Neural Pathways and Creativity

By Lacey Gunter

I have been reading a book about how the brain works. How it learns and improves. The book talks about what is termed 'neural plasticity'. It's like the new buzz word in dealing with problems associated with the brain. If you're interested in reading the book it is called The Brain That Changes Itself, by Norman Doidge.

The book talks about how the brain creates and uses neural pathways, sort of like trails and roadways for accomplishing certain tasks.  When we try something new, a neural pathway is created to record how we accomplished the task. Just like trails out in the wild, the more we use the neural pathway, the more developed the pathway becomes. The less you use a pathway, the more it deteriorates and gets overgrown.

"So why does this matter to a writer?" you might be asking. Well I am no neurologist, but here's how see it. Your brain is like a jungle, Amazon style; where you need a machete to get around. Somewhere in the thick of that jungle is a beautiful pool of creativity, a place where awesome ideas are born. If you've never been to the pool or have only visited it occasionally, it's going to take some considerable effort to hack a pathway to it.

It would be nice if we could just camp by the pool and fish out great ideas any time we felt like it. But back in the real world,  we are mothers and wives and homemakers and employees and we don't have time to sunbathe by the pool. We have places to go and things to do, far away from the pool. Usually by the time we have hacked our way to the pool we have two seconds to dip our hand in before we have to run somewhere else.

So if we let the difficulty of the creative task intimidate us and keep us from trying very often, the pathway only gets more overgrown.  It is only through frequent attempts and practice that our neural pathway to creativity starts to become a paved road, with limited obstacles. So apparently all those great authors that talk about creativity coming more easily when they consistently put in the time were right. You want to be more creative? Get your butt in the chair and write;  preferably with a very large machete (figuratively speaking, of course).

Practice makes perfect: what writers can learn from sketchers

By Lacey Gunter

I have been reading a great book by Barbara Bradley about how to draw people. Like many books on learning and developing art skills, she devotes a section of the book on the importance of taking a sketchbook with you and sketching what you see as you go about your day. You can sketch while you are at the park with your kids, sketch while you are waiting in line to pick your kids up from school,  or wherever and whenever you have a free moment to pull out your sketchpad and jot down a few lines.

She recommends this for multiple reasons; the most important reason being the more you draw the better you get. Another reason is it will give you exposure and experience in drawing a wide variety of people doing various actions in various settings. It will also help you to better observe the world around you and improve your ability to take in both the big picture and the fine details.


She talks about just observing the things around you and drawing whatever peaks your interest, such as a quirky look on someone's face, an intense interaction between two people, the bouncy movement of a child, or the way the wind blows someone's hair. Whatever gets your attention and motivates you to want to capture it in a sketch.

It's a really great idea for improving your drawing skills.  But I was thinking it would also be a really great method to apply to improving one's writing skills. We often talk about keeping notebooks handy for jotting down great ideas whenever they choose to strike. But what if we gave those little notebooks a lot more use by pulling them out whenever we have a spare moment and practicing writing about the things we observe throughout the day. For example, instead of sketching an intense interaction between two people, you could write a short passage describing what you are seeing or the emotions you are observing or the actions or conversation.  Just like with the sketching idea, write about whatever catches your attention and try to put it into words so that your capture that moment or scene.

The great thing about this idea is that it gives you tons of practice on writing about a wide variety of characters, interactions and settings, without requiring a great deal of creative thought or inspiration. Then, when those fleeting moments of creative genius do happen to strike, you will already have a wealth of experience to pull from on how to write about the characters, interactions and settings you create in your mind.

Faster.....faster!

by Lacey Gunter

So, as I mentioned in one of my November posts last year, I am working on developing better illustration skills to be able to both write and illustrate picture books. After watching several drawing videos, I have heard multiple artists state emphatically how drawing and sketching are learned skills. One of the videos stressed the idea that it is great to be capable of drawing a nice representation of something, but to really master it you must practice drawing the object or thing over and over and over until it is very easy to draw the object in a very short amount of time. He emphasized the connection between practice and time, the greater the practice, the shorter the time it takes to be able to draw a good representation.

