Writer (or Artist’s) Glut

Image from Scooter in the Sticks.

Most creative people eventually hit that edge-of-the-horizon feeling that you’ve come to the crumbly brink of your creative world. The next idea doesn’t show up on time. Missed the train. The next train doesn’t show up at all. The track rolls itself up and over the edge of the horizon, leaving you standing alone, squinting as the hot sun burns out the edge of the sky and drops below your line of vision, sending your last hope of creativity into the twilight shadows. Night descends and leaves you standing without a shadow to rely on.

If you have never experienced this feeling, you probably aren’t trying hard enough to push your creativity. And before you crack your knuckles to leave me a blistering reply that you always have ideas, stop. This is about you. This post is about having too many ideas, too much of an idea, an idea that rolls in like a giant wave, flattening you against the floor of your studio, pressing you down until bubbles float from your nose and you can’t inhale. That kind of creative overflow.

It doesn’t happen to me often, but when it does, it is overwhelming. I’ve been creative long enough to know that when the dark side of the world appears, it signals the long roll into dawn. But crushed with too many ideas, I feel afraid–I’ll lose the most important one, I’ll develop the wrong one, I won’t be able to figure out the process of this brilliant idea over here. Now what?

The simplest idea I came up with is to save as many of those ideas as possible, get them into some form you can understand, and save them. You can figure out process later. You can figure out sequencing later. What you need to do now, before your short-term memory sneaks out the back door, is get some of the ideas caught.

My two favorite ideas for capturing represent the high tech and low tech spectrum. Index cards, my long-time companions and art supply, are the low tech side. I write down the bare bones idea. Just enough to balance the memory on the tee, so I can whack it across the sand trap and out of danger. No big discussion, no marketing, no audience. Just the rough idea is plenty. If you can’t reconstruct it later, it may not have been as wonderful as you first imagined.

The second idea is a voice-recording app on your smart phone. The one you want to install is the one you know how to work. My first one was incredibly easy to use, but I couldn’t figure out how to play it back. You can imagine how that little fault messed with my mind. Occasionally I still believe the best ideas of my life are wrapped around the gizzards of my iPhone. The new one works better.

Don’t edit. Don’t worry. In fact, I generally don’t read or sort the ideas for several days after a brainstorm. I’m too critical. Or too immediate. I toss the index cards into a box and let them dry out. I’ll take a nice patina’d idea over a damp one, any day.

What’s your storage/retrieval system when your ideas back up and pour over you?

—Quinn McDonald is a creativity coach who helps people put life to their creative ideas.

Saturday Drift

Saturday is a good day to drift into creativity. I’ve left you some links to explore while I’m off on my own creative dig.

Mess up a journal page? It’s OK. Here are four ways to fix it or live with it.

Speaking in public is hard for most people. Whether you have to talk to your co-workers or to a room full of people, here are some tips to make the conversation work.

It’s Saturday. Change up that cereal-for-breakfast to a ham cup containing an egg and . . .

Every artist needs room to think and room to grow. Create a space for yourself.

–Quinn McDonald is running around the countryside this Saturday.

 

Lessons From My Motorcycle

For long-time readers of the blog, you know that I believe Suzie Lightning taught me everything I know about creativity. (Yes, my motorcycle has a name, and it’s from a Warren Zevon song.) Now that the weather is warming up, I’ll be riding through the desert more often. It’s another form of meditation–one that requires full awareness in the moment.  You don’t think of anything except where you right now when you are on a bike.  Full awareness keeps you alive.

A mesa in the desert

Riding feeds me lessons in creativity. Your heart is lightened by the views of mountains and arroyos, Saguaros and blue sky. Arroyos are dry river beds that fill up in minutes when it rains, and can lift a big car when only 8 inches deep in water. My favorite drives are away from the interstate, the roads that curve through desert and the endless sky.

The road is two-lane and largely deserted. I stick to the speed limit, because I’m sight-seeing and not in a hurry, and 65-75 is plenty fast for me. But cars appear behind me, fill my rear-view mirror, then explode past me.

When that happens, I back off the throttle, slow down, and move over. If you ride a bike, you know that you stay out of the grease-strip in the  middle of the road, and ride on either side of your lane—the first rider on the left, to protect the space, the second rider two seconds behind on the right, to fill the lane, and the third rider back on the left side.

When a car or pickup comes flying past, I move over in case they cut back too

Dawn on the road.

soon, and slow down to give them more space between us. My full-head helmet is expensive—it’s a “single-use helmet,” and I’m not eager to give it the single use I bought it for.

Watching a pickup truck cut back into the lane in front of me, I realized that that motion of slowing down and moving over is a creative tool, too. When I’m dealing with ideas that are approaching fast and need to pass, I let them go. I don’t try to speed up and catch them. Nor do I  try to stop them or teach them a lesson. Ideas are plentiful, and not all alike.

The people who participate in my art classes (and some of my business classes, as well) are always worried that each idea may be their last. It’s unlikely. There are a lot of ideas, and a few really good ones. Like the cars that whiz past, I remember the interesting ones, the unusual ones, the ones that remind me of something useful. The rest I just watch as they vanish in the distance.

Seeing a lot of cars, like ideas, allows me to choose what I want to remember and use. And let go of what is commonplace, too fast, or not remarkable. It’s a good idea to let ideas go speeding past. It helps develop discernment.

—Quinn McDonald listens to her motorcycle for creative ideas. Suzie and Quinn never run out of roads, ideas, or stories.

Ideas: Set Free Into the Wild

“Set your ideas into the wild.” It was just a sentence fragment I read on a blog today, but now, hours later, it still resonates. What a wonderful image–taking your ideas and setting them free against an autumn sky, to soar away.

