Accessing Your Creativity

Can creativity be learned, trained, harnessed, made to do our bidding at our beck and call like a willing servant? Can it be made reliable and prompt in delivery? I think so. I think if you're comfortable with your subconscious mind, that part just below conscious awareness, you can open an ongoing dialogue with it, a dialogue of the kind you might have with your closest friend. You built that friendship on trust. Trust was the outgrowth of reliability and confidence. You took pains to keep your friend's confidence and avoid hurting their feelings. Your very speech and manner of approaching your friend was fine-tuned within a mutual relationship. You both developed a shorthand dialogue based on accumulated, shared experience and understanding. Now you consult that friend when you are in a jam, i.e., you face a deadline and you need to reach in and come up with something creative.

Okay, so how do you buddy-up with your subconscious and what does it mean to do so? First, spend some time together. Retreat to the kind of setting that you have found enables you to be productive, perhaps a quiet or peaceful location, or even a stimulating location. Whatever its nature, it is one that solicits visits by your muses. Here you can converse undisturbed. Listen to your thoughts. That's right. Hear the voices? You're not crazy, just attuned Most people, I have found, can hear their thinking because we think in words. Writing, especially poetry, is a sensory-based activity. Fire-up all your senses; "hear," "see," "touch," "smell" everything your mind is offering up for examination.

Often we do not think about nor are we particularly conscious of how we think. By that I mean the processes of thinking that we employ. Certainly, we form images, but we tend to be "closer" to one mode (words or images) than the other. So, many find that one of these modes is more easily accessible than another. Internal auditory and visual experiences are common. Fleeting images come in and out of conscious awareness. We hear words and see things, and we experience feelings. Capture those words, flesh-out those feelings and commit them, as incomplete as they may seem, on a sheet of paper. You could also use an audio recorder to capture this "stream of consciousness." Either way you will be better able to remain relaxed because you have relieved your conscious mind of the anxiety associated with the fear of losing such budding ideas. Because once we tense up, we lose. Our "companions" leave the scene and disappear like snowflakes on the ground, never to reappear.

I find it helps to turn on some music. Any kind that puts me in a productive state. I like Amerindian chants, monastic chants, new age music, Jonathan Livingston Seagull-type inspired music, even the themes from action movies, depending upon my mood and objective. I listen to the music, try to acclimate to it, catch its beat and tempo (important in rhyming poetry) and just let it saturate my mind. When I begin writing, I find it easier to maintain flow and pace. It's as though I got on a parallel railroad track and am riding alongside of it Once my "friend" and I are in sync, we can meet in that mysterious private "chat room" where communications are rapid, subtle and symbolic. The images, feelings, and words may need further translation and elaboration. Many creative people complain of outside distractions interfering. I have found that a strong effort to block outside distractions actually seems to cause me to focus on them, so I have learned how to let them pass through and "rob" them like a highwayman as they go by. Sometimes as they ride by, they drop oft useful leads. I can't recount the many times this was the case with my own children when they were young.

Maybe what I'm doing is a form of meditation. I like to leaf through a general catalogue or a dictionary. I find the dictionary stimulates all kinds of images and internal dialogue, and it isn't long before secondary association comes into play. Try this: open a dictionary, randomly finger a word, focus until you either have a firm image of it in your mind or you hear your own words acting on it or you begin feeling a feeling. Play with two disparate words. Talk about them aloud; see what they begin to suggest-- let yourself elaborate on their connotations. Practice this as a discipline until you are able to do it easily. Don't give up if at first it seems difficult. Along another line, and perhaps surprisingly, I find watching nature and science channels excellent sources of poetic inspiration.

In the discipline of creativity, practice is important. It has been reported in the biographies of Nikola Tesla, the great electrical inventor/pioneer, that his ability to visualize was very highly developed. Blueprints were created after the fact so that fabricators could build the invention he had visaged. It was seldom necessary for him to have to revise their design. And, incredibly, they say he would "test run" electric motors and tune-in periodically to see how they were holding up! And why not? How many times have you revisited your work during the course of a day spent working on something else? I think we all do this at some level So it was with Albert Einstein and Leonardo DaVinci and, of course, many others with a creative bent, including great entrepreneurs who cast visions for business enterprises. So too, the humble poet in us.

When I am leafing and locate a word, I am reminded of an experience. As adults we have accumulated a vast reservoir of experiences. We do not have to invent that "data base;" it is already there; we just need to access it at will. I replay things in my mind's eye. I dwell on them a while and reconsider their meaning. I try to get at the feelings generated and reframe them as a basis for finding new ways to express them. Maybe then they have the substance of a poem, and maybe not, but in the process, if interesting lines enter my mind, I copy them down. Later, I usually find I can associate these lines together, and they will suggest the core of a poem.

