Losing Faith in Own's Own Creativity

It's possible to lose faith in one's own creative ability. The loss of faith can arise in different ways and last for different periods of time. Some artists never really believe in themselves and yet continue to create. Others lose faith after receiving negative criticism from an audience, critic, friend or family member. Others become dissatisfied with their own creations or with their low productivity or low publication rates.

The beginning of a new year is a good time to reassess one's loss of faith. Knowing that not all artists have creative self-confidence may help one carry on with creative activity.

To re-emerge after a period of stasis may be difficult, especially if that stasis derives from one not believing in one's creative ability. Simple creative exercises may be useful as first steps toward reanimating one's creative life.

A Visit from the Goon Squad and Point of View

I am reading Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad and have noticed that the novel uses point of view in an unusual way. Current wisdom says that a writer should not switch point of view in the middle of a section. That is, point of view in a third-person mode should be third-person limited omniscient rather than omniscient. Egan goes against this current wisdom. Although her text tends to be limited omniscient within sections (chapters or divisions within paragraphs), once in a while point of view shifts in the middle of a section.


I am not sure what to think about this. The book won the Pulitzer Prize, so I would categorize it as literary, but I tend to view breakers of the limited omniscient rule to be older writers (nineteenth century and earlier) or nonliterary: weak writers or writers of formula fiction.

Perhaps this rule of keeping a point of view stable is unnecessary. Furthermore, Egan's book breaks all kinds of rules (genre rules, chronology rules), so that the nonstable point of view is just one of many experiments. Arguably these point- of-view shifts are a sign of a possible negative criticism of today's standard approach to narrative point of view.

The book's shifts in time and its multiple characters can be confusing at times--people who like realist narratives would find the point of view and time shifts distracting, gimmicky and ultimately unnecessary. I still recommend that writers not shift point of view within sections. Each section can have its own point of view, though. Multiple shifts in point of view is risky, so writers who use it must be aware of the risk and perhaps be clearer in other areas (setting, time) to help readers keep track of the narrative's overall arc or theme.

It's fine to break the rules, but the rule breaking needs to have a reason; Egan's book is about memory and the fragmentation of lives, so the rule breaking makes sense.

Writing Exercise: Abstract to Concrete

Concreteness leads to specificity; in writing, concreteness usually means representation of sensory inputs.

Here is an exercise in concreteness.  Take an abstract sentence and increase its concreteness word by word. Do this in several stages, so that the next sentence is more concrete than the first.

1. The structure had negative qualities.

2. The building was inadequate.

3. The house was too small.

4. The bungalow had too few rooms.

5. The white bungalow had only four rooms.

6. The white square house next door had four rooms--a kitchen, a bathroom, a sitting room and a bedroom; the basement was a dugout for the furnace and a small storage room. Six people shared these rooms.

7. The Callaghans lived in a dingy white one-level house next to the abandoned gas station at the end of our block. The house had four small square rooms--a kitchen, a bathroom, a sitting room and a bedroom; the basement was a mere dugout for the furnace and a small storage room. Mr. and Mrs. Callaghan slept in the bedroom with the two youngest children, while my friend Peter shared the flowery-print sofa bed in the sitting room with his older brother Matthew. Peter claimed that everyone except himself and his little sisters snored; even the Alsatian and the tabby, who slept at the foot of his and his brother's bed, snored.


Concreteness leads to more words and to more personality.

Creativity in One's Life

Creativity means thinking of new ways to achieve a goal or communicate an idea. In that sense, creativity is a key part of everyone's life. This definition of creativity is broad, but its broadness arises from the centrality of creativity in people's lives.

Artists depend on creativity for a large portion of their productive output--the word creativity has the word "create" as its root, after all, which just means "to give birth to."

Not all births are big births, I would say. An artist has to think seriously about creating, though at times self-consciousness can be prohibitive. In that sense, thinking of creativity as normative rather than abnormal is both realistic (true) and useful (conducive to production).

Art may at times have a bad reputation, but creativity rarely does. Some people resist the idea of experimental creativity--extreme newness that threatens tradition. In the Western world after Romanticism, extreme newness became associated with all artistic creation. I am in favour of experimentalism--I like the avant-garde--but not everyone needs to go that way to agree with the value of creativity.

Genre

Genre theory informed my dissertation on nineteenth-century American literature (civil war literature to be precise). The course I am teaching on academic writing has a textbook that uses genre theory to explain how to write for post-secondary institutions. I will say more in future. This is a warm-up of sorts to introduce the idea of genre, which I am adding to my repertoire of subjects for this blog.

Freewriting

Freewriting is a way to record one's thoughts as they occur. Rather than letting one's inner editor interfere with one's writing (something writers often do), freewriting disallows editorial intervention in oneself.

This is a form of stream-of-consciousness writing. Physician, psychologist and philosopher William James (brother of, guess who, Henry James), invented the term "stream of consciousness." A famous bout of stream-of-consciousness writing ends James Joyce's Ulysses. Note, though, that literary stream-of-consciousness writing may actually be edited.

For my purposes here, free writing is not literary stream of consciousness. It is actual stream-of-consciousness writing (as close as one can come to recording one's own thoughts in words, which I realize is an imperfect art).

I recommend using a pen and paper rather than a keyboard, for keyboards make deleting text tempting, and frequent typos will make one's inner editor wake up screaming from its slumber. In freewriting, one cannot go back and change anything: spelling errors, weird words, embarrassing thoughts, nonstandard grammar, improper punctuation must all remain. Just keep writing, without stopping or going back to change things, for at least 15 minutes.

Pure freewriting has no topic at all. The results can be weird and disturbing, but pure writing is useful for unblocking yourself or working on a problem that you are not sure you have or when you are not sure what the problem is.

Focussed freewriting has a topic. Focussed freewriting is beneficial for working on specific ideas. Unlike pure writing, focussed freewriting could be clear enough for someone else to read, but again, without fussing about grammar or even logic.

The word mimesis (imitation, representation) has remained in currency mostly due to Aristotle. He and Plato are influential early philosophers of art in the Western tradition. They did not always have good things to say about representation (by "they" I really mean "Plato''); nonetheless, their ideas still circulate. I am not an expert in either of them. Read them for yourself or look at secondary sources about them.

Aristotle's significant discussion of art is in his Poetics. For Aristotle (and people of the classical Greek period), verse (poetry) was the mode for artistic composition, so that in Poetics Aristotle also discusses drama (which the Greeks wrote in verse). Aristotle made famous the idea of catharsis, the idea that representation has a positive psychological effect on the individual viewer of drama, purging negative energies, so to speak, from the audience, and creating beneficial energies and thus doing an overall cultural good. Aristotle speaks of catharsis in tragedy (a type of drama, remember, not just "sad events"), but people today use the term in a more general sense, even applying it to gaming.

Plato also discusses mimesis, though Aristotle tends to be more systematic than his teacher Plato, who framed his philosophical views in the form of discussions (actual or not) between Plato's teacher Socrates and Socrates's followers.  Plato most famously discusses mimesis in The Republic. Plato did not think mimesis was a positive force; instead, he thought mimesis, as a copy of the real, was a degradation of the real, itself a degradation of the ideal, and Plato took the ideal very seriously. In The Republic (Book X) Plato recommends (with the slightest of regrets) that all poets be banished from the polity--that's how seriously he took the ideal.

Aristotle is more of the artist's philosopher than Plato. Still, some people who do not like art will use an argument similar to Plato's. The idea, for example, that fiction is lies and nonfiction is truth (or "real") is basically Plato's argument.  Know the enemy.

Links: Plato's Republic; Aristotle's Poetics.