In Part 1 of this series we learned what creativity is. And in this part 2 I'll be giving
you three rules to unlock your creativity! But hang on a minute -
can you really have rules for creativity? Isn't it just unconscious
and inspiration? Paul McCartney once said that he just woke up one morning with the tune to "Yesterday"
in his head; the French mathematician Henri Poincaré said that a lot of his most creative
ideas just happened to him; and Picasso once said, "Je ne cherche pas; je trouve."
How can there be rules for something so mysterious?
The 18th Century Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant thought that you couldn't teach creative genius
There are no rules that tell you whether a work of art is beautiful, so he
thought there could be no rules that tell you how to make it beautiful. It just has
to come from inborn talent. Similarly, the ancient philosopher Plato thought that creativity
came from the Muses; it was literally supernatural. That was the only way he could explain
how fickle creativity is, how sometimes it can work great and sometimes you're just stuck.
But Kant has a very black and white view of what rules are. He's thinking, like, programming
rules where there are no grey areas and no exceptions.
But another kind of rules is heuristics, "rules of thumb." Heuristics are more like guidelines than actual rules.
You have to decide when to apply them and when to break them, and therein lies the room
for creativity and decision-making.
But still, what about all those creative people who said their ideas just jumped into their
brains from their unconscious? Like Poincaré: he said that one of his most famous ideas just came to him one day
when he stepped onto a bus, and bam! There it was. Well, actually that might not be true. You see he recorded
that incident some 30 years after it happened, which is a lot of time in
which to romanticize and simplify. And he also goes a bit too far in saying that his unconscious
did all the work, since by definition he couldn't have been aware that that was happening.
In fact some of the evidence from psychology suggests that the conscious mind might be
essential to creativity. One experiment asked people to perform creative tasks while
their conscious mind was occupied - like improvising jazz guitar whilst
solving a maths problem. And the experimenters found that on the whole, those whose conscious minds were tied up performed worse
when it was only their unconscious mind in the creative driving seat.
What those experiments actually show though is that having your conscious mind occupied during
a creative task is unhelpful. It could be that a period of unconscious incubation, going away and
doing something else for a bit, might be helpful to creativity. Like as an actor I know that sometimes if you try
and try and try to put a director's note into action in a rehearsal it just doesn't
feel right - it's only when you go away, and you do something else, and you just let it digest for a bit
that you can come back and find the truth in the performance again. In fact the whole
essence of Stanislavski's method of acting is trying to coax the unconscious mind out, trying to
lure it. So without further ado, here are three top tips for unlocking your creativity:
Number 1: set some arbitrary constraints. If you're just given a blank canvas and
told "Draw anything!" it's difficult to come up with something, but if you're told, "Draw
me a new landscape, draw me a new face, draw me a new animal," it suddenly becomes a lot easier. You don't have to use those
constraints in your final piece but just play around with them and see what happens.
Again, as an actor, sometimes in rehearsal I will play the scene with the complete
opposite emotion from the one I think I should be using in the final show, just to explore the different ideas and
dynamincs that come up. Leonardo Da Vinci used this technique when he was painting, writing:
"Cast your glance on any walls dirty with
such stains or walls made up of rock formations of different types. If you have to invent
some scenes, you will be able to discover them there in diverse forms, in diverse
landscapes, adorned with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, extensive plains, valleys, and
hills... These are like the sound of bells, in whose tolling, you hear names and words
that your imagination conjures up."
If you're doing creative writing, a good way of doing this is using metaphor:
say that X is Y: Juliet is the Sun, love is a flame, all the world's a stage. Again,
you don't have to use those metaphors in your final piece but just see what happens when you try and write with those constraints.
Number 2: identify the common rules and assumptions of whatever domain you're working in and
see whether they can be broken. A lot of conceptual art comes from challenging common ideas
about what a work of art can be. Some of my favourite standup comedians,
people like Stewart Lee, Pierre Novellie, Amir Khoshsokhan, are so creative precisely because
they've dared to ask, "Why can't standup comedy be informed by German theatre traditions? Why can't
it be an emotionally affecting work of art in its own right? Why can't it be quiet
and meek instead of loud and confident?"
This brings up the important point that if you're trying to be creative in some field,
it helps to know as much as you can about that field first. You've gotta know what the rules are before
you can choose whether or not to break them. Like one of the pieces of advice that established writers
always give new ones is to read as widely as possible.
The Beatles got thousands and thousands of hours of practice playing other people's songs before they started writing
their own, and even Mozart started out interpreting other people's works. There's no shame in it.
Number 3: take a big idea and apply it to something very small. Like, 'What does the societal construction
of disability say about the relationship between the characters in your play? How does the history
of British imperialism since Shakespeare's time impact the relationship between Caliban and Prospero in "The Tempest?"
It just broadens the pool of ideas that you can draw on and gives you new material to work with.
This is also a great tactic if you're looking for a topic for you essay or your dissertation - remember artistic
creativity isn't the only kind! Take a big theory and apply it to something tiny.
Like, "What does Saul Kripke's philosophical theory of names tell us about Twitter reply threads?"
"What do neocolonialist narratives in the media say about the way people play "No Man's Sky?""
"What does John Rawls' veil of ignorance tell us about people's behavior on RPG character
creation screens?" Oh wow, I think I've just discovered a formula that generates episodes
of PBS Idea Channel!
By now you're almost ready to get out there and start creating. You've learned what creativity
is and you've got three top tips to help unlock yous. But there's one more thing
you might need to think about. Have you ever noticedthat a lot of creative people tend to be
sad? Even depressed, sometimes? Why is that? And is there anything you can do to avoid it? Well Creativity and Sadness
will be the third and final part in this series.
Patreon.com/philosophytube is where the fans of this show help crowdfund it. Sadly all these academic
resources and texts I've been citing are not free, and uh... neither is food! So
if you could chuck a couple of bucks my way to help keep me alive and
keep me giving away free education on YouTube I'd really appreciate it. And as always don't forget to subscribe!