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On Creativity -- Part One 12/12/2014 6:02:58 PM
Here are some thoughts and quotes about creativity:
•A creative project begins with a dream, a vision, a desire to make something new, an urge to express oneself. I came across this sentence in “The Fifth Mountain”, a novel by Paulo Coelho. “When you want something, all the world conspires in helping you to achieve it.”
•Determination to create isn’t the same thing as ambition for power or money.
•We never create an object out of nothing. We need tools and materials and precedents to challenge and/or follow. The best that our wish to make something new can usually achieve is a combination of elements no one has thought of before.
•Ability grows as we use it and study what others have done. Creativity usually includes a desire for improvement
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•It can be exciting to get t know the works of pioneers — Haydn, Balzac, Delacroix, George Eliot, workers who thought in larger terms than others and moved their arts forward.
•Adversity can strengthen a creative person. Too much hardship stifles. Encouragement and a receptive environment benefit creativity.
•Willingness to work is important, so are rest and refreshment. New ideas can come when we visit places we’ve never seen before.
•Work frequently. If we’re absorbed with a project and the wellspring of ideas dries up, think about something else for a while.
•I make notes and an outline and after that a first draft. I often put down the first thing that comes to mind, no matter how primitive and immature. I don’t stop to revise but go on from there. As a result, I have something to work with. The subsequent drafts can turn out to be a test of character, but I persist until it gets exciting again. I treasured this comment I read in a tweet: “Our best effort comes in the last 10% of a project.”
•I also appreciated two insights I heard on the Internet from the British composer Oliver Knussen — that an idea that’s awkward and doesn’t fit provokes thought. Also — there’s a lot about creativity that that no one understands
•I’ve made it my practice to lie low.
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Some sentences from Balzac’s “Cousin Bette”, which I revisited by way of an audiobook:
“The habit of creativeness…is so difficult to develop, is lost with prodigious ease. Inspiration is the opportunity of genius. She does not indeed dance on the razor’s edge, she is in the air and flies away with the suspicious swiftness of a crow; she wears no scarf by which the poet can clutch her; her hair is a flame; she vanishes like the lovely rose and white flamingo, the sportsman’s despair. And work, again, is a wearisome struggle, alike dreaded and delighted in by these lofty and powerful natures who are often broken by it. A great poet of our day has said in speaking of this overwhelming labor, “I sit down to it with despair, but I leave it with regret.”…If the artist does not throw himself into his work…,as a soldier leads a forlorn hope without a moment’s thought, and if when he is in the crater, he does not dig on as a miner does when the earth has fallen in on him, if he contemplates the difficulties before him instead of conquering them one by one…the work remains incomplete…and the artist looks on at the suicide of his own talent.”
“Perpetual work is the law of art, as it is the law of life….(G)reat artists and perfect poets wait neither for commissions nor for purchases. They are constantly creating — today, tomorrow, always.”
(T)hese half-artists are delightful; men like them and cram them with praise; they even seem superior to the true artists, who are taxed with conceit, unsociableness, contempt of the laws of society….Great men are the slaves of their work.”
