G. Steve Journal

Teach Yourself

Came across some excerpts of William Faulkner's take on art, life and writing that are clearly true for any creative endeavor:

Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity.

Dogma

Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview - nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty.

                                                                                  ––  Stephen Jay Gould

Messy Inspiration

There's a fascinating piece in the NY TIMES about the role our surroundings may exert on our creative efforts -- namely that the creative process may be stimulated by a cluttered, messy environment.

Test subjects were placed in either a neat and organized space, or a cluttered, disorganized space and then asked to generate creative ideas --- the results?

When we analyzed the responses, we found that the subjects in both types of rooms came up with about the same number of ideas, which meant they put about the same effort into the task. Nonetheless, the messy room subjects were more creative, as we expected. Not only were their ideas 28 percent more creative on average, but when we analyzed the ideas that judges scored as “highly creative,” we found a remarkable boost from being in the messy room — these subjects came up with almost five times the number of highly creative responses as did their tidy-room counterparts.

While cleaning up certainly has its benefits, clean spaces might be too conventional to let inspiration flow.

Fluid Questioning

Musician Andrew Bird's behind-the-scenes look at his creative process (from an article in the NY TIMES)

It’s kind of a racket. When I step onstage I feel myself adopting that comedian’s posture, a shrug of the shoulders that says, “I don’t know, folks. We’re all just puzzling through it together. I’m not going to pretend to have the answers but here’s what I’ve seen."

To emerge from creative hibernation with my perfect oeuvre and worldview fully realized feels stifling and boring. And while I’m anything but an exhibitionist I have this perverse impulse to introduce half-written songs and invite the trouble that it might bring. Maybe I’m saying to my former teachers, “Look, by your standards I’m failing, but it feels great.” But mostly it’s that I just prefer a fluid questioning present to a fixed past.