What the Water Taught Me or Refreshing Your Relationship with Your Sketchbook, Part I

Postcard No. 3

Remembering Night Swimming

Mixed Media, Collage

Several weeks ago, right on the heels of the amazing Ghost Hunter’s weekend, my boyfriend and I arrived home to find our basement flooded with nine inches of water.

Driving home in the cloud soaked twilight, the neighborhood was an eerie scene, with the rain streaming down and fountains of water bubbling up from the manhole covers and storm drains. My intuition said it didn’t bode well for our seepage-prone basement and I was, sadly, correct.

We lost a few things, some that can be replaced and some that can’t, but thankfully important items, like my sketchbook that my mom kept from when I was little, made it through perfectly dry. My large, unwieldy art portfolio was in the basement and while some of the contents were quickly subscribed to the trash bin, other items, like my sketchbooks from college, I couldn’t give up on and I dragged them upstairs and set about a campaign to dry them.

For weeks, my sketchbooks were spread out on the radiators around the house or, on nice days, propped up in the windows of the back porch, the breeze fluttering the thick damp pages.

Not being one to sentimentally return to mull through things, it was an interesting lesson for me to see how my use of a sketchbook has changed. In college, my sketchbook was filled with images, sketches, design ideas for silk scarves and pillows. I used my sketchbook as a place to try out ideas and play before putting paint to paper, or dye to silk. Sometimes, there were also just big, emotionally-driven, playful drawings or the drafts of poems that later were published.

The sketchbooks, as they steamed and curled on the radiators, lived and breathed with images and the play of ideas. They clearly showed a colorful phase in my artistic journey.

In contrast, I realized that my current sketchbooks are filled with more notes than ideas. That business meetings and To Dos dominate the pages and the occasional “this-meeting-should-have-ended-20-minutes-ago” doodle decorates the edges. There are also notes on books I am reading, or activities and ideas for things that I want to improve in my Creative Thinking class. So while it is important material, it is very distant from the colorful playfulness of the pages of the previous decade.

I like the liberty of having a sketchbook for work, but it made me realize that I need a sketchbook to play in again—and that I need to take the time to play; to return to more visual exploration and expression.

The other thing that I saw in my open and drying sketchbooks was that they held the blue prints of many projects that had made their way from idea to tangible object. Which was an interesting observation—creating a master sketch seemed to make something happen. That or I was just closer to a finished project at the time that I was testing it on paper.

The damage of the basement flooding served as a catalyst for not only looking at my artistic process but specifically my use of sketchbooks and the role they play in cultivating ideas. The resulting search for a new sketch book and its insights are topics for my next post… Until then, I invite you to think about your artistic journey and how you can refresh your relationship with your sketchbook in the activity below.

Sketchbook Meditation

This activity is designed to help you take a look at your own work and see if you there are some new directions or explorations that may stimulate new ideas or work flow habits.

Take out your current sketch book (hopefully it is always nearby!) or, even better, if you keep sketchbooks, take out a selection at random and line them up. Flip randomly through the pages and observe what you see about how you work. Some questions to ask yourself:

• Do you use a lot of words or do you use more images?
• Is there a focus, or do you cover a wide variety of ideas and topics?
• What mediums do you use (paint, ink, pencil, mixed)?
• Is the information organized or random?
• Do you go back and review pages or information?
• How many of the ideas in the sketchbook made it into bigger, tangible pieces?
• How many of the ideas are “blue prints” and how many are exploratory or from playing?

After going through the questions above, think about what you may want to introduce that is different in your current sketch book. Maybe you realized that you want to play more or use more visuals. Maybe you want to better balance blue prints vs. playfulness. Maybe you want to use paint, rather than your standard pencil.

Pick one item/element from your observations and introduce it to your sketch book in the next week. See what happens and how you feel about your relationship with your sketchbook and documenting your ideas. Hopefully it will be a little bit of a “refresh.”

