this is a book recommended to me by John Clapp. i thought that parakkum would appreciate it as well, as we tend to talk about these things a lot.
from The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life by Twyla Tharp:
"Being creative is not a once-in-a-while sort of thing. Being creative is an everyday thing, a job with its own routines. That's why writer, for example, like to establish a routine for themselves. The most productive ones get started early in the morning when the phone aren't ringing and their minds are rested and not yet polluted by other people's words. They might set a goal--1500 words or stay at their desk until noon--but the real secret is that they do this every day. They do not waver. After a while it becomes a habit.
This is no different for any creative individual whether it's a painter finding his way to the easel or a medical researcher returning to the laboratory. The routine is as much a part of the creative process as the lightning bolt of inspiration (perhaps more). And it is avaiable to everyone. If creativity is a habit, then the best creativity is a result of good work habits. They are the nuts and bolts of dreaming."
i will have more quotes in the extended as i get along in the book.
pg 6:
The real secret is that they do this every day. In other words, they are disciplined. Over time, as the daily routines become second nature, discipline morphs into habit.
pg 7:
Creativity is a habit, and the best creativity is a result of good work habits.
pg 7:
There are no "natural" geniuses.
pg 8:
It's a nice image for selling tickets to movies, but whether or not God has kissed your brow, you still have to work. Without learning and preparation, you won't know how to harness the power of that kiss.
pg 8:
"People err who think my art comes easily to me. I assure you, dear friend, nobody has devoted so much time and thoughts to composition as I. There is not a famous master whose music I have not industriously studied through many times." --Mozart to a friend
pg 9:
In order to be creative you have to know how to be creative.
pg 9:
It takes skill to bring something you've imagined into the world: to use words to create believable lives, to select the colors and textures of paint to represent a haystack at sunset, to combine ingredients to make a flavourful dish. No one is born with that skill. It is developed through exercise, through repetition, through a blend of learning and reflection that's both paintstaking and rewarding. And it takes time.
pg 9:
If art is the bridge between what you see in your mind and what the world sees, then skill is how you build that bridge.
pg 10:
Everything that happens in my day is a transaction between the external world and my internal world. Everything is raw material. Everything is relevant. Everything is usable. Everything feeds into my creativity. But without proper preparation, I cannot see it, retain it, and use it. Without the time and effort invested in getting ready to create, you can be hit by the thunderbolts and it'll just leave you stunned.
pg 15:
It's vital to establish some rituals--automatic but decisive patterns of behavior--at the beginning of the creative process. When you are most at peril of turning back, chickening out, giving up, or going the wrong way.
pg 17:
But repeating the routine each day in the studio induced some click that got him started.
He putters about, feeling connected to nature, and this gets him going.
pg 18:
By making the srat of the sequence automatic, they replace doubt and fear with comfort and routine.
pg 20:
This, more than anything else is what rituals of preparation give us: They arm us with confidence and self-reliance.
pg 22:
Someone has done it before? Honey, it's all been done before. Nothing's really original. Not Homer or Shakespeare and certainly not you. Get over yourself.
pg 23:
Once executed, the diea will never be as good as it is in my mind? Toughen up. Leon Battista Alberti, a 15th century architectural theorist, said, "Errors accumulate in the sketch and in the compound, in the model." But better an impefect done in Florence than cathedrals in the clouds.
pg 24:
He has a sophisticated explanation for why his cleaning ritual works, involving neural pathways and emotions and identity and self-worth. The job of a writer, he says, is simple: you write what's in your head. But it becomes an emotional challenge when you can't corral the words into coherent thoughts. Suddenly you doubt yourself. As you wallow in self-doubt, you turn away from the computer screen and see dirt that you hadn't noticed before (certainly not when the work was going well and you didn't need to turn away from the screen); the dirt becomes inextricably linked with self-doubt, and wiping away the grime cathartically wipes away the self-doubt. The emotional crisis is solved. Let the writing begin.
Personally, I think the key to his cleaning ritual is the fact that he gets up and moves. Movement stimulates our brains in ways we don't appreciate. But I giving some credence to his cute metaphorical link between dirt and doubt. It might be mumbo jumbo, but mystery and mumbo jumbo are a big part of ritual, too. And if it works, why question it.
pg 26:
I list the biggest distractions in my life and make a pact with myself to do without them for a week. Here are some perrenially tempting distractions that I cut out: Movies, Multitasking, Numbers, Background Music.... It's a simple equation: subtracting your dependence on some of the things you take for granted increases your independence. It's liberating, forcing you to rely on your own ability rather than you customary crutches.
pg 30:
#1: Pick your pencil.
