Where the ideas are

Yesterday morning while running, I listened to an interview of Jonah Lehrer discussing his new book, Imagine: How Creativity Works, in which he explores the roots of creativity and tries to answer the question of where people get ideas.

The interviewer asked Lehrer about his premise that all kinds of creativity have common elements in terms of how and where they generate. Creativity does not manifest only in writing a poem or painting a landscape; Lehrer posits; creativity can also be found in the formation of an advertising tagline, the invention of masking tape, or the solution to a software bug.

Not surprisingly, when I think about the presence of creativity in my life, I tend to think about my writing, especially essays and blogging. Coming up with ideas – no fewer than three a week, to meet my self-prescribed blogging quota – sometimes feels like an almost agonizing workout of my creativity muscles.

So I was interested in what Lehrer had to say. One key point he made was the importance of the mental stimulation we get from other people. To take his point a step further, the secluded-cabin-in-the-woods concept for writing isn’t really the best way to generate ideas, though it may seem awfully tempting to a would-be novelist who is also a stay-at-home mother of three young children or a would-be poet who is also an accountant heading into tax season.

My experience definitely bears this out: although solitude is wonderful for output, a retreat tends to be most useful when you already have an idea you want to pursue. For sheer generation of ideas, what I find to be most useful is, more than anything else, exposure to other people who have something to say, whether in the form of friends, academic lecturers, clergy members giving sermons, or even celebrities making off-the-cuff comments about their own lives. Even chaperoning kids’ activities always gives me a rich storehouse of new ideas. So does a half-hour of sitting in a doctor’s waiting room, though I’d rather not have to do that to be inspired.

Lehrer tells the story of Steve Jobs insisting that the Pixar Studios be reconfigured such that everyone was required to use the same pair of bathrooms rather than have one close to their desk. It was, quite simply, the optimal way to be sure that employees had regular and inescapable contact with one another – and it was from that constant exposure to other minds that the ideas started flowing, no pun intended.

All of this is a good reminder for me when I start to feel reclusive and try to justify staying home to write rather than going grocery shopping or meeting a friend for coffee or volunteering in my kids’ classrooms. No: I know that really I need all of those things. Those are the moments from which creativity is generated. And next time I’m stuck for an idea, I’ll shrug off the temptation for quiet and solitude, and will instead grab my notebook and head for wherever the crowds can be found.

Creative cow-tending

Despite visual evidence and pastoral sonnets to the contrary, life in the barnyard is in fact never dull.

As I wrote about recently, the herd has grown. And for a while, it looked like my cow-feeding responsibilities would end as a result. Twelve animals, ranging in size from medium to extra-large, just seemed like too many for me to deal with every morning.

But then they were divided by fences into smaller groups, which made it a little less intimidating, and it turned out that I didn’t want to give up barnyard duty after all. So once again, since the beginning of last month, I’ve been out feeding the cows every morning before my daily run.

The feeding season started out well. This week has been challenging, though. I thought I’d developed a foolproof system, one that would work even with a sub-herd of six bovines following me as I trek through the mud to the barn. Adhering to the successful method I developed last winter, I climb up the outside ladder to the loft and throw down some haybales, which is supposed to divert the animals sufficiently that I can then slip in and out of the front of the barn without anyone following me as I pull out a few more bales.

But we have a new animal named Gretchen who is very large and a little bit pushy. Well, maybe that’s unfair. Pushy is a relative term, and when you’re Gretchen’s size, simply ever-so-slightly-leaning, or standing with the slightest bit of sideways motion, can make you seem pushy to someone less than one-tenth your weight. Anyway, Gretchen is clearly a grass-is-always-greener type of girl – quite literally, in this case. She dives in eagerly enough as I toss bales down from the loft, but somehow by the time I slog my way through the mud around to the front of the barn, she’s always right behind me, certain that whatever bales I’m about to pull out for the other herd are inherently superior to those that she was offered.

Other cows, assuming a creature who is both larger than they are and more interestingly colored (black and white as opposed to their uniform red coats) must know something they don’t, follow suit, and before I know it, I’m hemmed into the lower level of the barn, unable to push the gate back open because they are all standing too close to it. So I throw out some more bales, but because they are all in my way, the bales more or less bounce off their sides and land on the ground, directly in front of the barn door. So the cows stand there and eat, and I still can’t get out.

Yesterday I solved the problem by climbing over the barn gate rather than opening it, sliding into the few inches between Gretchen and the side of the barn, and slithering my way to freedom. This is a bad idea in any conditions, given that the space between a large animal and a wall is not where you most want to find yourself; and an even worse idea given the current mud conditions in the barnyard, where getting anywhere quickly – or, in this case, out of anywhere quickly – could present a problem to boots that can’t lift out of the ooze.

Today I solved it more creatively. When Gretchen and a few of her compatriots stood directly in front of the barn, I placed hay bales on their broad backs and let them roll off the other side. The animals turned toward the hay once it fell, and I made my escape.

