adult life allowing my creative self to stagnate. It’s easy to do, because being true to your creative self requires a lot of work and sacrifice.

For any readers who have been curious, the banner photo for this blog comes from this picture, which I took during my cross-country US road trip while driving I-80 from Cheyenne, Wyoming, to Rock Springs. Yes, it's not wise to operate a camera and a motorized vehicle simultaneously, but as you can see, it's not like there was a lot of traffic.

Over the last year I’ve stepped down from my CEO post with a D.C. nonprofit, launched a freelance writing business, begun taking my first-ever creative writing courses, and started an MFA in Writing. And I’ve thanked my wife and children (repeatedly) for indulging me in this reinvention.

I’ve written about the amazing creatives I interviewed on a cross-country U.S. road trip last year, and passed along inspiration and tips they shared with me. I’ve passed on wisdom I’ve learned in my MFA studies. And in an effort rich with irony, I’ve shared with readers my difficulty I have with sharing information about myself.

I write each post hoping my readers will have some sort of takeaway–a creative tip, a word of encouragement, a sense of community. But writing this blog has given me all of those things. I am so grateful for the fantastic individuals I’m now connected to as a result of this blog, and its companion, Twitter.

Ultimately, the path I follow in my art-committed life is mine alone. But it is so much easier to follow with the support and encouragement of family, friends and peers.

Now to the good stuff! One lucky commenter below (drawn randomly) will win a copy of a great book on creativity. The winner can choose one of these three: The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles by Steven Pressfield, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, or Explaining Creativity: The Science of Human Innovation by R. Keith Sawyer. Please post your comments by the end of the day on Tuesday, October 25th. Good luck!

Teaching by Personal Example

It takes a brave soul to educate others by revealing your own shortcomings. That is the admirable approach taken by creativity expert Douglas Eby in his new book Developing Multiple Talents, a comprehensive overview of many perspectives on creativity, from scientists to creatives themselves. The book’s title is an area of fascination with me, and I was flattered that in the book Eby cited one of my blog posts on the subject, “Creatives with Multiple Talents.”

Anyone who has spent much time researching creativity online has likely come across Eby’s writings. He’s the man behind a site filled with information and profiles of creatives, Talent Development Resources, and he shares resources on Twitter and Facebook. I’ve been reading Eby’s works for some time now, as my fascination with creativity is surpassed perhaps only by him, and a few others we both like to cite, including Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eric Maisel.

This is the parking lot of the Hormel Spam Museum, taken on my cross-country road trip interviewing creatives. Those spaces are empty, a reflection of my resistance to spamming readers with my own story.

I find Eby’s writing style to be direct and informative, but I’m not used to him sharing himself in his writings. The insertion of a personal narrative is a pretty common approach for a lot of writers on creativity, however. The iconic works of Julia Cameron (The Artist’s Way) and Anne Lamott (bird by bird) are as much memoirs as instruction manuals. Interestingly enough, Eby in his introduction insists his book “is not designed as a how-to or self-help book, so much as an overview of some of the key aspects of our personality and inner life that can affect how we understand, access and express our different creative talents — and be able to do much more than one thing.” But in fact there is plenty in his book that one could make use of in living a more creative life.

Eby is subtle in his inclusion of his own story. Cameron, for example, devotes pages on telling the story of her struggles with her marriage and her career. Eby, by contrast, teases us with brief insights. We learn he began Talent Development Resources after asking himself some pretty significant questions, such as “Why haven’t I ever ‘settled down’ into a specific career?” and “Why have I been so self-critical?” As for the former question, I too have held an odd assortment of jobs, but perhaps none as unusual as his stint as a glue tester. As for the latter question, I think Eby is sharing a question all of us who strive to live creatively ask ourselves.

If I am honest with myself, I must admit that my passion for the study of creativity stems from my own insecurities about my own creativity. Eby’s passion comes from the same source. Where I am not like Eby (yet) is my ability to share my own weaknesses. Eby shares that he is “vulnerable to dark moods like depression and anxiety.” When quoting actor Edward Norton on creativity as a compulsion, Eby shares “[f]or all too many years, I have been self-critical about focusing on creative interests instead of, for example, socializing.” When explaining how we often assume only geniuses can be truly creative, he says “I have often felt held back in writing, such as this book, by self-limiting ideas related to how I identify myself and my writing talents.”

Longtime readers of this blog know that I am on a newly dedicated path to an art-committed life. They also know one of my biggest challenges on that path is learning how to share my vulnerabilities and my struggles. I’m a journalist by training,and keep myself out of the stories I tell. If you watch the video interviews I’ve conducted with artists, I am never seen nor heard.

