Promotion

My writing group has self-published a collection of short pieces, Between the Shelves, as a fundraiser for Edmonton Public Library. The book is available for sale on Amazon.com. One of the editors, Hal Friesen, has conducted interviews with the contributors, and since I am very much dried up these days in terms of posts about creativity, these interviews serve well as substitutes.


I will link to these interviews one at a time. First up is an interview with Brian Clark.

PS: My own piece in the anthology is a short story called "Melvil Dui Conquers All."

PPS: I won an award for my story "Royal Visit," published in Prairie Journal of Canadian Literature. It won the silver award for fiction for the 2015 Alberta Magazine Publishers Association Showcase Awards.

Creativity and Mindfulness

Mindfulness is a tenet adopted from Buddhism. It is used not just in that philosophical program but also in treatment of mental health problems such as anxiety and depression.

In terms of creativity, mindfulness is a good state of mind to engage in. Mindfulness is the belief that people should pay attention to the moment in order to prevent thoughts of the past and fears about the future from crowding in and inhibiting peace and orderly decision-making.

In a state of mindfulness, one can pay attention to one's thoughts seriously enough to capture creative ideas that arise. In the rush of daily routine or in the obsessiveness over past suffering and future pain, a creative thought can sometimes be washed out by the intense emotions of fear and sadness.  So says Richard W. Sears in his book Mindfulness.

I would argue as well that creativity depends on being aware of the moment as a space of meaningful consciousness. To be creative, one must be able to put the present in the context of the past and the future. The reverse--making the past and the future more important than the present--is non-creative. One creates in the present, though not by ignoring the past and future, either. Instead, mindfulness argues that the present has meaning because of its different status from the past and the future. People who ignore the present are also denying the truth of the past and not preparing fully for the onset of the future. In the end, the present is where newness arises, and creativity is a manifestation of newness.

Creativity and Mind: Some Readings

Creativity has implications for people who study the human mind. I found three links from people and organizations who study mind-related sciences and creativity.

For photographer and psychologist Arthur Shimamura, creativity is understandable in terms of the formula I-SKE, which acknowledges the interrelationship between the artist's intention and the audience's sensation, knowledge and emotion.

Scott Barry Kaufman discusses research which suggests that creative people think in flat associations rather than hierarchical associations.

The American Psychological Association accepts artists and teachers of art as affiliate members of its division The Society for the Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts. As Erika Packard explains, "psychology has many applications in the arts--from music to visual and performing arts--as well as to the study of creativity."

An Internet image search on the words "creativity" and "mind" brings up all kinds of trippy images. [By Rp3082 (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons]

Woolf Knew All About the Agony of Creativity

The Young Woolf (Wikimedia Commons)

Virginia Woolf was prolific not because she could sidestep the anguish of writing but because she did so much writing that she experienced it.

In her pseudobiography Orlando, Woolf describes what the title character inevitably experiences once he decides to be a writer:

Anyone moderately familiar with the rigours of composition will not need to be told the story in detail; how he wrote and it seemed good; read and it seemed vile; corrected and tore up; cut out; put in; was in ecstasy; in despair; had his good nights and bad mornings; snatched at ideas and lost them; saw his book plain before him and it vanished; acted his people's parts as he ate; mouthed them as he walked; now cried; now laughed; vacillated between this style and that; now preferred the heroic and the pompous; next the plain and simple; now the vales of Tempe; then the fields of Kent or Cornwall; and could not decide whether he was the divinest genius or the greatest fool in the world.

Drama to Prose Fiction: Dialogue Transformations

I like the idea of applying good advice from one genre to another genre. Studying Plays by Mick Wallis and Simon Shepherd aims to help people understand how to read plays. The chapter on dialogue has a subsection on conversational maxims as devised by H.P. Grice. The theory is that people are supposed to follow a set of rules when they are in conversation so that the speakers seem co-operative. When someone disobeys one of these rules, that agreement to co-operate is broken.

