Raw materials

     I'm picking up today where I left off on Monday's post on the subject of "playing", but more specifically on being creative. I was interested to read in the comments about people's preferred methods of "creative play" (for want of a better description), for example, working with clay, arranging flowers, hand-painting yarn, photography - and yes, Simon, it's just a sheet of white printer paper and why it sometimes goes blue-ish as in the picture of the pen, below, I haven't a clue!

     What we do with our chosen raw materials depends on a number of things including, apparently, the right brain/left brain balance: how far can we exclude or ignore our left brain "critic"' and let our right brain create freely. Not glamorous or arty in the least, but I find I often get good ideas when I'm doing the ironing and I'm convinced it's because the left side of the brain is concentrating on steaming out those creases and folding shirts accurately so it's too busy to interfere with the other half which is musing on subjects for this site or thinking about how to describe and appraise a long novel in a paragraph or two.

     There is a growing body of literature on the subject of "releasing" one's creative powers, and the following are books I've read and found useful: Julia Cameron's famous The Artist's Way: A Course in Discovering and Recovering Your Creative Self (has anyone else ever tried morning pages?) and her The Right to Write: An Invitation and Initiation Into the Writing Life, and Betty Edwards' equally well-known The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. If you can recomend any others, please do so in a comment.

     While on the subject of raw material, writers often say they find theirs like scavenging magpies, picking up sparkling ideas where they happen to come across them, and the overheard conversation can be a fertile source for this.

Here's an exchange between two ladies lunching at the table next to mine recently:

"Oh, silly me, I've left Nigel Havers in the car!"

"Keep him, darling - I don't need Nigel."

You may not want him, madam, but there are others who'd jump at the chance!

Comments

[Peter the Flautist]

Scientists and Engineers (well good ones anyway) scavenge ideas like mad and from all sources - it is why we read so much! I find conversations with interesting and open-minded people in varied disciplines to be a very fertile source of ideas and new directions

Dark Puss

[Peter the Flautist]

Re the "blue" paper, looks like either the wrong "white-balance" chosen manually (i.e. set for tungsten light, but actually daylight illuminated) or a problem with your camera auto-balance. It is also interesting that it is being mapped to a mid-grey level rather than white. Is that the raw image, or it it processed at all?

[Mark Thwaite]

Sandra aka Mrs Book World -- http://bookworld.typepad.com/ -- did "morning pages" for a while and wrote wonderfully entertaining blog posts about doing them too ...

I do groggy morning tea, anything much else is beyond me ...

[Charity]

I recently purchased The Creative License, by Danny Gregory. I'm really enjoying the concept that anyone can draw, anyone can be creative... now I just have to get up the nerve to try it out!

[Margaret Powling]

The funniest bit of overheard conversation was when, deep in the west country where I live, two old biddies were chatting on the pavement of a small town. As I passed them by, one said to the other in her lovely Devon burr "I like remembering 'ow tiz was!" I (To translate for non-Devonians: I like remembering how it used to be.)

[Barbara MacLeod]

Yes, I think ideas (and solutions to nagging problems) seem to emerge when we are in a sort of day-dreaming space, e.g. driving on the motorway, sitting in a bus looking out the window, falling asleep in the bath.
To me creative thinking is more about connecting disparate things. Also, I wonder if a lot of it is about how one looks at things, e.g. part of a pattern? A mirror image of something?

[sherry]

Charity summed it up well... just start.

[Lee]

Seems to me we cant escape overhead conversations in this age of mobile phones. One only has to be sitting on public transport to overhear somebody's story - often spoken loudly and with disregard to other passengers! However must be a source of raw material for the creative writer methinks!

[Rebecca]

What a wonderful snippet.

I think your thoughts on left/right brain are rather interesting, indeed a great deal of my own blog thinking goes on while ironing, I actually iron rather more these days than I once did, I wonder if it is because I am subconsciously enjoying the thinking time?

You have mentioned some great resources there, I am off to explore them in more detail. Thank you for making my morning coffee break so pleasurable.

[Wanda J]

I love doing things mindless tasks that allow thinking time. :-)

One book I've enjoyed is Madeleine L'Engle's Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith & Art.

[Ruth]

In Ssinburys one day as I criss-crossed uo and down the aisles with a married couple.. they must have been married abot 40 years.

She: Doilies we need doilies.

Silence.
Then an explosion, as if a volcano had been slumbering for many years and had finally broken through the earth's crust..

He (very loudly, at the top of his voice and rising hysterically like an opera singer practising his scales): Doilies, why do we always have to have damn doilies?

It's the little (and white and cut-out in pretty holes) things that send us over the edge, isn't it?