Now that process leads you to great diversity of ideas. You don't know what the outcome will be going in, but you can be sure it will take a form. When it does, it will begin to speak back to you at some not too remote point in time. That, by the way, is today's definition of "Chaos:" a state of flux whose outcome is not predictable in advance, but which will ultimately take a pattern that is recognizable. So then, the finished poem, product, whatever, is recognizable. It will take on a unique character but still be recognizable. A hybrid perhaps, or some other transformation into something that is somehow familiar to us. It is important to note here that, knowing this, we should not fear that the emerging, incomplete images and words won't fit, that they will never be synthesized--they will.

Another technique I use is one I invented and tested in a large-scale, formal experiment in a professional work force, involving over 400 persons. See referenced study at the end of this article. It involved the use of visual stimulation to "break loose" the subjects' internal associative abilities. When that happened, their associative capacities "snowballed," producing a much greater fluency of ideas (in a measured given time period). In my theory of creativity, which was an outgrowth of that study, I maintain that there are four major elements: 1. Imagery, 2. Analogy, 3. Association, and 4. Transformation. I call these THE FOUR WORKHORSES OF CREATIVITY. When we are being creative, in writing a poem, for example, we are using most, if not all of these processes. They can occur in any order. I might experience an image, followed by an association to something else; then I may transform that into a line of poetry. Or I might focus on a word or an object, get an image, find an analogy and express that. I try to be conscious of my thought processes so that I can retain some deliberate control over the outcome.

I don't always know the topic of my poem going in. When I do, I use the same processes, but it's easier because I have a starting focus. When I don't, I use my "mental web-crawler" as I have described and let it offer something up. When that happens, and this is important, I have to be civil to it, like I would be to a friend. After all, its being offered by my inner friend, my unconscious mind. Only an ingrate would deride it or send it back. And, tell you what, when that happens, there's a tiff, and we don't talk again for some time. A kind of self-created "dry" period ensues. So be kind to your unconscious, and it will be generous to you.

Transformation is a very important part of this. As I define "transformation," it means the deliberate alteration of a starting image or idea, either to create something new, or to change a concept to, say, a line of a poem. This is a two-fold process. First comes "Divergence." I go for a range of diverse images, words, or lines. Second, I become selective (this is called "convergence"), and I close in to pick from among the alternates I have generated. In poetry, I think this is crucial because it translates directly into the exact words or lines of your poem. And this is where the mailer comes to rest.

We all know this is make-or-break. The skills of converging and diverging are quite different and equally necessary in professional life today. Generally, convergent thinking aims at narrowing down options. It is thought to be resident to the left hemisphere of the brain, the part that is analytical and uses deductive thinking. In contrast, the right side of the brain is generative, good at speculating and offering up a multitude of ideas. I suppose it would be fair to say that the finest poets are whole-brained !

You can see how the processes of imagery, association, analogy, and transformation intertwine here, When you want to transform poetic expression, transformation allows you to you to generate alternate, but roughly equivalent ideas. One way to do this is to come up with analogies. Analogies are wonderful where you want to reframe something to see it in a new light. Inventors often use analogies taken from nature to come up with new ideas and improvements. So do poets, all the time. Transformation allows us to wrest new ideas from many quarters of that disordered "universe" inside of us. It allows us to exaggerate and distort reality the way a comedian does. It allows us to combine an idea with another in a way it may never before have been done. We can also rearrange the elements of our thoughts like the furniture in our homes to give things a new look. I think poetry that reframes an experience in a totally new perspective does readers a service when it gives them a key to extracting new meaning from life's experiences.

When poets succeed in doing that, they are using all four workhorses whether they are aware of it or not; both sides of their brains are operating. If you stay mindful of these four workhorses and learn to use them in your writing, I think you will improve the novelty and diversity of your work. What more can a writer ask for?

References:
Article, "Imagery Is Poetry," by Joe Lavigne, Arcanum Café 1997.
Study, The Effect Of An Experimental Training Program On The Creative Thinking Abilities Of Adults. by Charles Albano, 1987, University Microfilm International.
Poems about the creative process appearing at this site are: "Thinker's Block," "Perception," "Word Squeezing," "Concentration," and "Teaching Thinking."

(Copyrights 1997,1998 by Charles Albano - No reproduction without express permission from the author)