Creativity is not only for the young…

Interesting article here by Malcom Gladwell on the New Yorker’s website.

We generally think that precocity and genius go together. In fact–or so we think–genius appears at a very young age. The old saw that states “if you don’t ‘make it’ by age thirty-five that you never will” is almost universally accepted. But it’s not always true.

Thank God for that.

I find it even more interesting younger people and older people approach the creative process differently: The young favor a conceptual approach whereas older creatives favor an experimental approach.

For those of us advancing in years, this is good news. But it comes at a price. Gladwell quotes University of Chicago economist David Galenson in the middle of a discussion about Picasso and Cézanne:

The imprecision of their goals [by using an experimental approach] means that these artists rarely feel they have succeeded, and their careers are consequently often dominated by the pursuit of a single objective. These artists repeat themselves, painting the same subject many times, and gradually changing its treatment in an experimental process of trial and error. Each work leads to the next, and none is generally privileged over others, so experimental painters rarely make specific preparatory sketches or plans for a painting. They consider the production of a painting as a process of searching, in which they aim to discover the image in the course of making it; they typically believe that learning is a more important goal than making finished paintings. Experimental artists build their skills gradually over the course of their careers, improving their work slowly over long periods. These artists are perfectionists and are typically plagued by frustration at their inability to achieve their goal.

Key takeaway? You gotta love the process if you’re over thirty-five. 🙂 And you’ve gotta have someone (or a couple of someones) who love you.

In Private

I’m still thinking about “practicing in public.”

I don’t want to make too much of this idea. What we do in public is only a portion of the whole. What we do in private is also important, maybe foundational.

In private is where intimacy occurs. In private is where promises are made. In private is where forgiveness is confirmed, where learning occurs, mistakes are corrected, decisions are made, courage is fostered, faces are set, spirits are strengthened and hope takes root.

In Public

Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail and the soon to be published Free, is quoted in the December issue of Writer’s Digest:

“I don’t come from the book or media world; I’m trained as a computational physicist,” Anderson says. “We in the software world wrote our code in public. That’s what beta testing is all about. Doing things in public is the norm. I took the habits that were most conventional, just like getting peer reviews in science, and applied it to my books.”

Anderson’s quote reminds me of something I read about Bob Dylan:

Dylan said he needed to practice in front of people. He could not sit in a room by himself and play. For all intents and purposes, Dylan practiced in public. He said that what he was practicing was what he was becoming.

I like that. Blogging is like practicing in public. So is Christianity. What we are is what we will become.

Whether we are writers or musicians or Christians, when the thing is done in public, something special happens.

What is writing? Is it paper or process?

What is writing? Is it paper or process?

Most people would probably say paper. I’m not so sure. I’m becoming more and more aware of writing as process, though I’m willing to concede this is somewhat a false choice.

How can I say that writing is process? Writing must be the end result, right? In other words writing is most definitely paper. I’m using the idea of words on paper as a representation of the end result. (I could use “screen” rather than paper to keep current with the idea of writing as it appears in the blogosphere. However, the idea of writing as “screen or process” was not quite as alliterative as “paper or process”.)

A Look Before the Season

Yesterday, before work, I saw this guy out our kitchen window. I scrambled into the bedroom to grab the camera and, when I went back to the kitchen, he was still there. I needed to hurry the shot because he was trying to decide whether or not he should be watching me through the window or running from the neighbor’s beagle. A few seconds later, he was gone. Life in the suburbs!

Creating in Time

Allow me to provide an overly simplistic paraphrase of an idea Kenneth Atchity puts forward in A Writer’s Time: Writing is nothing more than a transcript of an argument you have with yourself. You begin any writing project by making a decision. A portion of your mind will reject that decision. This causes the creative tension neccesary to write something down.

Advice Before Beginning Spiritual Work

I am compiling information about what we like to call spiritual disciplines. The following is a sober warning to beware about thinking we’re accomplishing too much in the spiritual life.

From a letter C. S. Lewis sent to Arthur Greeves, 15 June, 1930:

Mundane Mondays: Values

Mundane Mondays

My posts on Mondays will focus on the seemingly mundane things related to how I approach work. Today’s post will concentrate on determining VALUES.

Just why DID he write that letter? (2)

We might say the reason John wrote the letter we call 1st John was to refute a kind of proto-Gnosticism. This is not wrong; it is a valid statement. But his reason to write the letter amounts to so much more than that.

Just why DID he write that letter?

John the Apostle

 

Tonight, in our Life Group, we’re beginning a study of the New Testament book of 1st John.

In every study of a book like this, I try to determine just why the author wanted to write the book in the first place. John makes this task easier: He tells us. Twelve times he prefaces a remark with the phrase “I am writing…” These can then be classified into seven distinct reasons for writing:

John is writing the letter to:

Wrestling with the Imagination

Passing years have given me the option to relax about writing more than when I was in my thirties.

I once thought that if I didn’t write something, anything every day, the world as I knew it would end. And it did end. The old world ended and the new world began, with every missed deadline, with every unproductive writing day.

In the new world I was given the chance to view things differently, sideways maybe, or upside-down, but differently. The difference changed the shape of every writing project I ever set my mind and body to
complete. It would become a new project.