Want to get an idea of how others are using their sketchbooks? Check out http://sketchbooks.org/

“Star-Stuck”: Stop Censoring and Begin Championing your Curiosity (inspired by my weekend talking to ghosts and ghost hunters)

It is not every weekend that I get to go ghost hunting, nor is it every weekend that I get to meet and hang out with the people that I watch on TV on a weekly basis. So you can imagine my delight (if not outright glee) when my boyfriend surprised me with a TAPS(The Atlantic Paranormal Society) ghost hunting weekend at The Spalding Inn in New Hampshire lead by Jason Hawes, Grant Wilson, and Brit Griffith whom you may know from the Syfy hit show Ghost Hunters.

It is no secret that Ghost Hunters is one of my favorite shows. Watching Jason, Grant and the team calmly explore extremely creepy places, debunk hauntings as rattling pipes, etc. and enthusiastically document unexplained incidents, is a weekly ritual. It appeals to my Nancy Drew-side with its mix of adventure, practicality, and the uplifting knowledge that there are mysteries out there to be explored.

So when I found myself standing next to Jason Hawes in the lobby on the first night of the weekend, you can understand that a.) it felt unbelievably surreal and b.) that I experienced my first case of (subtly) being “star-struck.” More importantly, for the purposes of this creative thinking blog, I would like to call it “star-stuck,” meaning that I suddenly had an incredible opportunity to have a memorable conversation and receive the answers to about 10,000 of my ghost hunting questions (or at least say something interesting to a very normal and cool person) but I found that my internal dialogue was being censored by my preconceptions. I didn’t want to say something that every other fan had most likely said. I didn’t want to pester him with a question that he had most likely answered a zillion times. I opened my mouth and the only thing I managed to say during this fantastic opportunity was “I really enjoy the show.” Lame.

With the entire weekend still stretching before me, I resolved that a moment like that would not happen again, not with the TAPS team or with any other person that I found interesting and had the opportunity to meet in my lifetime. For me, the ironic part was that since I teach, and also present to clients at work, I know what it is like to answer questions, and frankly, they are my favorite part of any presentation. Questions are great because they give you a place to start an interesting conversation. So, with that knowledge, I bolstered my courage. I also made a list of all of the things I had ever wondered during the show and identified my key questions: have they ever encountered any people living in the abandoned buildings? Were there any situations where they had felt afraid? Do they do anything special to master or control their fear when being in an unfamiliar (and sometimes sinister) place?

Not only did I get to ask my questions to Jay and Grant at the Q&A session on Saturday, but also afterwards when we were hanging out in the lobby and the pub. During the investigation time, I even volunteered to ask questions to the ghost of Mr. Spalding who haunts the inn—and (through the K2 meter)—he answered back. Now that, is a memorable conversation.

I took many great things away from this experience, but one of the inspiration points for me was tapping into my curiosity and taking advantage of those rare chances you have to ask questions. One of the ways that I am continuing to cultivate this is by keeping a question list in my sketchbook. It is a great source of new discovery points, especially as I try and let my imagine run wild. This means I ask questions such as “What would I have asked Jim Henson if I met him?” or “What was Edison’s inspiration for the lightbulb?” In making it somewhat limitless—out of the boundaries of time and space reality—I discover a lot of cool things that I want to explore.

Within the more practical boundaries of reality, this is also a very helpful activity for when you are going to lectures, discussion panels, or networking events. I recommend identifying someone that you hope to speak to at the event and then list five questions that you would like to ask them. Then make sure to ask when you have the chance!

Curiosity Building Exercise:
In his book How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci, Michael Gelb, recommends creating a list of 100 questions to help stimulate your curiosity. I find that creating any list of 100 things can be daunting (although I recommend the challenge of it—it leads to some good questions.) I like cultivating the habit of curiosity through questions in sets of five. I recommend focusing on people or subjects that you have an interest in learning more about. A good starting place, for instance, is to take one of those crazy college entrance-like questions such as “If you could have dinner with someone from any point in history, who would it be and why?” Then make a list of five or more people that you find fascinating—then imagine you get to actually have dinner with them: what would you ask? List five questions for each person. See where it takes you. Happy discovery time.

Creating Time Awareness OR The Ultimate Love/Hate Relationship: Time & Creativity

In college, I had a French teacher who, when teaching us to tell time in French (it was a remedial level class, languages not being my strength), would meander off into enthusiastic philosophic musings about time and his unique perspective that the round face of the clock was a pie constantly being devoured.

