Creativity coach, author and psychologist Eric Maisel, PhD, notes “Some people become doctors, lawyers, accountants, or marketing executives. Some people stay at home and raise a family.

“But millions of people make another sort of choice, maybe only as part-time employment if you count the money they earn but as their full-time identity: they become artists.”

And, he adds, “they struggle.”

[Quotes from his site www.makingyourcreativemark.com]

In one of the chapters (“The Stress Key”) of his new book “Making Your Creative Mark,” he writes about how the creative life can be an ongoing source of stress – if we interpret or frame it as such.

“Well, obviously you need a writing instrument and you need an idea. I’m just not sure which should come first.”

Forensic anthropologist Dr. Temperance ‘Bones’ Brennan (Emily Deschanel), from TV Series “Bones” (imdb.com)

Creative expression is not just about using outside materials and tools, but actually being an instrument oneself.

It is a valuable and challenging idea that has been a theme of a number of acting coaches, but also applies to any form of creative work.

One example was the acclaimed teacher Sanford Meisner who said, “Every actor’s instrument is different because every actors instrument is their humanity, their sensitivity. Their soul. And there is no ‘right way’ or ‘one way’ to get to that instrument. That soul.”

[Book: Sanford Meisner on Acting.]

The following inspiring and insightful perspectives by dancer, choreographer and teacher Martha Graham have been around many years, and widely quoted – but it may be valuable to think about them every now and then.

These four P’s of Product, People, Process and environmental Press have been used as frameworks by many creativity researchers and writers.

In a helpful overview article, Sandeep Gautam provides explanations of these concepts, and references to various creativity experts. Here are a few excerpts.

First, to start with the illustration: “Blind monks examining an elephant”, an ukiyo-e print by Hanabusa Itchō (1652–1724).

The story that inspired this artwork is basically that “a group of blind men (or men in the dark) touch an elephant to learn what it is like. Each one feels a different part, but only one part, such as the side or the tusk. They then compare notes and learn that they are in complete disagreement.” [Wikipedia]

Gautam concludes his article:

“In the end, it is important to realize that creativity is all things to all people, but still needs desperately, and would benefit from immensely, an integrative research paradigm; otherwise like the proverbial blind men and the elephant, we may end up getting narrow and useless conceptions of creativity and ignore the big elephant in the room.”

Continue reading… »

“If there’s specific resistance to women making movies, I just choose to ignore that as an obstacle.” // “A filmmaker is a filmmaker.”

Kathryn Bigelow won the first Academy Award ever presented to a female director, for her outstanding Best Picture winner, “The Hurt Locker.”

Gendered Awards

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences presents awards in many gender neutral categories like Director and Screenwriter, but also separates Actor and Actress categories.

Other awards programs include The Man Booker Prize for Fiction (without reference to gender), and the Orange Prize for Fiction, for “excellence, originality and accessibility in women’s writing from throughout the world.”

In her Huffington Post entry, Vivian Norris de Montaigu relates the story of fifteen years ago inviting Bigelow to joining the board of a Women in Cinema Film Festival (which later became part of the larger Seattle International film festival).

“Ms. Bigelow turned us down, politely, asserting the fact that she was a filmmaker, period. Not a female filmmaker, but a filmmaker full stop.

“I’m a maniacal perfectionist. And if I weren’t, I wouldn’t have this company. It’s the best rap!”

Martha Stewart added, “I have proven that being a perfectionist can be profitable and admirable when creating content across the board: in television, books, newspapers, radio, videos… All that content is impeccable.” [Oprah.com]

Filmmaking and other arts often demand an obsessive attention to detail, and even rely on a certain level or quality of perfectionism in the pursuit of excellence, but perfectionism can also be limiting and destructive.

Actor Michelle Pfeiffer was quoted in an interview: “I’m a perfectionist, so I can drive myself mad — and other people, too. At the same time, I think that’s one of the reasons I’m successful. Because I really care about what I do. I really want it to be right, and I don’t quit until I have to.”

Creative problem solving is enhanced by thinking more abstractly or at an intellectual distance, rather than more concretely, according to research studies.

In my post Using Research to Enhance Creative Thinking – Part 2, I quoted from the article “15 Scientific Facts About Creativity” which notes that “psychological distance” facilitates creativity, and “when hitting a creative snag, the best thing thinkers can do for themselves is step away and try to look at everything from a completely different point of view.”

Evan Polman of New York University and Kyle Emich of Cornell University devised four studies on this creative strategy, with results published in their paper: “Decisions for others are more creative than decisions for the self” [Abstract].

Ellen Langer, a Harvard Professor of Psychology, relates the story of being on vacation and making a spur of the moment declaration to a friend that she was “thinking of taking up painting.”

She added, “I have no idea why I said that. I don’t think I’d had more than a fleeting thought or two about painting in my entire life up to that point.”

Her friend is an artist and gave Langer several small canvases to start her out, and advised her: “Your first painting shouldn’t be too precious,” a perspective shared by another artist friend who said, “Don’t evaluate your work. Just do it.”

Langer continues in her book “On Becoming an Artist” that “A week or so later, I did my first painting on a small wooden shingle I had found. The painting was of a girl on a horse, racing through the woods. I was surprised at how much I liked it.”

One thing I like about this story is her casual pursuit of an impulse to paint: she did not assemble a lot of tools, prepare a studio space, or even take an art class; she simply found a throw-away “canvas” for her first project and went ahead.

Don’t we need to keep practicing, keep learning, keep busy to be creatively productive?

A number of psychologists and artists say daydreaming or otherwise “wasting time” is actually a way to enhance creativity.

For example, author Barbara Abercrombie writes about working on an essay about her divorce, but not having created an outline or idea for its themes after a day of reading her old journals.

She comments, “I felt I had wasted most of the day because I wasn’t actually writing.

“This can be one of the trickiest parts of being a writer, this need to fool around to be creative, and to be okay with that.” From her book A Year of Writing Dangerously.

In his post In Praise of Goofing Off, psychologist Dennis Palumbo notes, “Some people call it puttering, or screwing around, or just plain goofing off. Others, of a more kindly bent, call it day-dreaming. Kurt Vonnegut used the quaint old term ‘skylarking.’

One of the ways that art students learn to paint is to copy the work of a master.

Of course, there are many more complex and abstract design, creativity and innovation challenges than traditional portraiture.

The Human-Computer Interaction Group at Stanford trains people in designing interactive systems.

In a research study they conducted, subjects drew animals to inhabit an alien Earth-like planet and were presented with example drawings at different stages in the experiment.

The results indicated that “Early exposure to examples improves creativity (measured by the number of common and novel features in drawings, and subjective ratings by independent raters).

“Sometimes, we place too rigid or high expectations on ourselves. For instance, some creative professionals have this idea that success means creativity would come easy for them, when in reality, creativity is an ebb and flow process.”

Creativity coach Lisa Riley – from post Self-care and Creative Achievement.

In her book The Gifted Adult, Mary-Elaine Jacobsen writes that author and Jungian analyst Clarissa Pinkola Estes “illuminates creativity’s natural cycles” in her book The Creative Fire, and “describes the creative process, which is analogous to the fulfillment of potential, as a ‘loss and restoration’ pattern of slowing down, descent, underground gathering, quickening, and a burst of intensity.

“This ebb and flow is the reality of the creative life and that we must expect and accept.”

For many creative and gifted people, who place demanding expectations on themselves, and operate with high sensitivity, intensity and imaginational excitability, it may be a real challenge to allow this slowing and turning inward.