A Prompt and a Catalogue

Sometimes you need a prompt, right? As I know from teaching, a good prompt sets the stage and evokes something’s making it easier to find a creative path. I recently received a collage card from a friend. Her creativity was a delightful prompt for my own. I would not have thought to make a collage at all, and I opted to reply in kind: she made a stylized flower garden and I replied in kind.

I went my own way, too. I developed the prompt for myself by limiting my materials to orange construction paper and a catalogue called Cuddledown: Devoted to your luxurious comfort and style. I am not kidding.

This catalogue is filled with pastel sheets with high thread counts, cozy robes, richly patterned bedspreads. The blue rosettes with cream, the modernized paisley in magenta, chartreuse and ecru (it’s not as outrageous as it sounds!), the watercoloresque impressionistic meadows made the project almost too easy. Sometimes that is the point.

It made for a fun card collage, and now suddenly my white on white sheets and comforter (in my gray bedroom no less!) seems unspeakably boring.

Take Time to Do Nothing

I’m taking my own advice. The pressure to use our newfound free time is absurd. Also, as someone now without childcare who is working remotely full time (and my job is significantly impacted because a majority of it is face-to-face teaching that is now online), I don’t have more free time. In some ways I have even less.

But it’s true that time itself is different. Our entire way of life is upended, and of course ways we structure time are changing. Try to relax into that. To truly be our “best selves,” we need to process and adjust and develop our long-term perspectives. Overwhelming productivity is actually going to slow down that process.

For a related take on this, check out Rachel Charlene Lewis’s “All the ways the internet is pushing hustle culture during the quarantine.”

Collaboration and Creative Freedom

Collaboration can be a great way to jolt your creative process. Sharing control can be frustrating, but knowing that you have to let go is freeing.

Also, for the purposes of creative exploration, I’m not focusing here on collaboration where one person follows another’s directions.

I recently have been inveigled into a number of this sort of collaboration by my kids. One of them will start a drawing, and then firmly request my assistance. Sometimes my job is to “add ten caterpillars,” each with a red head like the quintessential very hungry caterpillar. Sometimes my job is to “add a touch of blue to the brown soil so it’s wet.”

I’ve tried to assert myself a bit here. Collaboration is a back and forth, a conversation: I made a floral pattern and let one of my young artistic partners have at it. The result is whimsical and better than you’d think possible under the circumstances, and the process was a pleasure. Collaboration is letting yourself communicate creatively, letting yourself go, and letting yourself get inspired.

Multiples

Make multiples. It’s calming and promotes creativity. I made 27 butterflies today, with help.

Once you select what you’re making and give yourself a goal, you’re set. You have a specific task. You can pursue mastery of this task; you can explore widely within the confines of the task. It’s much easier to explore within the confines of that task. And your goal will be motivating.

If you happen to be trying to keep kids busy with a craft for more than long enough to pour yourself a coffee. multiples might help do that too. That depends on the kid , though. I make no promises.

Today, our house began a 100 butterflies project. We chose butterflies because we have a butterfly hole-punch, and it’s fun to punch them out, and then everyone can color them. It’s great because we have the confining butterfly shape and then anything goes. It is an almost all-ages collaboration. We are making a kaleidoscope of butterflies. Some are semi-realistic. Some are patterned—polka dots, chevrons, stripes, rainbows. Some have flowers and succulents . Some have scribbles.

One of the kids has already asked if we have to stop when we complete our 100.

Sidewalk Chalk Walk

My kids invited me to take a sidewalk chalk walk recently. I was tired, but they were enthusiastic. They had a container full of big pieces of low-pigment sidewalk chalk. This is not a medium I find inspirational, but when a determined preschooler asks you to draw a tulip, “please,” with a winning smile, what can you say, really? I drew tulips. I drew daffodils. I drew unidentifiable flowers in pale pink, washed out orange, and barely yellow yellow. They a really nice bright blue and some beautiful teal, but those were too popular.

