Father and Son

My father listened to Reading My Book Aloud 002 last week, and commented that while his poetry is self-explanatory, I tend to explain my poems. That was an intriguing observation, and I’ve been thinking about it all week. I’ve come up with a couple of, um, explanations.

1. I write to organize/categorize/energize/exorcise my emotions. I feel that my father already has his feelings organized when he sits down to write.
2. My father writes poems about things he already knows, values he believes in. My poems help me understand things that I didn’t understand before. As I explain my creative process to myself and to my readers/listeners, I learn more about myself and more about writing poetry.
3. My father writes poems to help people understand important things more clearly. My poems are not about explaining to brains; my poems are an attempt to transmit my feelings directly to the reader/listener. (You know those moments in songs when you recognize the emotion the musician is describing, because you had that exact feeling once? Or those moments in movies when you immediately recognize the situation or the conflict, from your own personal experience?) I try to transmit my feelings via the textures and interactions of the words I choose.

I’m speaking for my father here, and I hope I’m understanding his writing motivations correctly. Kind of pretentious of me, ain’t it? But I think our different ways of writing are fascinating!

Using People

Being a creative/innovative person is a pretty good life, isn’t it? Yet, creativity/innovation doesn’t happen by itself. You have to feed your imagination if you want to remain fully creative.

One way to stay creative is to hang out with people who stimulate your thinking. There are at least three kinds of people who can help you in this area:

• Tacklers are those people who enjoy solving problems and doing thought experiments. My friend Peter is like this. All you have to do is mention an intriguing idea or interesting problem, and he tackles it like, um, someone tackling something. Tacklers are great people to hang out with when you are feeling creatively dry; they will fill your head with lots of new material.
• Brainstormers are those people whose greatest pleasure comes from making up ideas. My friend Steve is a classic brainstormer. Every time I have ever hung out with him, the same thing happens. He gets this happy look on his face, and he says, “You know what I just thought of?” Brainstormers are great people to hang out with when you are starting a project, especially when you are searching for an innovative direction for your project.
• Go-To People are those people who experts in their field. They don’t have to be professionals, but they have to be passionate about their topic. These are the people you go to when you need details. My roommate Matt is my go-to person whenever I have a car question. When I want to know the year and model of a car I see in a movie, I ask Matt, and he always knows! These people have a freaky amount of detailed knowledge. These are the people you talk to when you are in the middle of your project, and don’t want to look like an idiot because you got some key details wrong.

Of course, there is going to be some overlap. Steve is all three of these, with brainstorming as his strongest area.

Do I use people? You bet I do! My tacklers, brainstormers and go-to people keep my brain alive and my imagination running! Who wouldn’t take advantage of that?

What is a Creative Person?

Just a quick explanation of what I mean by “creative person.” Everybody has the ability to be creative and innovative. When I use the phrase “creative person,” I am referring to a person who has made it a priority to create and innovate. Most often, I think of writers, musicians, painters, movie makers and other artists as creative people, but creativity and innovation are obviously not limited to the arts. Seth Godin’s work in marketing, for instance, is firmly rooted in creative and innovative thinking.

The Exhausted Creative

Even creative people get tired.

Even creative people get tired.

Admit it. Right now, your eyes are closing and you’re starting to snore. Maybe you shouldn’t have stayed up all night working on that important, all-consuming creative project . . . but I understand. Sometimes you just gotta.

The question is, what creative activities can you pursue when you’re tired? Sometimes you don’t have enough energy to work on your important, all-consuming project, but you still want to do something creative. Here are some low-energy suggestions:

• Get Inspired. Watch your favourite movie or online videos, read a passage from a novel you love, surf the websites of your favourite artists. Use your tired time to stealthily feed your brain.
• Be Sloppy. Create something without caring about details or perfection. Write a silly poem, finger-paint, jam on your harmonica, shoot some video with your web cam or cell phone. My buddy Dani, an artist, draws a bunch of cubes when he’s tired.
• Daydream. Listen to the music that always puts pictures in your head. Look up at the clouds. Stare into a body of water, whether it be the ocean, a river or the kitchen sink.
• Chat. Phone, meet or instant-message other creative people.  It doesn’t really matter if they are in your field of expertise or not. You can learn a lot just by chatting with people who have different creative interests.
• Fall Asleep. You have to sleep sometime. Before you fall asleep, congratulate yourself on what you have created so far. Keep a notepad next to your bed in case you have interesting dreams. After you wake up, try to remember the sensations and emotions from your dreams.