While the French language has not stayed with me, the vivid image of the disappearing hour-pie has. In fact, I can’t think of time—the artificial, man-made version of it, that we use to measure things such as arriving promptly, being up late, the duration of a task (or amount procrastination)—without thinking of a pie chart. Mainly because, by its very own definition and act of measurement, time is limited resource no matter how we “slice it.” We all have the same amount of, and personal struggles with, time especially when it comes to bringing ideas into action. How we spend our time is, on a very simple level, based on our own choosing and an act of creation/creativity in itself. Our relationship with time can be a powerful force for, or against, creativity and ideas.

The ultimate love/hate relationship is time and creativity. While ideas need time to incubate, they also need a certain amount of pressure to force them into being. This is why we live in a world of schedules, weekends, vacations and deadlines. One of the most important things that you can do to bring ideas into action is to create an equal balance in your schedule of time for doing/creating/producing and time for daydreaming/ playing/relaxing. While it is somewhat natural to consider things like vacations and intense work areas in the course of a year, I find it to be very helpful and refreshing in a small-scale way on a weekly basis. (Also, when you use mind-mapping as a planning tool, it is often a good chance to visually make sure that you have equal goal time and down time.)

The first step to creating that balance though, is creating awareness of how you use your time. There are a numerous ways to do this but being the paper person that I am, I find that even more than lists and digital calendars, graph paper keeps me honest. My strategy, in a very large horizontal graph paper notebook, is to map out the entire week. I block out all the things that I have scheduled, pencil in all the things that may change, add the time that it will take to travel places (this is a very important thing) and then, as the week goes, I block out the things I have actually spent my time doing. This effective technique allowed me to see that parts of my work day were spent in unproductive flurries of 15 minute chunks of multitasking, which were adding to my feeling of never getting anything finished, and that I sometimes easily lost a couple hours in the evening to the television. It helped me decide that I can close my email for an hour, and that I probably don’t need to watch the eleven o’clock news, giving me more time to accomplish the ideas and tasks that I had on my creative project list.

While beginning this task is easy, maintaining it, being honest and not passing judgment on how you spend your time is challenging. On the other hand, once you begin the exercise, just the act of mapping out the week by hand brings attention to areas that you have to work on projects, or to identify areas that you may have over-scheduled. (Note: It is important to fill in the tasks as you go, rather than wait for the end of the day.)

In the case that your schedule is (at least for the time being) no-way-around-it intense, I recommend the following to at least give you the impression that you have some creative thinking time:

• Write, sketch, or read for pleasure in the 15 minutes before bed/falling asleep
• Walk when you can, whether it is on your lunch or to run a local errand
• Take 15 minutes at the beginning and end of the day to do something of your choosing that is purely enjoyable
• Take 5 minutes during the day to stare out the window, meditate, do nothing, or listen to a favorite relaxing song. I like Chopin’s Nocturne No. 5 in F Sharp that has an ending I could listen to forever. (Five minutes! You may even find several five minutes time blocks in your day.)
• Use a timer. This is one of my favorite ways to balance the desire to clean and organize my work space and home with the promise to myself to play or work on creative projects (that don’t feel like work).

By keeping track of your hours on paper, I at least hope that this little task helps you with the big topic of time and creativity. Bringing awareness to your daily devouring of every 24 hours, will hopefully help you see opportunities and find creative ways to take back your time in order to create new ideas and bring them into being.

Recommendations & Further Reading
My intention of writing this post was further inspired after reading posts on two of my favorite blogs in the past week that, I felt, spoke to this desire for time in balance when nurturing new ideas. The first is Pam Slim’s winter musings on her blog Escape from Cubicle Nation and the other was Havi Brook’s post about a fragile new idea on her blog The Fluent Self. Barbara Sher’s book Wishcraft also contains, in my opinion, the best practical advice for time management when working towards achieving a dream. It is optimistic with a touch of kick-in-the-pants. For building a better relationship with time, I recommend Waverly Fitzgerald's book Slow Time or visiting her blog Living in Season. Last but not least, for those of you who like ready-made and despise graph paper, Paper Source has a great perpetual calendar planner that is not unlike my current time tracking system, but much more fun and colorful.