Eby’s book was written to inspire other creatives, but he inspired me by helping me see my own study of creativity can help me with my challenge. He writes this: “For most of my life I have struggled with unhealthy self-esteem and high self-criticism–but reading many books on giftedness and creativity, and interviews with talented and accomplished actors, directors, writers and other artists, I have come to realize that I am far from alone.”

I see that now too. Thank you, Douglas.

Do you wrestle with “dark moods” and “high self-criticism”? I invite you to share as well.

Our Art-Committed Ancestors

A serious artist always ensures her paint and tools are properly cared for. It seems an artist 100,000 years ago took enough care to allow us to study those tools today.

Is it possible that 100,000 years from now, scientists will excavate the paint from my garage?

This morning I learned of a new report in the journal Science of preserved art supplies found in a South African cave. They date back 100,000 years, far earlier than the first evidence of produced art. (See this article by Brian Vastag in The Washington Post.) Excavators found evidence of paint production and use — a canine bone likely used as a brush, a seal bone from which bone marrow likely was extracted as a key paint ingredient, a tortoise shell in which to store paint, grinding and pounding stones to crush the key paint ingredients , and evidence on these tools of ochre mixed with bone marrow, charcoal, flecks of quartz and a liquid (most likely water). That complicated chemical concoction was paint, experts at Paris’ Louvre confirmed.

This finding confirms three key points about art and the art-committed life:

• Art is not separate from but integral to culture: While we can’t be sure they used this paint to adorn walls (limestone build-up would have long ago obscured such works), previous excavations from this cave — Blombos, on the coast of South Africa overlooking the Indian Ocean — have found this paint used artistically. It was found adorning beads and allayed in cross-hatch patterns, all of which  are now considered the oldest evidence of art. But there were many possible uses of this paint beyond art. Scientists say the paint could have been a sunscreen or insect repellent. I would posit that, just as today we mark hiking trails with stripes of paint on trees, this paint could have been used by these nomadic hunter/gatherers to mark trails, including to this cave. Scientists say the paint also could have been used for face ornamentation, both artistic and practical. Today tribes in south Africa paint their faces and torsos to identify which tribe they’re in and their marital status. So whether it’s someone’s face or the side of a tree, this tool of expression has both practical and artistic uses. The ancestors of these ancestors, who first determined both the chemical process to produce paint and the tools to apply it, demonstrate a unity of art and practicality.
• An understanding of “domain” is essential to art: Creativity coach Eric Maisel, from whom I borrow the phrase “art-committed life” in this blog, writes that the art-committed master a “domain” in their artistic field. For painters, that is an understanding both of the tools of painting and of paint itself. It’s safe to assume that 100,000 years ago, not every member of a tribe knew how to produce and apply paint. Even in ancient times there was a painting “domain” and there were those committed to mastering that “domain.”
• 

  I fear future scientists will not find my organization of painting tools to be as competent as our ancient ancestors.

  An appeal to the aesthetic is elemental to art: The ancient Greeks studied aesthetics as a key element of philosophy, debating the inherent nature of art and beauty. But such studies can also be found in the earliest writings of the great minds of Africa and Asia. An essential element of this philosophy is that choices matter in determining what creation is in fact beautiful. How interesting, then, that scientists noted the producers of this paint made choices in paint color. Ochre can produce anything from “mellow yellow to raging red,” Vastag writes, but these ancient paint producers favored “only the brightest of reds.”

Readers of this blog know I focus my studies on “creatives” of all types. My own background is in music and writing. But visual artists date back to our earliest ancestors as surely as do musicians (percussion) and writers (oral storytellers). How thrilling to know our creative paths were first blazed by distant ancestors emerging at the dawn of humanity.

Guest Post: How I Use My MFA To Cultivate Creativity

Today we’re featuring a guest post from Deborah Connolly, a creativity coach and business entrepreneur.

Creativity and academia are a funny couple, and many often question the practical utility of an artistic degree “in the real world”.

It’s been over twenty years since I cashed in my teaching scholarship for a Masters in Fine Arts in English [read: poetry] from The University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop. Here, I spent my days in workshops led by brilliant scholars, poets and novelists—like Jorie Graham and Gerald Stern ­­–­­­ firing off synapses with some of this generation’s best writers before they were known in print.  But what I took away most from those years in the heartland remains the foundation of my own creativity and is the bedrock of my devoted pursuits as an explorer, writer, coach, and entrepreneur today.

My MFA is where I cultivated a sense of how to create an environment to maximize my own creativity.  How did I do this?  By understanding that, much like water, creative potential is shaped by the walls around us.  Expand the walls, and you expand. Knock all the walls down? You have human beings in beautiful chaos.