The purpose of these activities is to tap into creative channels that your fully-rested self would not normally tap into.

Please comment if you have any examples, anecdotes or suggestions.

Motivated by Drowning

If you think about it, almost drowning is one way of learning to swim.

I’m now using WordPress to create this site, and I have no idea what I’m doing. I feel like I’m in over my head. However, I’m also feeling more excited about yonderman.com than I have in a long time! This website has so much more potential than when I was coding the site by hand. My motivation to work on this website is high.

I knew I had to dive into a new way of making this site, because I was bored and unsatisfied with the way I was doing it before. I also wanted to make the site more interactive and more functional, for the sake of you guys. I had considered using something similar to WordPress months ago, but it seemed like too big a learning curve at the time. But I finally just dived in, and I’m learning so much so fast, thanks to a helpful online friend and my own “just click buttons” learning method!

Have you motivated yourself or jump-started your creativity by trying something new? If so, please leave a comment!

What’s Your Problem?

Creative people sometimes have difficulty finding a target for their creativity. They know they can create really cool stuff that can possibly change the world, but they don’t know where to start. They have no direction. The goal of this post is to help you find a direction for your creativity.

Let us imagine that there lives a creative person named Jedediah. Not only can Jedidiah create nifty websites, but he can also knit toques and play the kazoo. Yet, Jed feels unfulfilled. He spends his waking hours wondering how he can best use his skills.

He builds a website for the kazoo club, and he is happy to do it, but he feels that there is some bigger project out there just waiting for him. He makes dozens of toques emblazoned with the names of his own websites and gives them away to friends and strangers. He gets more traffic on his sites from all that free advertisement, but Jed still feels that he was put on this planet for a greater purpose. He knows his skills are meant to be used to change the world, at least a little.

Then one day, Jed comes home from kazoo practice to discover that his house has been robbed! His beautiful 60-inch computer monitor is gone!  His collection of vividly-coloured toque yard is no more! And most devastatingly of all, his most treasured kazoo is missing from its display case! That was the kazoo played by Moe “Hummer” Johnston on the award-winning kazoo album, “Live at the Heebie-Jeebie.” Jed had spent years tracking down that famous kazoo, and now it was gone!

As you can well imagine, dear reader, Jed is devastated. Jed now has a big problem. Not only is his stuff gone, but he is traumatized. Someone broke into his Fortress of Solitude! Someone violated his personal space! Someone made Jed feel like a scared little kid.

Yes, Jed has a big problem. Strangely enough , this big problem is going to help Jed find creative direction. Because now Jed really, really cares about something. He knows the pain and trauma of being robbed, and he does not want the same thing to happen to his family, friends and neighbours. Jed becomes passionate about preventing crime in his neighbourhood.

Jed remembers some advice his Uncle Zeke once gave him: “Don’t get mad, get nerdy!” So, Jed spends forty days and forty nights building a website for his community’s crime-prevention group. (To do this, Jed has to use his old, outdated 45-inch computer monitor; sometimes life is rough like that).

The site is the best work that Jed has ever done. The graphics are nifty, the wiki works well, and the site is user-friendly. Why is the site so good? Because Jed is passionate about cracking down on local crime, and all his web skills finally have a noble focus. His other talents also find their way into Jed’s new passion. Jed organizes a kazoo concert to raise money for his community’s crime-prevention group. Jed teaches teenage ruffians how to knit toques, diverting dozens of teenagers from lives of crime.

Jed’s problem led him to discover his passion, which allowed him to fully exercise his creativity. I have a friend named Daniele Rossi (danielerossi.ca) who is passionate about a lingering problem. He lets his passion guide his creativity, and today he is helping people around the world deal with self-esteem issues related to stuttering. Which is really cool. Check out Dani’s site at stutteringiscool.com.