The Creative Process phase 1: research

What do you do during your creative process? What do you use your creative process for? I’m self-expression oriented, and on top of that I’m more sensory oriented than abstract/intellectually oriented–textures, colors, sounds, and structures are more my medium of choice than words or diagrams or games.

So for me, anyway, the creative process starts with research–though no matter who you talk to, research seems to be the first step of choice.

I’ve been toying with the idea of a couture collection based around elements of nature, and one concept that is most interesting to me right now is decomposition, mainly because it affords a lot of textural variation.

Here are some of the images I’ve been pulling from (all were found on pinterest):

 

 

The thing I had never really noticed before was how many pink undertones there are to the browns of nature. I’m used to thinking in terms of golden-browns, or bluer browns…but the pink is simultaneously a softening agent as well as implying a healthy process. Which I like.

The next step in the process is going to be finding non-literal ways to use the shapes, textures, and colors, so that the idea is still present, but is more developed, more organically incorporated into the designs, evolved. So now I play with shapes, and silhouettes, and use of materials, until I start to develop a coherent idea. And I expect that my original starting point of “decomposition” will evolve into something quite different before I’m through.

Creativity and the Brain

The great thing about being creative is that you get a lot done, and the more you do, the more exciting it is.

The not-great thing about being creative is that creativity has its own schedule.

This past week, I’ve been doing creative output 10+ hours a day, ranging from costume drafting to programming. I’ve been using the active/”on” time for one creative activity to simultaneously operate as the passive/”off” time for another. I’ve been juggling, and laughing exultantly all the while.

Today, I am utterly useless.

My brain wants nothing more than for me to sit and watch paint dry—so, naturally, I’ve been watching head-explodingly adorable kitten videos on Youtube.

Unfortunately for me, I’m not driven by ambition, by goals, or by competition. I’m driven by boredom…or rather, my utter abhorrence of it. And watching kitten videos, while an excuse to gabble and squeal incoherently for 20 minutes, is a pretty boring activity for me.

“Well, fine, I better find something more stimulating to do.”

So I hopped on facebook.

I can hear the eyerolls. I hear them.

At which point I had a conversation with a friend of mine, who, like me, has a past firmly anchored in music performance (mine, if you lovely folks didn’t catch the first post, was in oboe performance).

“GUESS WHAT”

“what”

“I BOUGHT A VIOLIN YESTERDAY”

I did, indeed, buy a violin yesterday. I’ve always wanted to play—but that takes us down a very long yarn.*

I was expecting an eyeroll followed by “of course you would” and a head shake with a grin, but I fell flat on my emotional face when he asked:

“Have you ever played a string instrument before?”

This set my brain off in about ten different ways, but the biggest protests were the following:

How in the world is that a relevant question? Who decides whether or not to do something based on personal precedent? How would anyone ever learn anything with that sort of attitude? Did he live his life this way?

“What kind of stupid-#$& question is that?” I demanded.

“Let me rephrase it. Are you going to get a teacher, or are you just winging it?”

And I got set off again. Since when was this a point of contention when learning something new? I remember him picking up piano, and I remember how obsessed he was with it, and how brilliant he became. I remember him patently refusing to get a teacher, because it was expensive, and because he wanted to learn from recordings, rather than the dictations of a local piano teacher. I remember how far he pushed himself and how much of his potential he realized just by practicing intelligently. And now this from him?

So slammed my laptop shut, because I was about to tear his head off.

And then I thought about it. I was being really emotional about this. But the creative process is near and dear to me. It is the engine of my life. It’s the antithesis of boredom.

Where did creativity come from, anyway?

I opened up my laptop again, then redirected to Youtube. If I was going to be useless, I may as well learn something!

The first video I found was a TED talk by Jak Panksepp about studying the neuroscience of emotion in animal brains. Then I link-hopped to a TED talk by Vincent Walsh about the neuroscience behind creativity.

My big takeaways were the following:

1) Depression/purposelessness and enthusiasm are emotions resulting from “competing” emotional systems. Feed one, and it’s influence over your emotions waxes while the other’s influence wanes.

