Disciplined Creativity

May 18, 2020

It seems to be difficult to find time for creative work, with so many other things to do. I have frequently lamented my own lack of time to do all the things I would like to do. However, the problem seems to be that I have plenty of time, but do not use the time I have. Part of the answer to why I do not is that I try to do too much in one sitting. If I was content to follow my own dictum to set myself a small quota to be filled each day, a quota so small that filling is like "falling off a log" my task would be much easier.

One day, a long time ago now, I happened to wonder how many words a day on average William Shakespeare wrote. Assuming Shakespeare was a real person, not a committee like Homer, and had a career of around twenty-five years, his recognized total production of words comes to around one hundred words a day. That is what you get if you divide roughly 800,000 words by the number of days in twenty-five years.

For that reason I think of one hundred words a day as one "Shakespeare" and have set one or more Shakespeares as my standard for daily writing. One "Shakespeare" a day would write 36,500 words a year, or about two two hour plays. Two Shakespeares a day would write a medium length novel of 73,000 words, and three Shakespeares a longer book of around 108,000 words.

In writing posts for the several websites I am trying to write for, I am aiming to write one Shakspeare,one hundred words, for each. It is not a great problem to write a hundred words on any subject. I can sit down for a few minutes while waiting for the kettle to boil and write over one hundred words. The difficulty is in having the discipline to stop writing when my quota for the project is filled.

It may seem absurd to stop writing when you still have more to say. If you are on a roll, why not keep going? There are several answers to that objection.

The first answer was supplied many years ago by Ernest Hemingway. He held that the writer should always "leave some water in the well". That is, you should always finish your day's writing knowing where you are going to pick up at the next session. If you write only a modest amount on each project each day this principle is easy to apply.

A second answer is that if you limit yourself to a hundred words, or four or five measures of music, or whatever small quota you have set for yourself, you will always be writing at your freshest. You will usually fill your little quota of a hundred words so quickly that you won't have time to grow tired of the task, and With such a small amount to do you can give plenty of othought to the task without infringing too much on other tasks.

A third answer is that with only a small quota to fill each time you set to work, the psychological barrier to beginning is very low. I can speak for myself in saying that I have often failed to set to work on a project, when I had intended to, because I felt overwhelmed at how much there was to do. A large, complex task seems impossible when approached as a whole, but becomes quite managable, even easy, when broken down into small daily tasks.

When I am content to add only one hundred words a day to each writing project I am working on, I can easily make some contribution to each of several continuing projects. The same principle can be applied to writing music. It may be difficult to write a song of ninety measures, music and lyrics, all in one sitting, but to add three or four measures is trivially easy, and will produce your song in a month or less.

This raises the question: is it better to work on one project at a time or many? My conclusion should be obvious.

Making A Creative Schedule

March 30, 2020

Any large creative project is a daunting undertaking. You cannot expect to complete it in one sitting, or even a few. It will take many sessions, over weeks, months, or years. If you hope to complete your book, your musical, your mural, or whatever it is, you have to be a bit systematic and disciplined. You have to reconcile yourself to finishing only a little piece of your project at each sitting, and return again and again until your project is finished.

The creative task is complicated by the fact that you cannot know exactly what you are doing. The house builder, working to a plan, knows what will have to be done, and can schedule in advance, but this is more difficult in writing fiction, or music. or in painting. There you have to discover what you are doing as you go along.

I have struggled with scheduling my own creative effort, and I must say my scheduling is always a bit of a shambles. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak, or there's many a slip bewtween the cup and the lip. Nevertheless it is better to make some kind of attempt at a plan than to have none at all.

Set A Daily Quota

The Victorian writer Anthony Trollope said that a small daily task, if it be really daily will overwhelm the labors of a spasmodic Hercules. Set a minimum daily quota of work for yourself, and try if at all possible to keep to it.

You can set a quota of words written for example, or you can set a minimum amount of time to spend on your project. The latter choice allows for the fact that some parts of your project will be more difficult to complete than others. If you give your minimum time to your project regardless of what you are able to accomplish, it will intrude less into other aspects of your life.