What is your pencil? What is the one tool that feeds your creativity and is so essential that without it you feel naked and unprepared?
A Manhattan writer I know never leaves his apartemtn without reminding himself to "come back with a face." Whether he's walking down the street or sitting on a park bench or riding the subway or standing on a checkout line, he looks for a compelling face and works up a rich description of it in his mind. When he has a moment, he writes it all down in his notebook. Not only does the exercise warm up his descriptive powers, but studying the crags, lines and bumps of a stranger's face forces him to imagine that individual's life. Sometimes, if he's lucky, the writer attaches a complete biography to the face and then a name, and then a narrative. Before he knows it, he has the ingredients for a full-fledged story.
I know cartoonists who always carry pen and pad to sketch what they see, photographers who always have a camera in their pockets, composers who carry Dictaphonse to capture a snatch of vagabond melody that pops into their heads. They are always prepared.
Pick your "pencil" and don't leave home without it.
pg 30:
#2: Build up your tolerance for solitude.
Alone is a fact, a condition where no one else is around. Lonely is how you feel about that. Think of five things that you like to do all by yourself. It could be a hot bath, a walk up a favorite hill, that quiet moment of sinking into a chair with coffee when the kids have left for school. Refer back to the list whenever the aloneness of the creative process seems too much for you. The pleasant memories will remind you that alone and lonely are not the same thing.
Solitude is an unavoidable part of creativity. Self-reliance is a happy by-product.
pg 31:
#3: Face your fears.
Putting a name to your fears helps cut them down to size.
I'm not sure how to do it: A problem, obviously, but we're not talking about constructing the Brooklyn Bridge. If you try and it doesn't work, you'll try a different way next time. Doing is better than not doing, and if you do something badly you'll learn to do it better.
pg 39:
Chandler kept lists of observed details from his life and from the people he knew: a necktie file, a shirt file, a list of overheard slang expressions, as well as character names, titles, and one-liners he intended to use sometime in the future. He wrote on half-sheets of paper, just twelve to fifteen lines per page, with a self-imposed quota that each sheet must contain what he called "a little bit of magic." The "life" in his stories was in the details, whether his hero Marlowe was idling in his office or in the middle of a brutal confrontation. No longer distance musings on the state of the world. No middle-distance group shots. Just a steady streem of details, piling one on top of the other, until a character or scene takes shape and a vivid picture emerges. Up close was Chandler's focal length. If some people like to wander through an art museum standing back from the paintings, taking in the effect the artist was trying to achieve whild others need a closer look because they're interested in the details, then Chandler was the kind of musuem-goer who pressed his nose up to the canvas to see how the artists applied his strokes. Obviously, all of us look at paintings from each of these vantage points, but we focus best at some specific spot along the spectrum.
pg 40:
We want out artists to take the mundance materials of our lives, run it through their imaginations, and surprise us. If you are by nature a loner, a crusader, an outsider, a jester, a romantic, a melancholic, or any of a dozen personalities, that quality will shine through your work.
pg 47:
The better you know yourself, the more you will know when you are playing to your strengths and when you are sticking your neck out. Venturing out of your comfort zone may be dangerous, yet you do it anyway because our ability to grow is directly proportional to an ability to entertain the uncomfortable.
pg 47:
Another thing about knowing who you are is that you know what you should not be doing, which can save you a lot of heartaches and false starts if you catch it early on.
pg 48:
I wonder how many people get sidetracked from their true calling by the fact that they have talent to excelt at more than one artistic medium. This is a curse rather than a blessing. If you have only one option, you can't make a wrong choice. If you have two options, you have a fifty percent chance of being wrong.
pg 51:
#6: Pick a new name.
The ancient masters of Jpanese art were allowed to change their name once in their lifetime. They had to be very selective about the moment in their career when they did so. They would stick with their given name until they felt they had become the artist they aspired to be; at that point, they were allowed to change their name. For the rest of their life, they could work under the new name at the height of their powers. The name change was a sign of artistic maturity.
"Mozart's constant alterations of his name are his way of experimenting with different identities," wrote Mozart biographer Maynard Solomon, "trying to tune them to his satisfaction."
Done wisely and well, a change of name can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. As Epstein points out, "Eric Blair, Cicily Fairfield, and Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski became, respectively, George Orwell, Rebecca West, and Joseph Conrad--the first to shuck off the social class into which he was born, the second to name herself after a feminist heroine in Ibsen, the last to simplify his name for an English audience. Yet how right those names now seem, how completely their owners have taken possession of them!"
pg 55:
What is the dumbest idea? Thinking I could have it all.