2) creativity doesn’t actually happen when you’re working on a project. Creativity happens when your brain is resting. Rest allows different parts of your brain to talk to each other, and that’s how new connections form, and that’s where new ideas come from.

3) creativity is not originless. Creativity can only happen after you have obsessively worked on a specific skill set or problem for hours and hours, consistently, over long periods of time.

Conclusions:

1) Creativity feeds the enthusiasm system, which starves the depression system, and which causes a positive feedback loop; creativity is then exhausted because no time has been spent allowing the synthesis of new ideas, which leads to boredom, which leads to depression, which starves the enthusiasm.

2) Your brain needs a lot of feeding and some time for digesting before it’s gonna poop out that million dollar idea.

At first, I thought this was interesting, but then it made sense. Or rather, it made traits about me make sense. Have time for a story? Great!

A month ago, I went to Romania—Bucharest, to be precise. I was gone for a week. The month prior that, I was in a terrible mood, dominated by anger, frustration, and hopelessness. I knew I was mad, and I knew I was mostly mad at myself, because I wasn’t living the life I wanted to live. But what was that life? I had no answers. How did I define happiness, and how could I attain it? I had no answers for that, either. What was I passionate about? My question was met with silence.

I left for Romania four days before my 27^th birthday. I had been dozing on the plane for three hours when it suddenly hit me.

It was less like a eureka moment and more like the dam had burst open. I tore my laptop from my backpack, slapped it open, and furiously typed out a stream-of-consciousness that would give Faulkner a hard-on. Within twenty minutes, I had discovered the answers, which were now clear as day, to all but one of the questions I had been asking myself incessantly for the last six weeks. Within the next twenty-four hours, I had answered the last question, and then deftly wove the answers together to come up with a life plan that I would be able to start executing within the year, and would be able to see to fruition within 2-3 years.

Let me rewind and point out the important bits:

Questions I had been asking myself incessantly for the last six weeks.

Dozing on the plane for three hours.

Suddenly hit me.

Sounds a lot like that eat-digest-poop cycle I outlined above, doesn’t it?

It was a surprise to me that creativity would crop up in life questions, and not just related to writing, or fashion design, or programming. But that’s all creativity really is—problem-solving. Which applies to any aspect of your life.

Which means that self-help books that talk about turning your life around on a dime are worthless, because if you constantly think about your life, really examine it, agonize over it, obsess over how to improve it–and then take a vacation…

Your brain will do the rest.

Bam.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go enjoy the heck out of a few movies and beach reads for the next day or two. For the time being, it’s my job.

*: The Curse of the Singing Blood: Or, My Life’s Struggle to Learn the Violin

Remember me mentioning I’m a bastard? My father, theoretically, is/was a professional musician. I’ve never met the guy, so I can’t say one way or the other, but I do distinctly remember spending a LOT of time singing when I was very young. I was delighted when I discovered that I could start from any pitch and sing the same melody (inasmuch as my tiny, undeveloped vocal chords could produce), and surprised by how enraging it was when I would change the melodic line halfway through to something far more deranged—later on, I discovered the word for this was modulation, but at the time it just sounded horrible. Shortly thereafter, my mother (bless her) asked me if I wanted to play an instrument. We were getting a new family member, you see, a daddy, who was not MY daddy, but who WOULD be my daddy, and did I want a present for the occasion? Mommy would buy me an instrument if I wanted to play.

“Violin!” I squealed.

“Absolutely not.”

I was dismayed in that way that only children are capable of—that feeling that the world could not possibly exist ten seconds from now because there’s no point in living anymore. “Why not?” (I don’t know that I was quite that reasonable in my reply.)

“Because violins don’t sound good.”

By the way, this is something my mother and I still disagree on. Anyway.

“How about piano?” My mother suggested.

And piano it was.