Evolution, Creative Leadership—call it what you want, but our personal development bobs and weaves over time. Our only real job is to follow it down holes, over walls and to galaxies beyond.  Though the specifics vary for each of us (I want to finish my novel, I want to have my own business, I want to feel more alive), any goal requires the creation of a challenging environment that encourages us to aspire to higher potential.

While at Iowa, did I learn how to write on demand and withstand the criticism of many of my champions?  Yes; but more importantly it built my resilience, something that comes in handy on your way to creating a life that is deeply satisfying.  Replace the question, “what if I fail?” with a larger query: What else is there for me to learn and explore?

In our hectic society, we talk a lot about achieving work-life balance, and during my time in Iowa, I began cultivating regular routines that still serve me today.  Though neither the newest method, nor the most imaginative: the “like clock-work” adage has a lot to be desired when it comes to peaking creativity and productiveness.  How does this apply to my life today?  Let’s tick a few specific examples off:

Like Clock-Work/Work: In Annie Dillard’s book, The Writing Life, she applies the “ little-goes-a-long-way formula” to her writing. Write one page every day and at the end of a year you have 365 pages. Upgrade that? Write at the same time every day if you can swing it, even if that means waking up at dawn. The more unnecessary, repeated thinking you remove from your process, the faster you enter the fluidity of on-going creativity and personal productivity.

Like Clock-Work/Explore: Sure, I was scared out of my mind in Iowa surrounded by all those brilliant and prolific writers. What did I do with all that fear? I followed my creativity down unconventional paths.  I took road trips with my camera and painted on found objects.  I wrote every day and when I couldn’t write anymore I followed my curiosity from book to book–devoured them and followed their message.  Being inspired has everything with being curious.  Start and then continue to explore where you are naturally drawn.  During my time at the workshop, I learned not just how to craft a poem, but how to craft my life.  I live and explore my creativity freely.  How?  Become fluent in trusting your natural curiosity. Flirt with it some of the time.  You will find it sporadically enticing.  Lust for it all the time? Inspiration will spill over in a self-sustaining stream of fulfillment.

Like Clock-Work/Play: Every evening at 10:30, I could be found sharing a spirit and song at the Foxwood. While at first glance those evenings might have been cast off as non-productive, they fed fuel to my engine of creativity and efficiency. Overlooking the collaboration and city-like energy of being part of a larger group of innovators is the quickest way to knock the legs out from your world-wide-web.  Sharing your thoughts, genuine interests, and quests with your natural network of influencers every day is a simple, schedule-friendly thing to do. There are a million ways to interact — some of them take less than 140 characters.

This week I challenge you to take the first step into whatever may be frightening you.  Set aside time strictly for yourself, not just what you think you can get away with. Step out of your comfort zone every day for the next 7 days straight. Try it!: Pick up the phone and contact the person who can connect you to the next big scary step along your path; apologize to someone you may have wronged and move on; take a road trip this week end and see where you end up, find a new window to look out of while you write.

Feel anxious just thinking about it?  Try using the clock-work techniques to chip away at that anxiety.  Make a regular commitment to follow not just what makes you uncomfortable, but what truly delights you. Without a doubt you will continue to discover your natural resourcefulness, passion and productivity in all that you create.

___________________________________________________________________

Deborah Connolly is a thought leader in the human development field, an experiential workshop facilitator and the founder of Creative Leadership Coaching, offering 16 years of experience to individuals, executives, and entrepreneurs. She holds an MFA from The University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Professional Coactive Coach credentials from The Coaches Training Institute (CTI), and is an active member of The International Coach Federation. She lives in New York with her husband and their 3 children. Visit Deborah at http://creativeleadershipcoach.com/

Creativity Tweets of the Week — 10/7/11

Here’s this week’s short but sweet list of links on creativity and writing I circulated this week on Twitter. And for those readers not already sick of the vagabond Mr. Bacon, he made an appearance in Maine earlier this week at Julia Monroe Martin’s blog. I guess I’m not the only one who’s done a cross-country U.S. road trip.

• “Visiting with Richard McCann,” Q&A on Hunger Mountain: I like the response of this genre-breaking VCFA instructor on what writing rule he won’t break. (Related: Are You Original?)
• 

  When Mr. Bacon is on the road, he doesn't need a bed. Those little hotel remote-control caddies are more than sufficient.