I thought about how this might apply to writing.  Does consistently writing every day help you to become faster at writing a story or a manuscript? I'm not really sure whether this is true.

While mulling this over, I happened across an article written by an experienced illustrator about her creative process.   She talked about how at the start of a project, getting those first ideas too come out was such a grueling process and it was like wrestling with the characters. But once she got a certain way into the process, things finally started to flow and eventually flood out.  Yet no matter how many times she had done this, the initial part of the process was slow and difficult.

This idea seemed to better fit the bill for me in describing the writing process. The creative process seems to always be so slow and difficult at the beginning. But once you got far enough into the process, your practiced skills and abilities take over and allow you to speed through the rest of the process.

So, yes, perhaps writing every day will help you to become faster at writing the story, conditional on whether you have convinced your creative genius to come along for the ride yet or not.

But maybe for some of you, even that is too narrow of a conclusion? Are muses as varied as writers? Do some muses show up more frequently after dedicated time and practice, while others are as wild as the wind and will never consent to be tied down?

I have yet to find a connection between dedicated practice and the free flow of creative ideas for me. If I had to describe the way my creative process worked, I would probably say my creative juices start to flow only at the last possible moment after all else has failed. 

On the outside this might look like procrastination.  But to me, all those sessions of hoping and mulling and thinking and trying would suggest otherwise, even if they only resulted in blank pages. Then again, someone might make the argument that all those sessions were simply practicing.... If only I could figure out how to get that eleventh hour to come quicker. (Cringe!)

A Walk Among the Inspiration

              Let’s go for a walk together.   

We step-off down the trail at the beginning of a lovely autumn day.  The sun is bright and warm still, but the season lends itself to cool breezes.  As we emerge from a petite copse of fir trees, we find ourselves walking down a gently-sloping meadow of huckleberry shrubs, brilliant red and dusted with early-season snow.

As we descend further along the slope, we dreamily fall into the cooling shade of an overhang of red cedar that trellises a clear, cold water stream.  Along the banks are clumps of vegetation which include scruffy-headed black sedge and honey-centered partridgefoot.  We pause to rest and admire the matting of green fescue with blades bent in all directions because of the soft, downy lops that were playing on them in the moonlight the night before.  Nearby, the fan-leaf cinquefoils seem to all be pointing accusingly at the damp communities of bark streaked mushrooms and splattering of jelly fungi hugging the base of the Engelmann Spruce nestled in couples and small families surrounding this little Eden.

Refreshed of mind and body, we journey forth, this time with an incline towards a forest zone of ancient old-growth sentinels.  We soon trek our way into a swaddling of Pacific silver fir.  At a distance, we thought the silver-tipped highlights were just the accented needle tips of the seasonal makeover, but soon discover the silver treasures are really the cylindrical cacoons of next year’s babies, poised for their earthward plunge at just the right moment.  You pick up a cone and hold it close to your nose, inhaling the pungent pine fragrance, then drop the outsized seed back onto the nursery of old needles.  We trundle onward to our destination.

As we crest the rise we had been laboring to climb, the elevation drops once again. This time, however, our gaze falls upon a beautiful, pristine lake of shamrock green and teal water.  A light breeze is sighing its way across the basin causing ripples to corduroy across the glossy surface.  A small, sandy beachhead near a moderate waterfall that is feeding the lake is our destination.  Once again, we begin our descent into splendor.   

           

A friend of mine mentioned a blogger who writes like this as a form of exercise wherever she goes.  If she’s sitting in her doctor’s office, the drafts short stories full of rich imagery and finite detail about the doctor’s office waiting room wherein she is sitting.  If she’s by the pool while her children swim, she scripts the experience in the richest prose you might imagine.  When she flies in an airplane….  Well, you can just imagine what ethereal mini-masterpiece she creates in that environment.  To her, it’s all just practice; just exercise; just a mental warm-up for the really big race of the NOVEL marathon.

Sixty-Minute Shorts

- a post by Jeanna Mason Stay

Recently I decided that it would be fun to actually, you know, complete a project now and again. I mean, I love working on my novels,** but every once in a while it’s nice to have something finished and point to it and say, “Hey, that’s off my to-do pile.” And thus was born the “sixty-minute short.”