Later on, at the age of 11, my classmates and I had the opportunity to join band and/or choir. I had absolutely no interest in singing—instruments had completely replaced my voice as my preferred expressive medium, but my mother insisted on including choir in my schedule anyway—but I was interested in playing an instrument.

“Can I play violin?” I asked. Hopeful, but this time I was wise enough to know not to put all my eggs in one basket.

“There isn’t an orchestra at your school. There’s band. Why don’t you play flute?”

My mom had played flute for a while in high school, and she still had her introductory student model in the house somewhere, which was why she suggested it, and why I flat-out refused.

“Can’t I go to a school that has orchestra?”

“No. How about trumpet?”

My father had a trumpet. The enamel was peeling off in places. It was heavy. It smelled funny. There was no way I was putting that thing anywhere near my face.

“How about percussion?” I asked hopefully.

“Absolutely not.”

“But I could practice in the garage!”

I still don’t understand why, at this point in the conversation, my dad burst out laughing, and my mother looked furious. I probably never will.

Anyway, I ended up settling on oboe, but only because “your best friend will be playing it, too!”

My friend lasted a week. I played on.

Later on, in high school, I started playing in musicals, and we never had a violinist to cover the string solos.
“Can I learn violin for musical?”

“No. We need an oboe in the pit. Why don’t you just play the violin melody on the oboe?”

And later, when I was in college, it came up again while I was chatting with a fellow student in the oboe studio after masterclass. “I think I wanna pick up another instrument,” I said as we put our instruments away.

“Yeah?” She hoisted her English Horn case onto her back. “Clarinet?”

I stared at her. “No, violin. Why clarinet?”

“Oh.” She seemed unimpressed. “Well, if you learn clarinet, you’re a doubler. You can get a lot more gigs that way. Musicals and stuff. Plus, it’s an easy transition.”

At that point, the violin train derailed as I skipped off into the clarinet-saxophone-flute sunset and started doubling. After that, the train was forgotten as I left Academialand for the Real World, and then left the Real World for my Roaring Twenties, and then left my Roaring Twenties for Prodigal-Sonland and my return to the Real World.

But the glorious thing about the Real World is a Real Salary.

And now I have the money to buy a violin.

And I’m living alone.

AND NO ONE CAN STOP ME.

The Thesis Statement

Hi! I’m Elliot. As it stands, it is nearing the end of 2015. I’m 27 years old, trans/genderfluid, INTJ-turned-INFP, a bastard, omnivorous, and divorced. I have been paid to be a librarian, a radio astronomer, an oboist*, a doubler, a software quality assurance engineer, a fabric store associate, a seamstress, a tailor, an interior decorator, and a manager. In my free time, I read, write novels, make comics**, crochet, dance, learn languages, cook, and study science and history.

My heroes are Charles James, Margaret Hamilton, T. E. Lawrence, Teddy Roosevelt, Marco Polo, Richard E. Byrd, and Leonhard Euler.

I am obsessed with cephalopods, unpolluted night skies, autumn, Star Wars, and the Merlin mythos.

My universe is fascinating to me.

This blog is a direct result of having the temperament of an academic, but lacking an academic environment. I will always be a learner, an adventurer, an explorer. Unfortunately, my tendency to vomit information for 20+ minutes about the latest thing I’ve learned or discovered tends to bore or overwhelm my family and friends.

Fortunately, there’s the void of the internet to shout into.

If you’re a fellow explorer and/or “multipotentialite,” you may enjoy this blog, which will have posts on widely varied topics every week, ranging from psychology to updates on Pluto to beekeeping–whatever catches my eye and seems interesting at the time. I’ll likely start with comicking techniques and programming, and possibly costuming, as these are topics I’m currently investing time and effort into for external projects. But it might not–who knows?

Welcome aboard, explorers!

—

*: recording is of Maurice Bourgue and the English String Orchestra. It’s the recording I referenced when preparing the piece for an audition for a university tuition scholarship.

**: This is the most recent addition to my hobbies, so I don’t have anything to link to you yet, because we’re still in the planning stages. But once we have something to show, I will definitely post about it here!