The Falling Off A Log Principle

Make your quota, whether it be a quota of finished work, or of time spent easy enough to fill that it is not at all onerous. If your quota is easy to fill you are much more likely to fill it, than if it is difficult.

Bear in mind that a hundred words a day will write thirty-six thousand words a year, and that five measures of music completed will write around eighteen hundred measures, say eighteen typical musical theatre songs. This is about as many songs as you would find in most musical theatre pieces.

The creative potential is wonderful and there is no reason, in arithmetic, why it should not be realised. You do have to come back, however, day after day to do your small daily task.

It would help to make a plan for your creative work for the week and specify what projects you will work on and how much you will add to each project each day. Remember to underestimate rather then overestimate how much you will be able to do each day. A very small task is unlikely to fall a victim to unexpected interruptions.

Talent: Tilting At A Windmill

March 17, 2020

There is no such thing as talent. The idea of talent, that is innate ability given to one person and not to another, is so deeply set in the popular imagination that explosives would not dislodge it, and it is probably a waste of time to rail against it. Nevertheless, I don't believe in talent, and think the idea is pernicious.

When we describe someone as talented, we usually mean that the person can demonstrate some ability, so the word talent simply means ability, and often an ability or skill that is clearly acquired through practice. This means that a person can become more talented through practice, which is absurd.

Describing an able person as talented deprives him or her of the credit for the effort which may be considerable, taken to acquire the skill. It also implies, tacitly, that other people who presently do not possess the skill are probably untalented and inherently unable to learn.

Any worthwhile and rewarding skill takes a great deal of practice to acquire, practice that can be slow and frustrating. It is all too easy, in the early stages of learning, to feel that the difficulty lies in one's own lack of talent rather than in nature of the exercise. The idea of talent can kill the willingness to learn at the very beginning of learning.

The idea of talent may make you reluctant to begin to acquire new skills for fear of appearing untalented. It is more comfortable to remain with what you have already mastered and can execute easily.

Ironically the most discouraging time in learning a new skill, the very beginning, is the time when you make the fastest progress. Later, as you gain in skill, each practice session will bring less and less progress. This is what we call the learning curve -- a fast rise in skill at the beginning , a slower rise later on. This applies, for example, to the learning of a difficult piece on the piano, and to the acquisition of a general skill in playing the piano.

I think is rational to set aside the idea of talent, and take a realistic view of skills and how they are acquired. The one innate ability we all have is the ability to learn.

How does this attack on the idea of talent apply to the writing of a Canadian musical? To write music, to write lyrics, to write dialogue, requires abilities that are not easily acquired. It is all too easy to assume that these creative activities require some special innate talents given to some and not to others.

But it isn't true.

All around the world people have made their own music, composed their own words, for all we know, since human kind acquired language. All of us can learn to make art. We only need the audacity to begin to learn.

The Psychology Of A Creative Session

March 13, 2020

I should say right away that what follows is my own speculation based on my reading about the acquisition of skills, extrapolated to creative work.

A many years ago, during the Second World War, it was important to train radio operators as quickly as possible in Morse code. Morse was still widely used in radio communications, especially in the air, because the Morse message punched through interference much more clearly than voice messages.

At first thought it seemed likely that operators would learn most quickly if they practised all day every day until they achieved proficiency. However, a study was conducted to compare the progress of students who practised seven hours a day with those that practised only four hours. The surprising result was that both groups progressed at the same rate week over week. The students who practised Morse code seven hours a day were simply wasting three hours in which they could be learning other things.

It seemed that there was a four hour limit to the amount of practice the students could usefully do each day in learning the skill of Morse code sending and receiving. Does this apply to other skills? Apparently it does.

First Two Hours Most Valuable

Later, in the nineteen-fifties, the British Post Office was training keyboard operators to work on some new letter sorting machines. A study there confirmed that there was no benefit to practising more than four hours a day, but it revealed more. Students who only practised two hours a day progressed a little more slowly than those that practised four hours, but achieved proficiency in fewer hours of total practise. In other words the first two hours a day of practise in a skill seem to be more valuable than the last two.