Working with imprecise tools that doom you to failure is typically annoying. But taking a sidewalk chalk walk is amazing.

My pre-K-er did not compliment my efforts at drawing, as instructed, “a fluffy yellow chicken.” She asked: “Why does that chicken look too much like a person? Or a duck?” I kind of wanted to draw a chicken person, but I was hoping she wouldn’t notice. I was not trying to draw a duck.

The medium, low quality chalk left out in a storm last fall on rough sidewalk with scattered leaves, is a quintessential blunt instrument, and is the perfect scapegoat. I can joyfully forget that I rarely draw, don’t remember what little I used to know, and forget what baby chicks looks like.

Working with imprecise tools that doom you to failure might be the most freeing of possibilities. It’s the perfect antidote for people like me who tend to want things to sort of work out. It’s also perfect because when the rain comes, my chicken person will be gone forever, and I can take another sidewalk chalk walk.

Chicken duck person. Chalk on sidewalk.

Overwhelm Yourself to Jumpstart Creativity

Setting up life to foster synthesis, putting together ideas and materials in a way that leads to new connections and concepts, will help develop creativity. Considering how things fit together is a kind of exploration. One counterintuitive way to explore and find creative ideas is to deliberately overwhelm yourself with input—specifically the creative output of others.

In my field and graduate school program, studying for comprehensive exams meant spending about a year reading hundreds of books and articles, some from lists of books chosen by others years ago that were barely interesting and others that I selected and had to defend me selection of. I read so much in such a short period of time that I obviously could not fully absorb what I was reading, but my job was to synthesize it and remember it all so that at the end of the study period, I could take three full-day open-book essay exams. I had the maximum number of books checked out from two libraries and stacks of books with post-it notes all over my apartment. They were organized by theme, sort of. I had typed notes and handwritten notes. I would listen to audiobooks if I wasn’t reading. 

I regularly calculated my weekly reading pace and it was never fast enough. I frequently timed my reading pace, calculating how long it would take me to finish a book, and realized I had to skip along. At a certain point, it wouldn’t matter if I read the words, because there wasn’t enough room in my brain to hold it all together. 
It was absolutely ridiculous. 
What this absurd process did, though, racing through stacks of books and complex articles day after day, is create an atmosphere of synthesis. I made connections I would not have made under normal conditions. I had intriguing ideas that came from the juxtaposition of listening to The Scarlet Letter during a lunch break after zipping through not an article on shame, because that would make sense, but a dull tomb of literary criticism from the 1980s that was definitely written in response to another not terribly compelling 1980s piece of literary criticism that I would read two weeks later, when it happened to show up via interlibrary loan. The interesting thing about this whole mess is that I had intriguing ideas at all. 

The good news is that grad school is far from the only way to overwhelm yourself into a state of overwhelmed creativity. More feasible opportunities to invite chaos abound. Here are three:Rather than spending all of your time at a museum in one time period, and rather than trying to wander through wing after wing, pick two disparate exhibits: Go from, say, ancient Egypt to contemporary textiles in just an hour or two. Rather than reading one book at a time, or a couple of books, have a poetry collection, two nonfiction books, a graphic novel, and three novels going at once. Rather than spending the week perfecting one soup idea or trying ten variations of vegetable soup this month, browse recipes promiscuously and let that coconut lime idea into your mushroom toast plans. 

Because it is deliberately, overwhelmingly chaotic, exposing yourself to a wide range of creative content in a condensed time-frame allows you to make unexpected connections and to develop surprising concepts. 
To wrap up, here is the final lesson from grad school: I remember my year of studying for exams as a time of eating hastily and wondering if I had time for a shower. I would take a jog and love it even though I hate jogging. 

That’s the most crucial bit of wisdom. Stop the input. Reflect. 

And take notes: I cannot remember what I realized about The Scarlet Letter, and because it was quirky, idiosyncratic, not useful for any possible comprehensive exam, I failed to write it down. All I remember is the surprise of discovery, which is probably more valuable anyway.