Follow Up to Four Blank Books

My brother, song writer and historian-in-training at UVA sent me this picture and the following note, that was too good not to share as a follow up to the last post:

"I'm going to become a student of Paper Compass. Although I've already failed the last post because I have a different notebooking system: one which is a quasi-personal journal in which I track my academic progress, the other is a raw song/poetry notebook, and then I have an intense archiving system for all my school notes. Nonetheless, I know when to admit I need help. See attached photo. I was looking for some song lyrics that I wrote in 2007, and still haven't found them. Feel free to use this as an example of what happens when you don't properly organize creative thought."

PS. E, there is no chance of "failing". It is all about creation and customization. And by its very nature, creativity--the act of creating--means it is always a work in progress.

Four Blank Books for All Seasons

I am a firm believer in all things cyclical. Like the seasons, my desk and work area have a tendency to mimic the progression of nature’s wild abandon through the seasons. Come spring, new projects are usually in the works. By summer, the file folders are full. And by the end of autumn, papers have piled up like so many stacks of leaves, along with notes, ideas, sketches on scraps of paper, articles and images to be housed and projects started only to become TBR (To Be Resumed) after the holidays.

So winter finds me in a desperate frame of mind for a clean slate, a neat desk and all things tucked away like the severity of a frozen landscape. My tendencies for organizing and mission towards a personal inventory (another thing ingrained in me from my eight years of retail) are slightly held in check by the amount of time I have to dig into them, but even if I have to work small (like drawers and file folders) the sense of well-being is immense. (I will confess to mind mapping the areas I am going to organize in the winter, which does prevent this from becoming a daunting and unrealistic task as I am too “creatively minded” to be a neatnik.)

Like the possibilities of the blank page, a fresh work area is like a launch pad for projects—especially ideas in progress. Part of my customized system of organizing includes four very important blank books where I store all the ideas, images and scrap-paper notes of inspired brilliance (which sometimes make no sense several months later and go in the recycling bin). It is a system I have had going for a few years, and it comes in very handy. Especially since, once the blank books are filled, I put them in the bookcase and can reference them later, when hunting for inspiration.

Here are the four all-important books: one is an image-based sketch and idea book, where I keep everything from drawings, to images that intrigue me to gift ideas and recipes (I cannot tell you how handy this is during the holidays). The next is a notebook for everyday plans, ideas, and raw thoughts. There is also my journal (in which I also put photos and mementoes) and the last is a notebook I reserve for any and all things that have to do with writing stories. The last notebook, by the end of the year, usually has become fat and lazy with plot twists and character sketches that get stuffed into it when I have to sacrifice my time for writing creatively. (If you are not a writer, I would still recommend this for any pursuit, whether it be painting, decorating, cooking, or even business ideas.)

If I was to recommend any of the above books as a must-have or a “start with this,” I would go for the imaged-based sketch book. You will never need to keep magazine around for longer than a month. Plus, over-time, it becomes a lush visual journey that tells its own interesting story and/or is usually good for some idea inspired lateral thinking and random connections.

For me though, just getting the desk clean and all the ideas sorted into their respective notebooks (with all the glue stick and tape that involves) gives me a sense of tying up loose ends. For the unfinished projects, or ideas that still make sense, it gives me an important overview of what projects I have to return to working on—usually when I have no excuses and more time (which sounds like a good topic for next time.)

Further Inspiration
I highly recommend having some sort of blank book in which to store images or things that make your mind light up. If you would like to use this as a creativity tool rather than an idea system, I suggest using it as Sarah Ban Breathnach does in her year-long meditation book, Simple Abundance. As part of the self discovery process, she calls it an Illustrated Discovery Journal and uses it to give insight into things that you may not recognize as points of inspiration, but will reveal themselves throughout themes emerging in the images.

Looking Forward: Using Mind Mapping for Goal & Intention Setting

January is named for the Roman god Janus, who looks both backward and forward. After the whirl-wind of the fall semester and the holidays, January can seem stark with its quiet, weather-driven days. I like to use the weekends in January to catch up with myself and look forward—not making predictions, or resolutions, but set goals. What is it that I want to accomplish this year? What ideas do I want to invest in? I like to take time on a Sunday afternoon at the beginning of the month to mind map not only the year ahead, but also take stock of what I have accomplished in the year that has passed.

