Aha! vs Just Do It! Creativity Controversy

News!

The www.UPositive.com website is up and crawling…there are some editorial changes and some additions still in process, so it won’t quite be up and running for a few more days (next week?). Please visit! Please give me feedback at Batya@UPositive.com.

The Batya Sez… shop (you can reach it through the Shop page on the website, or directly through www.cafepress.com/UPositive is working! It needs a lot of editing, and so far has only T-shirts and mousepads for half the motivational/inspirational/slightly cynical/and just plain funny sayings that will soon be there. At some point in the near future, there will be caps and mugs, magnets and coasters, bumper stickers, and more…and nine more sayings! Check it out---get yourself or someone you know a gift…and come back often! (I don’t think the Thank-You page is connected yet, so let me say Thank You now!

The first eBook….The UPositive Guide to Goal Attainment for Creative People…is waiting for its isbn number and for me to figure out which server(?) to attach it to. So…foreseeable future!

The Aha! or Just Do It! Creativity Controversy

I’ve been joining a lot of social/business networks lately, and visiting some interesting forums. This week, one of them focused on the question of creativity and moods, or style of creativity. The musician/songwriter wondered if people thought it better to create from those moments of inspiration or from sitting down and forcing the creative act. Here’s my response, with a bit more detail than I fit in the post:

I think it's (d) all of the above.

The more you use your right brain, the more open it is to receiving input, and the more available it is to you. Although that's not quite right.

The right brain is always receiving input: sensory, emotive, whole-picture (forest-type), metaphorical. The trick is opening the path from right to left brain---bringing it into awareness and available thought (left brain). It's cleaning up, calling in the road crews, and widening the corpus callosum, which is the connector between right and left brains. The more you use it, the easier its use becomes. You want to introduce your right brain to your left brain and get them talking to each other.

Personally, I sometimes write with that sudden "Aha!" inspiration. Other times, sit me down in a nice comfy chair, with pen(cil) and paper or laptop, tell me "write!" and it happens. When I was working on Barbie fashions, I could grab a piece of material and a doll, without any preconceived idea, and just start draping. Sometimes, though, I’d walk through my workday with an image of a dress floating just behind my eyes, rush home, and execute the piece---with or without a sketch.

I realize not everyone works this way, and I'm not saying it's the best or worst way to do it---the creative process and judgment don't go well together, until you get to the Edit stage.

First---figure out your own style, and encourage it. Organize your time as best as possible around those activities or triggers that already invite your Muse in. If you write best in the morning, wake up early with your inspiration open. If you design best late at night, clear a space in your home where you won’t bother others as they sleep. Maximize what already works for you.

Then, encourage your brains to talk to each other any time, everywhere. Beckon up your Muse: invent a chant, light a candle, find a talisman---create a small ritual to call him/her present. With some repetition, this works remarkably well. The Muse, after all, comes through the right---symbolic---brain.

Practice, practice, practice. Sweep and stretch the corpus callosum, let your right and left brains sit down to coffee together regularly. Train them to pay respectful attention to each other, to inform each other of their needs.

Any other thoughts on the Aha! vs Just Do It creativity controversy?

--Batya

Courage and Creativity, Part II

First, Happy St. Patrick’s Day! Let’s all do a jig in celebration. Let’s all write/dance/paint with leprechauns!

In my blog on 2/18, I raised the question, paraphrased here, What is courageous about creativity? It took me a while, but here’s my personal answer.

Creativity is the act of bringing something new forth from the materials/emotions/situations in which we live. The form might well be almost infinite, in a number of realms: language, movement, shape, color, taste, even odor (there’s a word I can’t think of this moment for perfume-makers).

The feeling of safety comes, most often, from familiarity and trust (trust building, also, from familiarity and consistency).

As creative people, we choose to move from moments of “safety,” of being in the known, the already experienced, into the unknown. Like the “Fool” in the Tarot deck, carrying the form of our creativity in our hobo-sacks, we step off the ledge of safety into the unknown. The “Fool” often represents new beginnings in a Tarot reading. It is safe to say, then, that there’s at least a bit of foolishness in the creative act.

It takes a lot of courage to play the Fool.

It takes a lot of courage to step into the unknown.

It takes a lot of courage to risk failure---and a lot of courage to risk success.

Taking on an even larger edge of the discussion…In the Western world in which we live, we come from traditions (Judaism, Islam, Christianity) in which the Deity has created the world, and the entire population of it. So ”creativity” is seen or experienced in a deep, learned level, as a God-act.

How much courage it takes to step into the realm of God-action!

Does that make us “gods”? No, I don’t think so. Does it make us more “godlike”? In a certain sense, yes.

I, personally, and absolutely, believe that creativity is a sacred act. No matter what we’re creating. (Yes, I believe there can be exceptions to this statement.)

And it takes a lot of courage to make sacred acts.

Sci-fi writers might understand this: creating whole new worlds, sometimes life-forms that didn’t exist until they put them on paper or screen. But they’re not the only ones. We all feel that sense of expanding, of our hearts opening as well as our minds as new ideas, shapes, motions, connections fill us as we create.

It takes courage to remain open to new possibilities. It takes even more courage to form those ideas and thoughts into a tangible art form---of any kind.

And so we risk---our selves, our sanity, our safety, our security---to walk the path of creativity. Without the risk, everything would stay exactly the same. No change. Stasis. Life requires change, growth. It’s part of the natural cycle. Those of us who are courageous enough to participate in the continuing creation of the world around us keep life happening. We are contributing to the future of life on the planet we live on just by being brave enough o create. We are courageous enough to keep the spark of change going, to keep the creation of the world moving forward.

Creativity is being courageous enough to open ourselves to possibility, to newness, to what-comes-next.

Even in its smallest forms of expression, creativity is a courageous act.

I’d love to read the thoughts of others on this (or other) topics about creativity. Please blog back!

--Batya