While Waiting For Inspiration

I recently read something Corey Doctorow said in an interview:

It’s not that you can’t be a great writer who only writes when inspiration calls, but you’ll never be a happy writer if you only write when inspiration calls. Inspiration is unpredictable. And if writing is the thing that makes you happy and sane—or it’s one of the things that makes you happy and sane—but you can only do it when this unpredictable lightning strike happens, then you’re not going to be happy and sane. You’re going to spend a lot of your time moping around, waiting for lightning to hit you. One of the things I’ve noticed about writing every day is that there are days when writing that page feels like flying. Like the hand of God reached down and touched my keyboard, and every word is just pure gold. And then there are days that I feel I’m writing absolute, totally forgettable junk that shouldn’t have been committed to phosphors, let alone saved to disc. The thing is, a month later, you can’t tell the difference. The difference between a day when it feels like you’re writing brilliantly and a day when it feels like you’re writing terribly is entirely in your head, it’s not in the prose.

Pagedropping

PAGE DROPPING

in conversations.
what have I learned?
what am I wondering?
what strikes me as funny?
what moves me to tears?

what kind of knowledge
can bend the
conversation

in some new direction
–not spinning–
but challenging
thinking
seeing
feeling
newly
differently

And then going back again
for a reassessment

growth is recursive

On Writing in a Journal

Ernst Junger On writing in a journal:

“I would advise anybody who takes part in a war or any other unusual experience for a long period, to keep a consecutive diary, if it be only a succession of jottings which serve later on to give memory its clues. […] They force the writer of them to seize upon the essence of his experiences and to get above – if only for a few minutes a day – the familiar surroundings and to put himself in the position of a spectator. The daily experience will appear in a new light, just as a well-known landscape changes as soon as you try to sketch it. […] It takes more energy than one might think to put a few facts together day by day when it is not a matter of life and death. […] In any case the effort to observe goes with the habit of making notes, and when a man is in a situation like this that only these few years can offer and that can never recur in the same form, he ought to keep his eyes open and try to seize its unique features.”

I’ve seen and heard comments about the fact that I’m always writing in a notebook: “What, losing your memory for things?” they’d say.

I thought maybe I should quickly develop some talking points for myself:

1. Notetaking (or notemaking) keeps me engaged in a way that keeps me accountable, even if only to myself.
2. The act of ‘noting’ things keeps me as objective as possible, the primary goal being to capture the essence of waht is actually said or thought and not my opinion about what is said or thought. I try to avoid, whenever possible, rendering judgement on whether that thing is either good or bad. A premature judgement on such matters is usually wrong.
3. And, as a jogger of memory, the notebook does play a role. I have a written record to which I can refer. I suppose the criticism that we should remember things is valid enough–but as time passes and things happen, thinking gets replaced by more thinking.

 

Stuff Near My Desk

In my workspace at the moment, I have:

• A pocket briefcase filled with 3 x 5 index cards

• a reporters notebook

• Three Moleskine Cahier’s notebooks filled with really bad poetry

• Legal Pads (White and Yellow, just in case)

• A standard Blueline journal

• A small sketchbook

• A large newsprint poster-sized sketchbook

• A digital voice recorder

• An inexpensive .mp3 player loaded with podcasts

• A portable CD player loaded with J. S. Bach’s 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd Brandenburg concertos

• File folders with printouts of .pdf’s I’ve been meaning to read

• A desk lamp

• A table lamp

• A dictionary, thesaurus and Strunk and White’s Elements of Style

• Fowler’s Modern English Usage

• Strong’s Concordance

• Young’s Concordance

• Vine’s Expository Dictionary of Biblical Words

• Five translations of the English Bible

• Thirty-seven different pens

• Twenty-three pencils

• A large coffee mug filled with….something

• Notes from a lecture series

• A two gigabyte flash drive

• A novel by Larry McMurtry

• The Book of Common Prayer

• Various CD ROMs with PowerPoint Presentations going back to 2001

• A cigarette lighter

• Two small binder clips

• A goose call

• An archery glove

• An old hospital wristband

• A Tony the Tiger Baseball signed by Tony the Tiger

• Five smooth stones

• A painted rock

• A replica of the Stanley Cup made out of tin foil and toilet paper rolls

Certain Kind of Joy

A certain kind of joy, here.

 

Smeared ink staining my
fingers as the scratching
of the nib makes a lonely
kind of music. 

 

Writing-pen to paper for
the first draft-maybe
the only draft-of
something left
of some
unread,
untranslated,
barely thought out,
barely digested,
nascent memory.

 

A certain kind of joy, here.

 

The feel of music and
wasting time, eyes adjusting to
the eerie light. Fighting off the
pre-dawn delirium.

The half-light of the morning moon makes
the steam rising from the coffee thicker,
somehow.

 

A certain kind of joy, here.

 

Remembering
through the scratching
of the pen
something from
long ago
from those first twelve years
from the city
of the cracking
January
ice.

 

A sip from the cup and
my mind is braced
and the wary glimpse
is gone.

 

The pen still scratches across the page.

 

A certain kind of joy, here.

 

Longing
Desire

Fuzzy Focused Stills

They say, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” or “Every picture tells a story.”

but…

camera shots
and angles
and fuzzy-focused
black and white stills
are only snapshots
in freeze-frame.

movement is implied.

Anti-Drifting Practices

We spent time in our Life Group discussing spiritual disciplines.

There’s some push back on this. Seems we equate the idea of practices with spiritual gymnastics. But, like anything else, we must seek our own level, here.

Reality is that everyone in the group practices a spiritual discipline whether or not they recognize their practice as a discipline.

Not Much Different

writing
speaking
computers
and
pens

not much different than:

pencils
crayons and
chalk

Intellectual (?) ideas
presented
using tools
from a Child’s
ART BOX

Always Writing Down

J. mentioned that she looked over while we were singing in church and saw me writing on an index card. She laughed. I was embarrassed.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “That’s just so you.”