Thinking Space

Where do you do your best thinking? Gorgeous creative spaces are pictured on a truly amazing three dimensional webpage at The Economist's Thinking Spaces. (Have you seen anything like this before?)

And you are invited to submit a photo of your own room to add to the site.

(Thanks, Umapagan, for the link.)

The 8 Habits of Highly Successful Creative People

Dina Zaman just sent me this link to an inspiring piece on writer/illustrator Keri Smith's blog.

Smith talks about how at times when she feels low, she finds herself drawn to inspiring books, mainly biographies :

...that speak of survival, triumph over adversity, and the need to create through all else.

She mentions the journals of women writers including May Sarton, Annie Dillard, Natalie Goldberg, Anais Nin, Maya Angelou and Colette, and asks herself :

How did these women find the constant courage and confidence to believe in themselves?

She believes the answer lies in the many similarities they share, and draws up a list that I think should be useful to the rest of us :

• All possess a obvious passion for nature, a connection with something greater than themselves, many of them connect this with memories of childhood. Several bought houses in the country to encourage this.
• There is a deliberate connection to other artists/writers/creators, a sharing of ideas, or a need to be coinspired by someone who is also creating. Creative gatherings, dinners, support groups, cafe meetings, letter writing, afternoon teas.
• They all seem somewhat “comfortable” with solitude and have a need or at least the ability to spend quality time alone.
• There is an capacity for self motivation, all find various ways to shift perception get a fresh perspective on the world and their lives. Inspiring walks, travel to foreign lands, learning new skills, reading, cooking, exploring,
• All experience pain, they choose to feel it intensely. They also move triumphantly beyond it creating a well of strength from which they draw from.
• They possess the ability to see magic in the ordinary, the gift of mindfulness.
• All have moments of gratefulness and compassion.
• They all do something decadent to pamper themselves regularly. May Sarton bought fresh flowers for herself every week! That nourishment theme again.
  

Mapping Tash

The bad times in writing are numerous and range from being merely bad to truly catastrophic. Any writer will tell you that the daily grind of writing is in itself a challenge, but anyone engaged in a serious project will experience great lows during which one doubts the very validity of one’s existence as a writer – sometimes it feels as if one can’t even write a single sentence.

The job of a writer is largely concerned with being able to withstand these dips in morale. Sometimes they can last months, during which the whole of your life seems futile. But writing is cyclical and if you can hang on long enough and keep working through these dips the good times do come back. Eventually.

Comforting words from Tash Aw who talks about his new novel, his creativity, and how the press got it wrong about the money is interviewed by Soon Heng Lim in today's Star. I especially like the question about whether serious fiction/literature is scripture for a secular world?

Lim also reviews the novel here.

Glad I am to see that this time round there's plenty of publicity for an author of whom we are rightly proud.

Ole Elizabeth!

Is it rational, logical, anyone should be afraid of the work they were put on earth to do? And what is it specifically about creative ventures that seems to make us nervous of each other's mental health in a way that other careers don't?

Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert delivers a most inspiring lecture on the nature of creativity for the TED Conference. I love the way she talks about "genius" and the way that she talks about herself as :

... a mule, not a pipeline.

You might also like to check out what she says on her website about how she got started as a writer. The best advice, I think :

The more important virtue for a writer, I believe, is self-forgiveness. Because your writing will always disappoint you. Your laziness will always disappoint you. You will make vows: “I’m going to write for an hour every day,” and then you won’t do it. You will think: “I suck, I’m such a failure. I’m washed-up.” ... The other thing to realize is that all writers think they suck. When I was writing “Eat, Pray, Love”, I had just as a strong a mantra of THIS SUCKS ringing through my head as anyone does when they write anything. But I had a clarion moment of truth during the process of that book. One day, when I was agonizing over how utterly bad my writing felt, I realized: “That’s actually not my problem.” The point I realized was this – I never promised the universe that I would write brilliantly; I only promised the universe that I would write. So I put my head down and sweated through it, as per my vows.

Lazy Journalism

Using paper and pen (or pencil) as opposed to computer software encourages creativity and maximises intelligence shouts a headline in the Star technology section today refering to research by Dutch physchologist Christof van Nimwegan. (The actual piece by Rachel Levy is not on the Star website but you can find it here.)

I seized upon it because I personally find, and many people in my creative writing class find, that ideas flow better on paper than on screen. I have anecdotal evidence, so was interested in backing it up with a bit of theory. We always gravitate towards whatever bits of research prove our prejudices, don't we?

But whatdya know, this is another example of a distorted news story getting passed on and passed on like an urban legend. As van Nimwegen points out angrily in a rebuttal on Boing-Boing :

I have indeed done research at Utrecht University, it did involve computer interfaces, and my doctoral thesis was indeed called "The paradox of the guided user: assistance can be counter-effective. (But) Never, ever in my life have I investigated the use of paper and pens/pencil, nor did I ever mention any of these. NOT ONCE, leave alone that I have done experiments with them!

(A much better account of what van Nimwegan was actually investigating can be found on the BBC website.)

Journalists badly need to acquire the skill of clicking round to compare sources and getting at what the news really is!

Hmmm, it's curious how this post started out as being about one thing (paths to creativity) and ended up by being about something totally other (shoddy journalistic research).

When the Spirit Moves a Nobel Winner

The modern American canon would not exist without all this madness and alcohol ...

says Micheal Carolan (left) in The Amhearst Bulletin. Carolan is teaching a course at the University of Massachusetts entitled Dionysus Hitting Bottom: The Alcoholic Narrative in Film and Literature.