The memory of fireflies, Ink on paper. © Quinn McDonald

You lose control over them, but you never really were in control of your ideas. You just kept them, like fireflies in a jar,  until you had filled your eyes with wonder, and then you let them go, because they weren’t really yours to begin with.  But you never forgot the glow in the dark and the churn of comfort and power you got from opening that jar and having the fireflies crawl to the rim, lift their wings and blink up into the grassy-smelling dark of night.

Our ideas are ours to nourish, marvel over, and set free into the wild. You write a book, you teach a class and your ideas float across space and time, to be caught, transformed and set free again, in different shapes and textures. You may not even recognize it when it comes back, but as it passes you on the street, dressed in a suit and formal with design, you’ll smell a hint of summer grass and catch a slight wink of light, and the memory will still be there.

The experience of recognition, the experience of power and joy, that makes setting free your ideas all the more worthwhile.

–Quinn McDonald has a jar of ideas on her desk. She remembers it once held fireflies.

Motorcycle Riding and Creativity

For long-time readers of the blog, you know that I believe Suzie Lightning taught me everything I know about creativity. (Yes, my motorcycle has a name, and it’s from a Warren Zevon song.) So we went off to Tucson this weekend, not on the interstate, but through the heart of the Sonoran Desert. There’s a stretch of about 70 miles where you see the San Tan mountains and then the Catalinas in Tucson,

Rear view mirror gives you a look at the future. From Shop4it.biz

but between the two points, all we saw were saguaro cactus, mesquite trees, and hawks wheeling in the deep blue bowl of sky as we crossed arroyos. Arroyos are dry river beds that fill up in minutes when it rains, and can lift a big car when only 8 inches deep in water.

The road is two-lane and largely deserted. I stick to the speed limit, because I’m sight-seeing and not in a hurry, and 65-75 is plenty fast for me. But cars appear behind me, fill my rear-view mirror, then explode past me.

When that happens, I back off the throttle, slow down, and move over. If you ride a bike, you know that you stay out of the grease-strip in the  middle of the road, and ride on either side of your lane—the first rider on the left, to protect the space, the second rider two seconds behind on the right, to fill the lane, and the third rider back on the left side.

When a car or pickup comes flying past, I move over in case they cut back too soon, and slow down to give them more space between us. My full-head helmet is expensive—it’s a “single-use helmet,” and I’m not eager to give it the single use I bought it for.

Watching a pickup truck cut back into the lane in front of me, I realized that that motion of slowing down and moving over is a creative tool, too. When I’m dealing with ideas that are approaching fast and need to pass, I let them go. I don’t try to speed up and catch them. Nor do I  try to stop them or teach them a lesson. Ideas are plentiful, and not all alike. The people who participate in my art classes (and some of my business classes, as well) are always worried that each idea may be their last. It’s unlikely. There are a lot of ideas, and a few really good ones. Like the cars that whiz past, I remember the interesting ones, the unusual ones, the ones that remind me of something useful. The rest I just watch as they vanish in the distance.

Seeing a lot of cars, like ideas, allows me to choose what I want to remember and use. And let go of what is commonplace, too fast, or not remarkable. It’s a good idea to let ideas go speeding past. It helps develop discernment.

–Quinn McDonald is a writer who teaches writing. Her book, Raw Art Journaling, will be available in July, 2011.

Theme Thursday #4, 6/4/09

This week’s Creative Play roundup is really wide-ranging–no close focus here.

We talk ourselve into and out of the most amazing possibilities by listening to ourselves. Ten ways your brain fools you.

I’m an admitted pen- and pencil addict. I love specialty pens, like this one for arthritic hands, a pencil with 3-lead sizes in one automatic pencil, (which means you can load different hardnesses, too and an eco-friendly, lined journal with paper that won’t bleed.

Lisa Pressman is back from a critical feedback  workshop. She heard some interesting questions, and you can use them, too.

© Jason Mitchener, August Days. See link at right.

Jason Mitchener does some interesting 3-D art. That’s his illustration on the left. His work is available on products, too.

See the world, one urban artist at a time. Here’s the visual journal page of Maria Lopes, from Lisbon. The site has different artists, different cities.

Yes, this is #4 of the series of Creative Play posts that I call Theme Thursday. You are invited to find three websites that focus on your interests and post them on your site, leaving a link in the comments.

Previous Theme Thursdays:

CreativePlay 5/21/09

Creative Play 5/14/09,

Creative Play 5/7/09

—Quinn McDonald is a life- and certified creativity coach. She teaches people how to write and give presentations. She also  manages four journals that travel the world.

Creativity in the Shower

Those great ideas, the really best ones, come at you in the shower, don’t they? It’s not surprising. Studies in brain science generally say that creative solutions come about in three steps:

1. Looking at the problem from many angles in open curiosity.

2. Researching information and possible solutions.

3. Putting away the problem by taking a nap or sleeping on the problem overnight.

When you wake up, not thinking about the problem at all, but coming awake, a creative answer suddenly leaps out at you. Stands to reason you could be in the shower at the time. My morning start with a walk, but I meditate while walking, leaving the mind open for ideas that slap me in the face in the shower.

What do you do with those ideas? Well, someetimes they are fleeting, like a streaker dashing across the brain. I need to hang on to a edge of them before they vanish. So I write them down. In the shower? Absolutely. With a grease pencil. If you are under 50 you won’t remember grease pencils, also known as china markers.

Grease pencil

They are big, heavy pencils that you peel to sharpen. And they write on bathroom tiles. Easier than keeping waterproof paper in the shower. And faster. And it guarantees that I catch the ideas and scrub the shower once I’ve written them down. (Waterproof paper is available at stores that carry serious hiking equipment and construction supplies.)

—Quinn McDonald is a writer and certified creativity coach. She teaches people how to write as well as how to keep a journal you love.