Because I'm pretty sure that adding a pic of
Cary Elwes will drive up blog traffic. :)

The idea is to spend no more than sixty minutes from start to finish on some little project that sparks your interest at the moment. I’m still deciding how to divide up that time, but right now I’m going for roughly this:

1. Ten minutes on planning

2. Thirty on writing

3. Ten on polishing

4. Ten on whatever else needs it

I finished my first one this week, and you can read it here. It’s a short retelling of a lesser-known fairy tale variant called “The Nix.” I shan’t overanalyze it much, but I will mention two things.

First, it was tough for me developing a story I actually liked in that period of time. Story development has always been very slow for me. Also, the time restriction meant that there was plenty of polishing, cutting, revising, and such that I would have done but just didn’t have time for. It was actually freeing in a way to say, “Okay, well, it’s over. Good enough.” And while I’m not perfectly happy with it, I had fun, and that was a big part of the point.

Second, my first draft was significantly darker. Many moons ago, when I was a teenager, I tended to write sort of depressing, bleak stuff (teenage angst, anyone?). Eventually I came to a realization that I didn’t want to write bleak anymore.*** For me, it was a copout—dark was always easier than pleasant. So I decided to revise that out a bit. I think it’s still the teensiest bit ambiguous, but I’m much happier with the ambiguity.

Well, analysis of my story over. Now it’s time for the encouragement! If you are so inclined, you should give flash fiction a try. It’s fun, it’s quick, if you hate it you can just dump it and move on!***** Write it up and polish it in an hour or less. And if you post it on your blog, share the link here so the rest of us can revel in your flash fictioning.

Writing flash fiction is like
crocheting stuffed animals.
No, really. It is.

Finally, if you’re looking for inspiration to draw from, Writing Excuses always has funny prompts, or you could just google “writing prompts.” Go have fun!

* No, I’m not talking about the kind of shorts you wear. I’m not even sure what “sixty-minute” would mean in that context, but it probably wouldn’t be good.

** Okay, “love” may be an optimistic word sometimes.

*** This is a long story involving my sister, a tv show whose name I can’t remember, and Cary Elwes.**** It is not particularly relevant at the moment.

**** I think probably all life-changing events should involve Cary Elwes.

***** These are some of the same reasons I crochet stuffed animals instead of afghans. Maybe I have an attention span issue?

Again. And Again. And Again, Please.

How many of you have ever taken a lesson? Say you learned to play the piano or some other musical instrument. Or you're an athlete, and you trained everyday for years for one race, or you retrain yourself every year for a marathon, hoping to better your time.

I am musically trained. (Meaning I have taken lessons in various forms over the years.) I have done that train and retrain, practicing until the music no longer has meaning, it's been broken down into so many phrases, notes, or atoms. I have taken it all apart and put it back together again so I have the music down cold.

I came into writing with the attitude: 'Hey, I'm a reader. I know what I like. I can predict so many of these books, I could write one in my sleep."

Yes, you can laugh at me, too. Even right now I want to reach back in time and slap myself silly for such arrogance.

I know better now. I've gone through some stages here, though, and wondered if anyone else had travelled the same path as well. Here's what I've identified as the   stage process of becoming anything worthwhile:

1. ADMIRATION: when you look at a performer, be it musical or some other form, and think, "I can do that. I bet I could do it better than they did, even though it was breathtaking."

2. ENTHUSIASM: when you begin the path to your goal, and nothing seems to slow or halt your progression towards it.

3. REALITY: when you realize that the person you were so sure you were better than really knows a whole lot more than you do about the topic. They have achieved of level of proficiency that is far above your skill level. It will be years before you can even come close, and even then it might be a false hope.

4. HEARTBREAK: when you know that the dreams that feed you so full have now dried up, and you are abandoned on the path to mastery. It's swim or be swept back down stream.

5. RESOLUTION: It doesn't matter know what came before or who you were, what thoughts or pride you may have had. You look neither left or right, but trudge forward, keeping your eye on the prize.

I've only recently discovered this applies to writing as well. I know. Shocker.

What about you? Are there any of these rules you agree with? Would you add more? What do you do to get over the hump of rule number 4?