  “Don’t be Afraid to Tell Your Story,” Karla Archer, there’s beauty in the chaos: Karla’s reflection on negative feedback to her sharing. The title of her post is what my MFA instructor keeps telling me after every writing packet. (Related: Sharing Without Fear)

• “How to Write 300,000 Words in One Year,” Chris Guillebeau, Psychology Today: That’s 892 words a day. That’s not hard for me. I’m trying to learn to write 50,000 great words in a year. (The Short-Order Writer)
• “How to Get More Great Ideas in the Shower,” Laura Vanderkam, BNET: I get plenty of great ideas in the shower. I’m sure they were great; it’s hard to know, though, since I tend to forget them by the time I get to a pad and pen. (Related: 5 Steps to Subconscious-Driven Creativity)
• “How I Got My Agent: Linda Ashman with Agent Jennifer Mattson,” Q&A on Write Up My Life by Julie Hedlund: An interesting read, but note that Ms. Ashman was multi-published before signing with Ms. Mattson. (Related: Literary Agent = Book Contract?)

Now I’m going off the grid for the weekend. Seeing my essay on being unplugged published this week has inspired me to recreate the magic again. See you on the other side.

When Hard Work Pays Off

It’s live! A personal essay I wrote last month that won a contest with Unplug & Reconnect, “Forest Foursome,” has now been published. Regular blog readers will note it is a shortened rewrite of a post from late August on unplugging from the grid. Thoughtful author Jessica McCann directed me to the contest, and my family was kind enough to let me use the better part of a weekend performing what I believe is the soul of writing — revising, revising, revising.

If you like it, please feel free to leave a comment on their site!

FYI, I’m very proud of my 16-year-old visual-artist daughter. She has a photo credit on the essay.

Making Use of White Space

Do you think of “white space” as a topic important only to visual artists? One lesson I took from an all-day Poynter seminar, “Write Your Heart Out, Washington,” was that white space matters to every writer.

White space, quite simply, is the part of the page without text. Writers aren’t taught to view their prose as a visual art. Having worked in print layout in the past, I’ve labored to find the right aesthetic pairing of columns of text with visual elements. But I haven’t always structured my writing to maximize visual effect.

This isn't white space, it's my white board, where I'm mapping out a creative writing project. I appear to have some white space in the upper right.

Enter Poynter’s Roy Peter Clark, author of more than a dozen books on writing, most recently Help! for Writers: 210 Solutions to the Problems Every Writer Faces. “White space is the most powerful form of punctuation,” said the author who includes an exclamation point after the first word in the title of his latest book. “Without it, the text looks dense and impenetrable.”

“It is the paragraph that creates white space on the page,” Clark said. This is obvious, but worth reflection. In a sentence the most emphasis falls on the last word. In a paragraph, the most emphasis falls on the last word of the last paragraph, and thus is a critically important moment in the prose.” Noting the British refer to a period as a “full stop,” Clark said, “If the period is a stop sign, the paragraph break is a stoplight.”

As a journalist I was taught to keep my paragraphs nice and short, because when they’re crammed into thin columns a very long one can indeed seem impenetrable. Now that I’m studying the personal essay, I’m learning that my habit of automatically hitting the enter key every few lines is, at best, misguided. The writers in my MFA workshop, and my instructor, have been puzzled by my paragraph breaks, which at times seemed arbitrary.

That’s because they were.

Clark taught me that even newspaper journalists should make use of white space. He shared a story from Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas French, a feature story titled “Elegy for the king and queen” from the St. Petersburg Times that French has now expanded into a book, Zoo Story: Life in the Garden of Captives. If you click on the link to the “Elegy” story above, you’ll see how French made use of not just paragraph breaks. His first paragraph is a mere seven words long. The second is longer, ending on a strong tease. The third is longer still, landing on a punch line. The fourth is a bit shorter, and ends with a moving passage. The fifth? It conveys the real thrust of the story, why this chimp is worthy of a profile. It ends with the shortest sentence in the passage — the most powerful sentence — and is followed by a three-asterisk hard break.

Dialogue, of course, is one way to create white space, although Clark was quick to point out the difference between dialogue and quotes, with the latter merely a repetition of what was said, and the former a selection of what was said that advances the story. Choose your quotes wisely, he cautioned.

I was struck by the recurrence of discussion of white space in the last panel, featuring Pulitzer Prize winning columnists Kathleen Parker and Eugene Robinson, both of whom I have the pleasure of reading in my hometown newspaper, The Washington Post. Robinson said he works with white space with each column, something he learned years ago as a city desk editor. Struggling with a reporter’s story that was overly long and overly dull, Robinson realized part of the problem was that every paragraph was exactly the same length. Parker added that she tends to include at least one one-sentence paragraph in each 750-word column. She said she views a column as a musical work, and that sentence serves as a “staccato.”

(You are lucky I was able to write down anything Kathleen Parker said, transfixed as I was merely by being in her presence. I’m not usually a sucker for blondes, and I’m not suggesting any political leanings here, but I have a mad crush on that woman. So smart. So funny. So beautiful. Yes, my wife knows of my crush. Yes, she tolerates it.)

Do you take white space into consideration in your writing? How do you make use of it?