It’s not a great solution, but in the barnyard, as in life, circumstances are ever changing. Within the next few weeks, the current configuration of animals is likely to change – some will be moved for breeding; others for weaning – and it will be less complicated when there isn’t such a high concentration of critters in any one place. The mud will turn to frozen ground, and that will make general navigation of the terrain easier as well. Moreover, Gretchen might wise up to the fact that there’s no difference between the bales I’m throwing down from the loft and those I’m trying to hoist out of the lower level, and then maybe she’ll eat contentedly near the loft and leave me to pass in and out of the front of the barn unobstructed.

Between the three, that last possibility is the one I’m least inclined to bet on. But it could happen. The grass may be always greener, but the hay is always….hay-colored. Maybe the animals will realize that. And if not, I’ll just keep finding new and creative ways to vault over them. Necessity is the mother of invention, and somehow, if need be, I’ll come up with a bovine circumnavigator of some kind before the winter ends.

The clamor that generates creativity

Some writers dream of solitude: a Thoreauvian cabin in which to spend their hours writing; a windswept beach on which to walk alone as they let ideas percolate.

I know better: at least for me, it is the company of others and not the silence of aloneness that energizes me and fuels my creativity.

And this is fortuitous, because a solitary cabin on a windswept beach is not a place I am likely to find myself any time soon. But last night, feeling refreshed from the weekend and excited about a new work week beginning, I was struck by all the different constellations of people who had peppered my entire weekend, from start to finish.

On Friday evening, I went to a small gathering at a friend’s house: there I visited with four or five women whom I know but haven’t spent nearly enough time with lately. On Saturday afternoon, I walked for an hour with my friends Jane and Donna. On Saturday evening, one of Tim’s friends came over, and the kids and I played Parcheesi out on the screen porch long after dark.

On Sunday morning, the gathering I was in the midst of had an average age of about nine: I taught the grades 3-5 Sunday school class, and struggled to answer their provocative questions about everything from whether to use “He” or “She” when talking about God (as with so many other aspects of Unitarian Universalism, I told them, you should use whichever one is in accordance with your beliefs, or perhaps neither) to why in Biblical times animals – such as the Garden of Eden’s serpent – talked to people and today they generally do not.

On Sunday afternoon, Holly and my mother and I attended an open studios event at a large arts complex in Maynard; dozens of artists took time to talk with us about their work, which ranged from painting to jewelry making to pottery to metal crafting. In the evening, my parents came over for dinner, and as we once again sat out on the screen porch – it was an unseasonably warm, humid weekend – my father told me a story I’d never heard before about a time during his teenage years when his boat ran out of gas and he spend the night lost in the woods.

While I can’t right now say how any of these encounters will turn into a specific piece of writing, I know it’s all mingling – or perhaps composting -- somewhere in the back of my brain. By the end of the weekend, I was struck by just how lucky I am to have so many people around me so much of the time: children, adults, friends, new acquaintances. Solitude might be effective for meeting deadlines, but company is what writers need in order to generate ideas. And as much as peace and quiet sometimes seems like an unattainable goal when you are in the middle of the busy parenting years, a clamor of voices can be more artistically inspiring than any lonely windswept beach.

Creative output

I asked Holly what she planned to do after dinner, during the thirty minutes or so before we needed to head upstairs together for reading and bathing.
“I’m going to write a play,” she answered.

“Wonderful idea!” I told her. Holly’s third grade teacher is a playwright and songwriter, and without overtly urging the kids to take up either pursuit, he has probably been responsible for many more creative efforts this year in our household and those of Holly’s classmates than might otherwise take place.

Holly sat down at the desktop computer in the family room while I started collecting dirty laundry. Five minutes later I saw her heading off to another part of the house. “The computer kept freezing,” she announced. “So I’m going to build a blanket fort instead.”

A blanket fort? I wanted to protest. What if Tennessee Williams or Eugene O’Neill or Thornton Wilder – or Shakespeare – had ever-so-nonchalantly decided to go build a blanket fort rather than write a play?

I don’t mean to suggest that my daughter belongs in that pantheon of playwrights, just that I was alarmed at how easily she abandoned her literary pursuits. To my mind, her intent to write a play was obviously much more important than any kind of fort-building, and it was unnerving to see her shrug off the plan so easily.

But at the same time, this is one of the most delightful aspects of children’s creativity: how they haven’t yet distinguished art from craft, creative endeavor from hobby, self-improvement from fun. In my mind, those delineations are always obvious. Going running is important; taking a walk is just for fun. Writing an article matters; writing a Facebook post is a frivolity. Making dinner matters; baking cookies is self-indulgent. And so on. Not that I don’t do the things in the latter category; I do all of those things, walk and write Facebook posts and bake cookies. Just that there’s always the foregone conclusion in my mind as to whether or not any given activity is truly worthwhile or just for fun.

Kids don’t think that way. I remember one summer afternoon when my niece, Phoebe, was about five and I was babysitting for her. She played in the sandbox for about fifteen minutes; then she decided to weed the garden. She knew how to weed a garden; she’d been helping her mother with that job all summer. But what was interesting to me was that from her behavior and her attitude, there was no clear difference between sandbox play and garden maintenance. To me, one was recreation and the other was labor, but to her, both were opportunities to have fun in the dirt.