What made it stupid? It's built-in futility, given how I work. To lead a creative life, you have to sacrifice. "Sacrifice" and "Having it all" do not go together. I set out to have a family, have a career, be a dancer, and support myself all at once, and it was overwhelming. I had to learn the hard way that you can't have it all, you have to make some sacrifices, and there is no way you're going to fulfill all the roles you imagine. We thought as women in the sixties and seventies, that we could change everything and remake all the rules. Some things changed, and some things pushed back. What makes it stupid is that I set up a way of working that was in directly conflict with my personal ambition. Something had to give.
pg 59:
What is your idea of mastery? Having the experience to experience to know what you want to do, the vision to see how to do it, the courage to work with what you're given and the skill to execute that first impulse--all so you can take bigger chances.
pg 64:
Creativity is more about taking the facts, fictions and feelings we store away and finding new ways to connect them. What we're talking about here is metaphor. Metaphor is the lifeblood of all art; if it is not art itself. Metaphor is our vocabular for connecting what we're experiencing now with what we have experienced before. It's not only how we express what we remember, it's how we interpret it--for ourselves and others.
pg 64:
Metaphor, as Cynthia Ozick writes, "transforms the strange into the familiar. This is the rule even of the simplest metaphor--Homer's wine-dark sea, for example. If you know wine, says the image, you will know the sea."
If all art is metaphor, then all art begins with memory. The ancient Greeks knew this: In their original myths they cite Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, as the mother of the Nine Muses.
pg 65-73:
Types of Memory...
---Muscle memory---
Muscle memory has its uses in the creative process, perhaps more for acquiring skill than for developing inspiration. But it's useful nevertheless.
It's no different from a young person sitting with a drawing pad in a museum copying a great artist. Skill gets imprinted through the action.
If there's a lesson here it's get busy copying. That's not a popular notion today, not when we are all instructed to find our own way, admonished to be original and fine our own voice at all costs! But it's sound advice. Traveling the paths of greatness, even in someone else's footprints, is a vital means to acquiring skill.
---Virtual Memory---
---Sensual Memory---
---Institutional Memory---
---Ancient Memory---
Once you realize the power of memory, you begin to see how much is at your disposal in previously underappreciated places. The trick is figuring out how to tap into it. You can’t always wait for a photo of an ancient pot to appear in the Science section of the New York Times and jolt you into action. Sometimes you have to be proactive about mining the veins of memory within you.
In a sense, I was apprenticing myself to these great women, much as Proust had to Ruskin and Chandler to Hemingway. A young friend of mine recently described an internship he was about to begin. He called the process “shadowing,” following around a mentor and learning from him. That’s what I was doing in the archives, shadowing my predecessors. This is how you earn your ancestry.
pg 74:
The Nine Muses:
Calliope--Epic poetry
Clio--History
Erato--Love poetry and lyric poetry
Euterpe--Music
Melpomene--Tragedy
Polyhymnia--Sacred song
Terpsichore--Dance and choral song
Thalia--Comedy
Urania--Astronomy
pg 77:
#9: Mining for Memory in a Photograph
This photo reminds me of how every young person grows up with an overwhelming sense of possibility, and how life, in some ways, is just a series of incidents in which that possibility is either enlarged or smacked out of you. How you adapt is your choice. In that sense, this photo is Darwinian: It’s the origin of species. And I’m the species.
pg 85:
I believe in starting each project with a stated goal. Sometimes the goal is nothing more than a personal mantra such as “keep it simple” or “something perfect” or “economy” to remind me of what I was thinking at the beginning if and when I lose my way. I write it down on a slip of paper and it’s the first thing that goes into the box.
pg 86:
No matter what system you use, I recommend having a goal and putting it in writing. I read once that people who write down their New Year’s resolutions have a greater chance of achieving them than people who don’t. This is the sort of factoid that is probably apocryphal but, like many urban legends, sounds as though it should be true.
pg 87:
…we could have invented something equivalent for the scene, but real details created authenticity.
pg 88:
The box is not a substitute for creating. The box doesn’t compose or write a poem or create a dance step. The box is the raw index of your preparation. It is the repository of your creative potential, but it is not that potential realized.
pg 89:
…the quality of my creative output is also a function of how diligent and clever I’ve been in filling up my boxes.
pg 90:
I find the box is most useful at three critical stages: when you’re getting going, when you’re lost, and after you’ve finished (that’s when you can look back and see the directions you didn’t take, the ideas that intrigued you but didn't fit this time around and might be the start of your next box).