The co-operative maxims, words verbatim from pages 58 and 59 of the third edition, are as follows:

(1) quantity: give the right amount of information (neither too much nor too little)
(2) quality: try to be truthful
(3) relation: say something pertinent (don't go off on a tangent)
(4) manner: don't be long-winded and be clear (avoid prolixity, ambiguity and obscurity)
(5) respect:: give your interlocutor their due (give them the respect they deserve)

Page 59 lists the ways people break these maxims:

(1) quietly violate a maxim e.g. deceive
(2) opt out of the co-operative principle e.g. claim a right to silence
(3) avoid a clash by breaking one maxim e.g. tell a lie to be kind
(4) brazenly flout a maxim e.g. when the customs officer asks if you have anything to declare, reply "Nothing but my genius"

In drama, a violation of a maxim can reveal the relationship between the speakers or reveal ironies related to plot, among many other things.

I decided I would do an exercise that Wallis and Shepherd describe (59). I took a piece of dialogue from the novel I am working on and changed it so that one of the characters broke a maxim in a specific way. Once that maxim gets broken, the other character's responses must change too. Even if a character is already breaking a maxim in the original, I have to make the characters break another one.

Here is the original dialogue. Burghie is helping Gilda find Gilda's brother Pete, Burghie's childhood friend, whom Gilda thinks is planning to leave town. At this point in the story, Burghie and Gilda have just found out that Pete has left. "He has a crush on Gilda and has decided to tell Gilda how he feels about her. Burghie is speaking to Gilda while sitting on his bike. The story is from her point of view.

    “What did you want to tell me?” Gilda said. “Is it about Pete?”

     “No.”

     “What, then?”

     “I just wanted you to know, Gilda,” Burghie said, “that this thing with Pete has been fun. I mean, I don’t think it’s fun looking for someone who has disappeared. But it’s been good to get back in touch. I mean that it’s been fun hanging out with you and working on this stuff. It’s like old times.”

     Gilda nodded. “Sure. I think so too.”

     He nodded back. “I’m glad you think so too.”

     “You’re easy to worth with.”

     He hesitated, then said, “So are you.” 

(1) Quietly violate a maxim (relation)

     "What did you want to tell me?" Gilda said. "Is it about Pete?"
     "No."
     "What, then?"
     Burghie opened his mouth, then shut it with a click. "Do you think this neighbourhood is going downhill?"
     Gilda frowned. "Um, no. I mean, it never was the best neighbourhood, but it's not any worse that it always was. Why do you ask?"
     "I was just thinking of starting my own restaurant, maybe around here."
     "I don't know," Gilda said. She couldn't believe that he'd asked her to come here, in person, to talk to her about the food industry. "I don't know anything about restaurants. I'm the wrong person to ask. I mean, don't you work in a restaurant in this neighbourhood?"
     Burghie flinched. "Yes, of course you're right."

(2) Brazenly flout a maxim (quality)

     "What did you want to tell me?" Gilda said. "Is it about Pete?"
     "No."
    "What, then?"
    "I just wanted you to know, Gilda, that this thing with Pete has been fun. I mean, I don't think it’s fun looking for someone who has disappeared. But it’s been good to get back in touch. I mean that it’s been  fun hanging out with you and working on this stuff. It’s like old times.”
     "Sure it's been fun, Pete. Sitting around wondering when or where my sibling is, wondering if he's dead. Risking getting into trouble at work by making phone calls to try to track him down. Spending all my free time calling people I wouldn't normally talk to."
     Burghie flinched. It reminded her of a dog being hit across the head with stick. She had gone too far with him.She'd forgotten. He was not like her that way. Damn her cynical mouth. "Not that I'm saying you're a bad guy or anything."
     He was looking down at his pedals, but under his eyebrows she could still see his eyes glistening. "Of course that's not what I meant," he said. When he lifted his head again, his eyes hardened. "I'm not a monster."
     "I know that. You know that I know that."
     "Why say that, then, Gilda?
    

Another episode of "General to Specific": A Writing Exercise; Also, Abstract to Concrete

First Go-Round: WhatEvs. In writing, specificity allows writing to reflect the uniqueness of things and ideas in the world. Small variations from a type will change a caricature or cliche into a character or inventive phrase (and thus a new idea). There is something to be said for simplicity, of course; but if the aim is not to go for simplicity, then specificity is a good tool.

This exercise is also a way to generate ideas quickly. Start with one sentence that is general or abstract (or both). Rewrite the sentence and add a level of specificity or concreteness (or both).


Rewrite that sentence and increase the specificity or concreteness again. Carry on until you can't take it anymore, or, better yet, until you think you have a tiny narrative worth expanding on.

