Monday, January 23, 2012

Failure, communication, and failure in communication

Happy Monday, everyone!

I stumbled upon this article over the weekend. It has plenty of filler, in my opinion, but it has some good sections too. Among the good:

"Robert Epstein, a former editor of Psychology Today and founder of the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies, likens the process to being stuck in a locked room. The doorknob isn't responding. You turn it, you jiggle it, you lift it. Nothing.

'When you're ineffective and you can't turn that knob, lots and lots of different behaviors and thoughts and ideas all pop up simultaneously, more or less -- and that's the stuff of creativity,' he says. 'That's where the inner connections occur.'

The wonderful thing about such creative sparks is they'll feed off one another. The terrible thing is that emotions might take over and reduce you to mush. Epstein observes that the person in the locked room eventually starts banging on the door and, if left long enough, cries for his or her mother."

and:

"Giving up can also be part of the creative process, says Dean Keith Simonton, a psychology professor at the University of California, Davis, and a creativity expert.

'Sooner or later, creators have to learn when an idea is going nowhere,' he says.

But, he cautions, that point is hard to identify.

'The error is more often in the opposite direction: Not giving a new idea a sufficient chance for development. It is not easy to tell in advance which is going to pan out and which not,' he says."

and:

"[Jennifer] Egan agrees assessing progress isn't easy.

'A lot of it is trying to understand what kind of dead end it is, because they aren't all the same,' she says. 'With "The Keep," I was essentially at a dead end for the first many months of working on it, because I couldn't find a voice for it. And if you don't have a voice, you've got nothin'. You can try every bell and whistle and good idea in the world, but if the book doesn't have a voice, you don't have a book.

'But for some reason I kept hammering away at it, which certainly in retrospect could have been a terrible waste of time if I hadn't found a way,' she said."

ALSO: If you'd rather just have a laugh, check out the creative e-mail exchange between "Shannon Walkley" and "David Thorne." Thorne reminds me of Mr. G.F. Bailey...if he hated cats.

14 comments:

  1. Missing Missy! That was very funny, and yes, I can picture Mr. Bailey writing them. I imagined Shannon banging the keyboard and crying "Mommy."

    Applying real-life problem solving techniques to a creative dilemma makes sense. Ideas do need time to grow (for me) and giving up to soon is laziness. Most times I go to another project while the idea that has me stumped rattles around my subconscious for a while.

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  2. Therein lies the dilemma, what a terrible waste of time all this could be considered to be if I never find a way.

    Interesting post Domey, as always!

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  3. Hmmm . . . if you are enjoying your writing and learning from it in some way I don't think I would ever call it a waste of time. Of course the ideal is to create something worth reading and sharing with the world but for me the experience always comes first, whether I learn better how to handle the craft or things about myself I never knew. But then I've always been the type to hack away at things I should have given up on a long time ago.

    This a very scientific description of the creative process. Very acurate and, based only on the points you highlighted, succint, but very scientific.

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  4. Why do I have such a reputation for being mean? I'm a sweet guy, really I am. And I love cats. Still, I laughed. A good friend of mine worked as a graphic artist for a corporation and he's been in this very situation.

    But wait: there was a serious part of this post, wasn't there? Creativity? I fully understand Ms Egan's claim about how the book won't go anywhere until you find the right voice for it. Each of my books has its own voice, and finding that voice was a big step in getting underway. There's a book that Mighty Reader wants me to write, but I don't know the voice of one of the three sections yet, and I can't write that book until I do.

    Also, I really like solving the problems of art. I try to do at least one impossible (for me, that is) thing in each book I write, just to see if I can.

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  5. Scott, for the record, I associated you with the guy in the emails only because of voice and sense of humor, NOT because of meanness. You do seem to care for cats and goats.

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    1. Have I told you that Mighty Reader bought me a goat for Christmas? (She actually bought a goat from Oxfam in my name to go to a farm or family in a third-world nation, but it's still cool. We already have Noel, the Steel Goat.)

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    2. This weekend I went to a 2-year birthday party held for a friend's daughter, and when I got there I discovered goats in a pen on the front lawn. Mostly they wagged their tails and ate grass, which made a nice little snapping sound. Sometimes they butted each other and nibbled on little girls' party dresses, which wasn't a positive experience for the little girls, even though no material was actually torn or eaten. Goats have horizontal slit pupils, which freak me out a bit if I stare at them too long as they stare back.

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    3. I think their eyes are cool. It's easy to anthropomorphize and so I think we need regular reminders that animals are alien to us and essentially unknowable. They have their own reality in which we are unknowable aliens. Sometimes I look into the eyes of our cat and I am struck by just how much her world is not my world, and how we will forever be, at some basic level, complete strangers, absolute foreigners. But I like that unknowableness. And goats are cute when they chew on things, too!

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  6. I thought the parts of the article about Jennifer Egan were fascinating, especially that she seems to outline but after she has a first draft, and that she had an outlier success with one early story and then had to build back up to that level.

    But I found the rest of the article to be inane. I mean, do we really need cognitive scientists to tell us that: (1) successful people weren't always, and aren't invariably, successful; and (2) it's a good idea to persist in the face of failure, except when it isn't? I imagine some editor saying, "that's a good interview with Egan, but nobody's going to want to read a whole article about a Pulitzer prize winning author's writing process, so gussy it up with some scientist quotes and make some larger point about the creative process."

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    1. Good point about the article as a whole. "Jennifer Who? No idea. But hey--creativity! Shiny!"

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  7. Taryn, Most of the time I absolutely agree with you that the experience is key. I very rarely view anything I've worked on as being a waste of time. But, I'll admit, that--now that I've been at this for over ten years--I am starting to occasionally ask myself if I have been productive enough!

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  8. You know, I think that's why I like prompts so much. They really spark that creative flow for me because I always think to myself - how would everyone else do this? Then I try to figure out a way to do it differently. At least I'm thinking that's what gets it going! Who knows how my brain works. :)

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  9. I've never been locked in, but I have been locked out. I surprised myself by the physical dexterity I never knew I had. In my desperation to get back in the house, I somehow removed the screen of the kitchen window, climbed a five-foot wall, and squirmed through the tiny window. I don't know how I did it, I guess necessity IS at the root of creativity. :) Great post. Psychology Today is my favorite magazine, by the way.

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