In fact what happens is that when we come to a fresh session of practice in a skill, after a night’s sleep to consolidate the previous day’s learning, we need a brief period, say ten or fifteen minutes to warm up. After that warm up period our ability to learn is at its peak, and declines steadily through the minutes and hours of practice, until at the end of four hours we can no longer learn anything until we have had a night’s sleep.

The curve of new learning of a skill in a practice session looks like this:

The area under the left half of the curve, which represents learning, is much larger than the area under the right half, and at the far right of the curve, at four hours, learning goes to zero. You can practise the piano twelve hours a day if you wish; you will not progress any faster than someone who practises for four. You can also see that three hours of practice is very little inferior to four hours of practice, so someone who practises for three hours a day will not be far behind someone who practises for twelve hours a day.

The Bold Step

Now I dare to suggest that working creatively is much like learning a skill. We learn to write a play as we write a play and learn to write a song as we write that song. If this is so then our daily session of creative work should be subject to the same constraints as practise in learning a skill.

If this is so then the maximum time we can usefully give to any one creative activity in a day is four hours. Anyone who has worked creatively knows that four hours is in fact a long time to give to hard creative thought, and that after a period like that we are ready to turn our minds to something else.

What this says as well, if true, is that there is no particular benefit to retiring to a desert island or renting a garret in some distance city if you want to write or paint, or compose music. Hard creative thought is essentially a part-time activity, and if you have only a half hour or an hour a day to give to creative work, you can still accomplish quite a lot.

Making A Plan For Creative Work

March 11, 2020

I don't say that making a plan is easy. It calls for as much mental perspiration as any other creaive activity, but a plan is so helpful that it is worthwhile making one for your creative work, even if you only follow it for a short time.

A plan allows you to relax, knowing that in a set amount of time you will accomplish what you want to do. It also allows you to allocate your time effectively, so that nothing you really want to do is neglected.

Write It Down

David Allen's well known method makes writing things down an essential part of "Getting Things Done". A notebook of some kind, either paper or digital, is a valuable tool for taking charge of your time.

In your notebook you set out what you want to do, and when you would like to get it done. You record ideas, you work out plans. I keep a notebook of this kind, and I always find it surprising how much I forget, and have to be reminded of.

Writing things down forces you to specify and elaborate; just exactly do you want to do, when do you want to finish, and how are you going to do it?

Read Your Notes

Of course a notebook is only useful if you read what you have written in it. Reviewing your notes is an essential part of note making and planning for your creative projects.

Decide What Is Most Important To You

In making a plan you should acknowledge that you can't do everything you might like to do, although, with a plan you can do more than you ever thought you could. You do have to decide what creative projects are most important to you, and give most of your available time to those.

For me writing songs, lyrics and music, writing plays, writing posts for my website, and possibly writing a mystery novel are the things I want to be sure to provide for. If I can fit in other things, well and good. Whatever art forms you find yourself coming back to again and again are the ones you should consider giving the most time to, and practising every day.

The Quiltmaker's Principle

It is also useful to realize that a small increment of work finished every day will accumulate very pleasantly over time. My wife recently went to a talk on quilt making, and the speaker was a quiltmaker who uses tiny pieces of scrap fabric with a great deal of stitching to make quilt tops. She said that the amount of effort to make these quilts might seem oerwhelming, but that she makes up the tops by adding one or two little pieces at a time, as scraps appear from other projects. A quilt top might take months to assemble, but the amount of time and effort on any one day is trivial.

We might call this the "quiltmaker's principle": add one little bit at a time to your creative project, and let the accumulation of little bits create your project for you.

An Example: Writing Blog Posts

If you want to write a blog post of six to eight hundred words -- the longest article that most people are likely to read -- every week, you have seven days to accomplish your task. There is no need to find time to write six to eight hundred words all in one stretch. One hundred words a day will complete your blog post within a week.

Not only is it much easier to find time on any day to write one hundred words than to write six hundred, writing a little bit every day gives you time to mull over your ideas between writing sessions. Your writing will be better if it evolves over a week than if you write it all in one go, and you will enjoy the process more.

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