pg 94:
You can’t just dance or paint or write or sculpt. Those are just verbs. You need a tangible idea to get you going. The idea, however minuscule, is what turns the verb into a noun—paint into a painting, sculpt into a sculpture, write into writing, dance into a dance.
pg 95:
Scratching can look like borrowing or appropriating, but it’s an essential part of creativity. It’s primal, and very private. It’s a way of saying to the gods, “Oh, don’t mind me, I’ll just wander around in these back hallways…” and then grabbing that piece of fire and running like hell.
pg 97:
The difference between good and bad ideas is a lot like E. M. Forster’s distinction between narrative and plot. Plot is “The queen died; the king died.” Narrative is “The queen died; the king died of a broken heart.”
pg 97:
You (and by “you” I mean both you and me, dear reader) don’t scratch for big ideas. The come upon you mysteriously, unbidden, sometimes unwelcome (especially when they become impossible to execute). There is always an ulterior motive behind a big idea, usually that you want to catch people’s attention, or make a pile of money, or both. Big ideas are self-contained and self-defining projects. I get them once or twice a year whenever I start to fret about the impermanence of my craft and want to make something enduring. I want people to remember I was here.
pg 98:
They are big ideas because they take up a lot of space in my mind, and if I commit to them, they will be all-consuming. They are big ideas because, in and of themselves, they are meaningless, little more than a goal or a dream; they cease to exist if I fail to follow up on them with the steady string of small ideas that make each a reality.
That is why you scratch for little ideas. Without the little ideas, there are no big ideas.
Scratching is what you do when you can’t wait for the thunderbolt to hit you. As Freud said, “When inspiration does not come to me, I go halfway to meet it”…If you go halfway, you double your chances of getting a toehold on an idea.
Remember this when you’re struggling for a big idea. You’re much better off scratching for a small one.
pg 99:
When you’re in scratching mode, the tiniest microcell of an idea will get you going.
pg 99:
When I’m scratching I’m improvising. Like a jazz musician jamming for an hour to find a few interesting notes, a choreographer looks for interesting movement. I didn’t start out knowing this; it came to me over time, as I realized that I would never get to the essential core of movement and dance through a cerebral process. I could prepare, order, organize, structure, and edit my creativity in my head, but I couldn’t think my way into a dance. To generate ideas, I had to move. It’s the same if you’re a painter: You can’t imagine the work, you can only generate ideas when you put pencil to paper, brush to canvas—when you actually do something physical.
pg 100:
Here’s how I learned to improvise: I played some music in the studio and I started to move. It sounds obvious, but I wonder how many people, whatever their medium, appreciate the gift of improvisation. It’s your one opportunity in life to be completely free, with no responsibilities and no consequences. You don’t have to be good or great or even interesting. It’s you alone, with no one watching or judging. If anything comes of it, you decide whether the world gets to see it. In essence, you are giving yourself permission to daydream during working hours….There’s no tollbooth between my impulse and my action. I just do it and I consider the results, the consequences, and the truth (if any) later in repose. That’s an incredible place to be. If you’re privileged enough to be able to do that for forty-five minutes a few days a week, you have been given something wonderful.
pg 101:
The Harvard psychologist Stephen Kosslyn says that ideas can be acted upon in four ways. First, you must generate the idea, usually from memory or experience or activity. Then you have to retain it—that is, hold it steady in your mind and keep it from disappearing. Then you have to inspect it—study it and make inferences about it. Finally, you have to be able to transform it—alter it in some way to suit your higher purposes.
pg 101-103:
Some ways to scratch for ideas:
---Reading---
It doesn’t matter if it’s a book, magazine, newspaper, billboard, instruction manual, or cereal box—reading generates ideas, because you’re literally filling your head with ideas and letting your imagination filter them for something useful. If I stopped reading, I’d stop thinking. It’s that simple.
---Everyday Conversation---
For a certain type of artist, particularly storytellers and songwriters, every day conversation is scratching.
---People’s Handiwork---
You can scratch for ideas by enjoying other people’s handiwork, whether it’s in a museum or a theater or an exhibition.
---Mentors and Heroes---
You can also scratch in the footsteps of your mentors and heroes, using their paradigms as a starting point for ideas….Scratching among the paradigms is a dangerous habit if it turns you into an imitator rather than a creator.
---Nature---
Reading, conversation, environment, culture, heroes, mentors, nature—all are lottery tickets for creativity. Scratch away at them and you’ll find out how big a prize you’ve won.
pg 103:
Genius is the act of perceiving similarity among disparate things. –Henry James.