Still, I didn’t want to give up quite so easily on Holly’s literary ambitions. “You can use my laptop if the desktop isn’t working,” I offered. She considered for a moment, and then I guess the muse called out to her, because she sat down at my laptop and worked for the next half-hour or so on her play. When she read it to me, it sounded like she’d done little more than establish the mood of the opening scene, with three characters having a few lines each of banter. “I’ll work on it more tomorrow,” Holly told me with satisfaction. “Now I’m going to work on my blanket fort.”

My friends who are engineers might say that it’s the blanket fort that’s the really important pursuit here, and the script is a mere amusement. Either way, it’s probably good that she wants to do both. As is true of most kids, her interests are diverse and her judgments about them are minimal. I would be wise to follow her example in both regards.

One last Colorado post: Thinking more clearly west of the Continental Divide

One more vacation post before the week ends. (Yes, our vacation was last week, but rather than announce through an open-access blog that my whole family was out of town, I’m posting about it on a one-week delay.) So, one more Aspen post before I return to the realities of Carlisle…a place that at times is also nearly as bucolic as a vacation. But not quite, because home never is.

Aspen, on the other hand, always feels exotic to me, even though I’ve been spending a week or more there almost every summer since I was born. My family vacationed there when I was growing up; now I vacation there with my children. It’s a longstanding tradition.

I still remember how when I was barely older than Holly, I was aware that I felt different there. Specifically, I felt more creative, though I couldn’t have articulated it that way at the age of eight. I remember countless projects undertaken there as I was growing up that I never would have taken on at home. I read epic novels. I wrote dozens of letters to my friends back home, and to just about anyone else I could think of. I wrote poems and plays.

And it wasn’t just me. My mother would do amazing handiwork projects out there: knitting or needlepoint. My elder sister would take on complicated academic challenges like learning an entire year’s worth of AP bio. One summer when I was a teenager, I devoted most of my time to photography and even taught myself darkroom skills using Aspen’s community college facilities.

Once I was old enough to be aware of this phenomenon, it didn’t seem remarkable to me. We spent four weeks at a stretch in Colorado each summer, and I didn’t have any friends or scheduled activities out there. It made plenty of sense to me that I was more focused on creative projects than at home.

But later, in adulthood, when my vacation allotment shrank to only a week at a time, I was surprised to note I still felt more creative when I was there. I still accomplished more writing and reading, and came up with more ideas in general.

To some extent, this happens to almost everyone when leisure travel takes them away from home. In fact, I read an article recently about the appeal of SkyMall, the in-flight shopping catalog that you find on planes, and the article said that one reason those catalogs succeed is that they carry a range of self-help products – everything from exercise equipment to foreign language tapes – and people tend to be more open to the idea of self-improvement when they are traveling. Out of our usual context, many more changes seem possible.

But in more recent years, I’ve begun to suspect there actually is something in the Colorado air that sharpens my mind a little bit. For one thing, the summer climate is drier than in New England. Humidity tends to make people sluggish, which is certainly not ideal for creativity. Just as at home I feel sharper and more productive in October than in August, the dry, sunny, often cool Colorado air makes it easier to think. And there’s a certain scent in the air: wildflowers and sage. There’s even a sound I associate specifically with Aspen nights: the clip-clop of horses, since a horse-drawn wagon passes by our condo every night ferrying tourists around town.

Besides, I know for a fact it’s not just me. Aspen hosts all kinds of creative and intellectual events. It has the yearly Aspen Summer Words writers’ conference, which I attended last year, and also the yearly Aspen Ideas Festival and the Summer Music Festival. One afternoon a couple of years ago, I was running near the conference center just after lunch during the Aspen Ideas Festival. It was apparently a time when a lot of the conference participants take a break; thanks to the oversized laminated name tags they all wear, I eventually determined that within a one-mile stretch of the running path I’d passed a Supreme Court judge, a former secretary of state, three professors who are household names, a university president, and the director of a well-known think tank. It was a cerebral place to be running.

Unlike when I was a child or a teen, I can’t exactly leverage this rich source of creativity for maximum output anymore. When I was sixteen, I could spend hours sitting on a park bench writing; now family needs take precedence, and I’m lucky if I can find an hour a day for creative pursuits. But it happened again last week. I’d brought a reasonable amount of work with me, and to my surprise I did most of it, and I enjoyed the hours I spent working.

For whatever reason, the muses still call louder than ever once I cross the Continental Divide. Maybe it’s the vacation mindset. Maybe it’s the thinner air sharpening my thought process. Maybe it’s entirely the power of suggestion. Whatever the explanation, I try hard to capture as much of the creative spirit as I can while I’m there, and bottle it the only way I know how – with notes and drafts – and bring it home. Back to my real life, it’s not always easy to maintain the creative juices. We can’t be on vacation all the time. So, just as with the other benefits of vacation – relaxation, good exercise habits, more positive personal relationships -- we take the best of what we develop while we’re away and try hard to make it work for us at home.