Those who ponder the fact that Malaysian authors aren't winning Nobel Prizes might like to think about this :

... of eight native-born Americans awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, five were alcoholics, including Sinclair Lewis and Eugene O'Neill. ... (And) Alcohol is a factor if not the central focus of the three top modern novelists - Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald. ... As novelists they were addressing how man lived in the 20th century, and the answer was, through drinking.

And yet, says Carolan, authors' alcoholism has been ignored or denied in literary criticism.

This looks set to change with the growth of :

... the relatively new area of inquiry known as "addiction studies," a multidisciplinary field that combines literary criticism with sociological and historical perspectives. ... Carolan said his class also brings together fields of addiction medicine, film studies, psychology, sociology, cultural and gender studies.

(Story found via Literary Saloon.)

Writers Need Risk

This article in yesterday's Observer intrigued me:

Rachel Cooke writes about a new collection of journlism, Risky Business: Books, Poker, Pastimes, People by poet and critic Al Alvarez who considers writing: ...

A solitary, joyless occupation ... For five or six days each week, I sit at my desk and try to get the sentences right. If I make a mistake, I can rewrite it the following day or the next or catch it in proof. And if I fail to do so, who cares? Who even notices?' Worse yet is the sense that, as Frederic Raphael once put it: 'Real men do things. They don't just write about them.'

Alvarez talks about the enjoyably symbiotic relationship between the solitary act of writing and high risk pastimes. He got his adrenaline rush from playing poker and climbing rock faces, and in the book profiles other creatives who feel (or felt) a need to push themselves to the physical or intellectual limits, including authors Philip Roth, Malcolm Lowry, Jean Rhys and Sylvia Plath.

This book is on my wish list, much coveted.

I must not one-click, I must not one-click, I must not ...

Touched With Fire

Sometimes a book can go where our words can't and carry our message.

A friend is in pain. I'm not sure he know the cause, though its effects are all too real to him and those he loves.

He's fearlessly creative on cavas, and claims a total freedom for himself on the page, splashing words recklessly. Images emerge so fresh and surprising they make you gasp. And when he's well, he's warm and gregarious, full of talk and ideas and love for the world.

But at times he curls into himself, unable to face the world, swamped in depression. Everyone disappoints, no-one measures up. If disturbed, he hits out, throws words like rocks - knowing exactly what soft targets to hit, how to maximise the hurt.

I know it is not him talking, but the illness.

Does he know the thing that afflicts him has a name?

I don't think he does.

Does he know that there are others who suffer and have suffered in the same way? I don't think so. Yet
a roll-call of fellow sufferers would sound like a Who's Who in the arts: Blake, Plath, Oliver Goldsmith, Coleridge, Byron, Mary Shelley, Keats, Samuel Johnson, Robert Lowell, Virginia Woolf, Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, Ivan Berlin, Jackson Pollock, van Gogh to name but a few. It has been estimated that 50% of poets suffer from it, 38% of musicians, 20% of painters, and large proportions of those in other creative fields.

But to romanticise the illness is very wrong. It may be a spur to enhanced creativity (oh, and how we envy that, the pedestrian lumpen rest of us eking a little courage from our petulent muse) but unless you suffer from the illness yourself you cannot understand the darkness of the flip-side (I try but know how badly I fall short). And the risk of suicide is great. 15% of all sufferers die by their own hand, and up to 20% in untreated cases. He thinks about it too.

Made a decision yesterday that I had to tell him. Sometimes knowing the name of the demon you face helps you to begin to banish it, or at least put it in its place. I've met it before in several others and know a little of how they deal with it, their personal struggles. And I've read. There is no cure, but medication might work for him. Or at least the knowledge that he does not need to be alone with this nameless thing. I wanted to move conversation gently to this point, but it never has worked that way. I'd rather tell him tactfully, face-to-face, but I cannot find spaces between his floods of words, or else he shuns communication.

So I've send him my copy of Kay Redfield Jamison's book An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness through the post. Jamison writes a most moving account of her own journey through manic depression, and she became Professor of Pyschiatry at John Hopkins school of Medicine and one of the world's most foremost authorities on manic-depressive illness. Jamison talks of her own coming to terms with the illness, and sees it as more of a blessing than a curse in her life:

I have often asked myself whether, given the choice, I would choose to have manic-depressive illness. If lithium were not available to me, or didn't work for me, the answer would be a simple no... and it would be an answer laced with terror. But lithium does work for me, and therefore I can afford to pose the question. Strangely enough, I think I would choose to have it. It's complicated... I honestly believe that as a result of it I have felt more things, more deeply; had more experiences, more intensely; loved more, and have been more loved; laughed more often for having cried more often; appreciated more the springs, for all the winters... Depressed, I have crawled on my hands and knees in order to get across a room and have done it for month after month. But normal or manic I have run faster, thought faster, and loved faster than most I know.

Crazy Dumbsaints Unite!

I lift my writing mantra from Jack Keroac's "Belief & Techniques for Modern Prose - List of Essentials". Take from it what you will ...

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, listening
3. Try never to get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from the bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable vision of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust, be an old teapot of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel centre of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement of yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Dont [sic] think of words when yous top but to see picture better
23. Keep track of everyday the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You're a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

As ever, Jack

Creativity Bootcamp

Can creativity be taught? This article from today's Independent argues very nicely that a residential writing course can do writers a power of good.

Independent Enjoyment

For years I've looked longingly at prospectuses for writing courses and retreats with both Arvon and Skyros.

In the past I've had no time for such courses. Now I have the time but no money. Ain't that always the way!