Getting in the Creative Groove

When the well runs dry and the ideas won't flow, it's time to get out of your head. Really out of your head. I like walks. Rambling, long walks in places I haven't been. The point is to turn focus away from the critical voices yammering inside the skull. I play a game - looking for x number of things to see. Things to observe. From the macro - Some days there are great alpine glow photos. (Alpine glow on the Olympics here). To the micro - Some days it's nothing more than listening to the gentle cackle of a pair of crows courting one another in the trees. Or the little weird and wonderful things that happen closer to

home - like a seagull trying to make a snack out of something as big as it is. The point is to focus outward, to distract the ego enough that the creative juices have a chance to work in the background. For me, the more I try to pin creativity down with ego-driven critical YOU SHOULD BE <fill in the blank>, the more creativity squirms away, retreating into the dark. If I give the grasping, frenetic portion of my conscious mind something to do, creative stuff is then free to sneak back into the open. I favor walks because moderate physical exertion works wonders for shutting up monkey mind. So does journaling.
 

 In the bad old days before better living through chemistry made ironing work shirts a thing of the past, I would have my best writing breakthroughs while ironing (which I absolutely hated - ironing - not the ideas.) The task was mindless, but you had to pay attention so as not to burn down the house. Or permanently press your digits. Conscious mind got occupied with wrinkles. Creative mind churned in the background, kicking out little 'hey, what if' voices. The closest I get now, is through walking a couple of miles (which occupies the conscious mind) or via deliberate alpha state meditating.

Still. All of that can be a little naval gaze-y. And occasionally, the best option is to stopping focusing inward at all. The best kick in the creative pants comes from looking out at the world and observing. Mary Buckham, in the midst of teaching a plotting course, once said that it is a writers job to see what no one else can or will see and then bring that to the page. We concentrate so hard on getting things to the page, we forget all about being observers of our world - all of our world, not just the bits inside our heads. Which makes me think that maybe tomorrow morning, I'm due for a good, long walk.



Crisp Precision

If you watched the Olympics, or if you watch any kind of dancing competition, you've seen crisp. You've also seen the antithesis. I wish I had videos to show you to illustrate crisp and - you know - not. However. Speaking of not so crisp, since I'm posting late and I still have word count to rack up today, me surfing the interwebs isn't going to happen. I know my weaknesses.

So I describe. 

Crisp is during a football game, some guy leaps into the air, hangs there, and plucks the ball out of the sky as if he had all the time in world to wait for it. He lands, there's a beat, and then he takes off down the field. He makes it look easy.

Crisp in this context describes physical precision. When it's lacking, you look at someone's performance, nod and say, "Eh, not bad." If the performance is crisp, it becomes one of those cheesy "OMG You Have to Watch!" videos that makes the email and social media rounds. I know a little bit about it because of Stage Combat training. Without at least a little bit of physical precision on your part, your fight partners didn't last long. What?? Mine are all fine. I swear. Though I won't make any claims about having made swinging a broadsword look easy. It wasn't and I didn't.

Oh, look. It turns out I lied. I do have videos. This is music. In the first one, watch how Bing Crosby belts out his show tune while making it look like the easiest thing he's ever done. In the second, Bing is much older. Same song, but all the ease is gone. The song and the performance are as muddy as the river he sings about. I can't watch the second one all the way through.

 

Well, dang it YouTube. I don't guess there will be any kind of contrast/compare. YouTube won't play nice.  (Here's the URL, but YouTube won't let me put the video into the post. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2GFxVCE5pQ) But really. If you're watching a performer make hot, sweaty work of whatever they're doing - unless, of course, hot and sweaty is the *point* - the performance isn't crisp.

 

What does it matter? Very little, probably. Some people like to see the work that goes into something - whether an athletic performance or a piece of art. Other people (I find I'm one of them) value the mastery demonstrated when someone makes the difficult or the impossible look like a cakewalk. Think Jackie Chan. He can't possibly be human. He has achieved a stunning level of physical precision and mastery. And he makes it look not only like it's easy, he makes it look like it's all an accident.

 

Is it stupid that I want that kind of mastery over storytelling?