I put on some music that lends itself to becoming forgotten and immerse myself in drawing, sketching, and connecting words. I recommend a fresh sketch book/idea book to begin the year, but all you truly need is a fresh sheet of paper (usually the bigger the better, especially if you like to spread out).

When looking ahead, I have two approaches. Sometimes, I focus on the entire year, and more often than not, I focus on the seasons, creating four separate mind maps. Personally, thinking about the year in seasonal quarters is deeply ingrained in me from years of retail, but also makes the year ahead seem less overwhelming. There is a place for everything in moderate detail within each of the seasons.

From the core image, I set out branches that cover the key areas of my life, such as: Friends & Family, Home, Career, Finance, Learning & Travel, Body & Mind, Reading & Writing, and Relaxing. This is a fairly customized list, and I encourage you to do the same for your own exercise.

Mind mapping is a great tool to explore ideas in a non-linear format. It is ¼ list, ¼ notes, ¼ connections and ¼ map. There is no right or wrong way to create a mind map. I often start one and then refine it if it gets really messy. The point of the exercise is to look holistically at the year ahead and set about creating space for you to explore the time and place to either bring to fruition creative ideas that have been percolating (like the short story that you have outlined but never officially begun) or schedule time to learn a new language or finally take that French cooking class at the culinary institute. It is also great for planning ahead for birthdays and holidays.

Once you’ve begun experimenting, you can adjust your mind maps to be as big-picture or as micro-detailed as you would like. Often, when I have multiple projects going on, I create a monthly mind map to document the key points that I would like to take action on that month.

Ultimately, mind mapping the year ahead creates intention. I’ve found that things I noted in my mind maps, even if I was unclear how it was going to happen, do come about—in some way, shape or form. Sometimes things happen in a way that I had not envisioned, and when I go back and look at my mind map, it never ceases to amaze me what ideas (and wishes) have come to fruition.

Happy New Year & Happy Mind Mapping!

Resources: I was introduced to the concept of Mind Mapping as used for setting goals in Michael Gelb’s marvelous mind-expanding book How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci. I then learned more about using mind mapping as a tool for monthly planning , or even a daily performance evaluationsl, in Tony Buzan’s book Mind Mapping. If you are more of a list maker, or want a quick life-area evaluation tool, I recommend Julia Cameron’s The Artist Way, The Life Pie exercise or Barbara Sher’s yearly planning map in Wishcraft.

Paper Trail

Sometimes it can take a while for an idea to move from conception to being something tangible. The blog that you are now reading was an idea just like that. It has hovered around, like a hummingbird drinking nectar, gathering, darting, but not landing anywhere. Until now.

Sometimes ideas come and go. Other times they decide to stick around. It has been my intention to begin The Paper Compass for over a year. The only challenge was that I didn’t know what it was. It had unlimited possibility and was everything from a small business, to nothing but a name inspired by an image in an altered book that my sister had created. Now, I am letting it off the page and out into the world. It is a working blog that shares both my own experiments in creativity, and connects them to the quintessential role that paper plays in my life. Hopefully it will also inspire you to join me in the journey.

The Paper Compass is about using paper to motivate your creativity, make better connections, and build memorable relationships. It is about taking the magic that happens in your head and using your hand to put it down in ink (or graphite)—imperfections and all.

For me, the point where pen and paper meet is the point of intention. Sometimes ideas hover, and sometimes they don’t. Stock piling them is good for a number of reasons, but for where we begin today, the act of putting them on paper creates a paper trail. Just like a paper trail can lead to solving a mystery, so can documenting your ideas.

I hope that you will enjoy reading my posts and that the ideas will inspire your own creative thinking. My intention is to post in the first and second halves of the month, sharing exercises I am exploring, how I am keeping my mind flexible, and over-coming challenge areas (like putting ideas into action, which, unfortunately, happens sometimes).

Please join me in sharing your own experiences and creative thinking tools in this space, creating a community dedicated to discovering ideas and opportunity everywhere.