1. Things are here.
2. Boxes arrive at the building.
3. Square cardboard cases trickled in to the factory.
4. Dishwashers in their cardboard boxes trickled in at a rate of two a day to the factory.
5. The recalled dishwashers, some of them re-packed in their original boxes by their anal, angry owners, trickled in at a rate of two a day to the factory in Anaheim.

 
Who knew that I had an interest in  dishwashers and in Anaheim? But apparently so.

***

Second Go-Round: General to Specific. I am going to do this exercise again, except this time I am going to try to distinguish between General to Specific and Abstract to Concrete. "General" means "applicable to many things or circumstances." "Specific" means "applicable to a small subset of things or circumstances."

"Abstract" is not the same as general, not really. "Abstract" means"related to the nonmaterial world, to ideas or concepts." "Concrete" means "related to the material world, such as what can be understood by the five senses." (ESP not included.) That is, it's possible to have an abstraction that is general or specific, or to have a generality that is abstract or concrete.

I am starting with the same sentence as above, but I will force myself to go from general to specific and stave off any urges to think about abstraction or concreteness. This will be hard to do. My model sentence is suitably bland to have it both ways in the general-specific or abstract-concrete spectrums.  I will also force myself to keep as closely as possible to my silly dishwashers and Anaheim, though I won't kill myself if the sentences deviate.

1. Things are here.
2.  Elements exist in this region.
3. Non-continguous monads co-exist in this field.
4. Non-continguous monads of the phenomenal world form the content of this discursive field.
5. Discrete words about human experience constitute the vocabulary of legal discourse.

This was difficult. I felt like I was making things up, and I couldn't really follow my dishwasher-Anaheim model. But I did avoid having sentences that deal with the sensory world, more or less.

Third Go-Round: Abstract to Concrete.

1. Things are here.
2.  Objects exist nearby.
3. Boxes sit one metre away.
4. Cardboard boxes are stored one metre away from Bindi.
5. Cardboard dishwasher boxes hunker down one metre away from Bindi's office in the Anaheim factory.

PS: I kind of did this exercise in a different post.

Five Statements about Creativity

Mozart knew a thing or two about creativity. (Wikimedia Commons)

• "[C]reativeness is the lucky readiness to feel, to sense, to see an opportunity--to discover and to invent." Josef Albers, quoted in Black Mountain by Martin Duberman.

• "For when you come to think of it, the only way to love a person is not, as the stereotyped Christian notion is, to coddle them and bring them soup when they are sick, but by listening to them and seeing and believing in the god, in the poet, in them." Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write.

• "When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheer--say traveling in a carriage, or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep; it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence and how they come I know not; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me, I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way it occurs to me how I may turn this or that morsel to account so as to make a good dish of it, that is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of the various instruments." Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, quoted in Brenda Ueland's If You Want to Write.

• "First thoughts have tremendous energy. It is the way the mind first flashes on something. The internal censor usually squelches them, so we live in the realm of second and third thoughts, thoughts on thought, twice and three times removed from the direct connection of the first fresh flash." Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones.

• "Fundamental to any art form is the image, whether it be the physical image as created by the dancer and choreographer, the musical image of the composer and musician, the visual image of the plastic artist of the verbal image, often metaphorical, of the writer and poet....While, however, it may be quite easy to see the role of image as it relates to the visual artist, it may be less easy to do so with respect to the writer. The word 'image' is being used here to convey what can only be described as the irreducible essence--the i-mage--of creative writing; it can be likened to the DNA molecules at the heart of all life. The process of giving tangible form to this i-mage may be called i-maging, or the i-magination. Use of unconventional orthography, 'i-mage' in this instance, does not only represent the increasingly conventional deconstruction of certain words, but draws on the Rastafarian practice of privileging the 'I' in many words.'I-mage' rather than 'image' is, in fact, a closer approximation of the concept under discussion....In her attempt to translate the i-mage into meaning and non-meaning, the writer has access to a variety of verbal techniques and methods--comparison, simile, metaphor, metonymy, symbol, rhyme, allegory, fable, myth--all of which aid her in this process. Whatever the name given to the technique or form, the function remains the same---that of enabling the artist to translate the i-mage into meaningful language for her audience." M. NourbeSe Philip, "The Absence of Writing or How I Almost Became a Spy."