Summer Creativity Challenge #3: Boredom

It happens in the first weeks of July, after the summer semester has ended—the final projects graded, the last email conversations to students concluded, my normal work day wrapping up neatly within the confines of banker’s hours—I find myself at odd moments during a quiet evening or slow paced weekend experiencing an unfamiliar and almost forgotten sensation: boredom.

Boredom is a rare species.  It is unfocused restlessness that rides on the hands of a creeping clock.  It hovers, unseen and unnoticed, over your shoulder when you are deeply engaged.  Boredom—or the doldrums—carries with it the stigma of negativity and images of unhappy, sour-faced children waiting impatiently on the world of adults.  As a child, boredom is rainy afternoons.  It is the hour before a friend comes over.  It is tasks that you don’t want to do, like cleaning your room.  It is a lack of excitement, stimuli and adventure.

As we grow up, grow older, and take control of our own time, we often forget what it is like to be bored.  We entertain ourselves, distract ourselves, and make plans.  We consciously and subconsciously rail against boredom, eliminating it from our lives.          

We forget that boredom can have a certain magic to it.  It means a slowness of time.  It is carbonated with possibility. 

Which is why, in those moments in the summertime when my world has slowed down and I am undecided what to do next with the time that lies before me, I revel in the foreign feeling of being bored. 

Boredom is transformational.  It is that rainy afternoon from your childhood—when you picked up a soon-to-be-favorite book.  It is the task of cleaning your room—and finding a treasure trove of forgotten toys.  In C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe boredom (and a rainy day) is the precursor to the exploring of the house and discovery of the wardrobe in which Lucy finds Narnia.

Boredom inevitably gives way to discovery, which makes it very important to creativity.  At the beginning of every semester of my Creative Thinking class, I have the students read the July 2010 Newsweek Article, The Creativity Crisis.  In discussion, they always comment on the paragraph which talks about the work of renowned psychologist and creativity expert Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Gary G. Gute, of Northern Iowa University, who in studying creative adults found that creativity flourishes in the space between anxiety and boredom. 

Author Mark McGuinness, in the article, Why Boredom is Good for Your Creativity, that appeared on The 99 Percent the other week (and right when I had started my thinking on this post—synchronicity!), writes about battling resistance disguised as boredom, at the beginning of a project.  He uses special tools to shut off the Internet and even writes at the library to help him stay focused.  “The British Library is a beautiful building, and purpose-designed to be one of the most boring environments on Earth - there are no enticing distractions, and the 'wall of silence' peer pressure from your fellow readers makes it hard to do anything other than sit still and keep quiet.”    

All of this is not to say that boredom doesn’t have its dark side.  As McGuiness explores in his article, and The 99 Percent’s founder, Scott Belsky, also discusses in his book Making Ideas Happen, becoming bored with ideas, right at the time that they need the most work to become tangible, is something that most creatives struggle with.  This is why many ideas never happen—they are abandoned because the work and dedication part is not as exciting as the inception.

Also, boredom by nature should be a temporary feeling.  As a creative, you should know boredom for what it is: an awkward, quiet moment before you embark on another idea or project.  It is a doorway, not a room.  If you identify it as resistance and procrastination--push through! And if you sense that it is beginning to feel like the Sargasso Sea, then I encourage you to add some Artist Dates or new challenges to your work or routine in order to set a spark to the transformation from dullness to exciting endeavor.

All of this is inspiration for the third Summer Creativity Challenge: Boredom.  This challenge is open to interpretation.  You can use it to meditate on boredom—when you last experienced it; what role it plays in your creative process; how you feel when you are bored—or you can use it as a spark of inspiration for a short story or recapture a memory of being bored as a child.  If it has been a while, you can even set up a nontraditional Artist Date to reacquaint yourself with the experience of boredom.  And ultimately new discoveries.   

With this as your touchpoint, record your impressions, writings, memories, or meditations in your sketchbook or notebook.  Record in your sketchbook any inspiration, ideas, illustrations, or thoughts—then share here on The Paper Compass. 

    

Using a Sketchbook Commonplace Book to Jump Start Your Creative Thinking

The summer semester of Creative Thinking is coming. With only four weeks until class, my wintery and myopic mind, preoccupied with work and dulled by the grind of the New England weather, has finally bloomed and started to look forward to the horizon like a sailor in the crows nest.

With the fire of teaching rekindled in me, I take stock of the syllabus and begin some tinkering. I keep the general format of the class and the core lessons, but I tighten and hone the information that enhances them. While I am looking forward, I also look back and review a few things that struck me about the last couple semesters. From here I brainstorm on what I can introduce or communicate better to give the students more tools, information or interpretations to make the experience more dynamic and effective.

My post-mortem introspection of the fall semester, coinciding with some mind-blowing reading of Steven Johnson’s book Where Good Ideas Come From, actually presented me with a new way of presenting one of the core tools in the class. As it so happens to also be a very important paper-based idea connector (of which I can’t overstate the importance to creative thinking) I thought I would assemble my thoughts here and test them in the wild. Which is why this long promised blog post is about a key creativity tool: Commonplace Books.

In the large and detailed document that is the class syllabus there is a list of supplies that the students must have for the class. One of these is “a sketchbook roughly 9 x 12.” By the second class I notice that two camps form: students who embrace the sketchbook as though they have been looking for permission (or an excuse) to buy one and carry it around; and students who only bring a sketchbook to class when required. In lieu of a sketchbook as a constant companion, this group likes ruled notebook paper, small lined journals, and other structured note-taking items that have lines, margins, and generally no really great place to let your mind wander.

It is important to mention here, that I have no bias against how the students are taking notes in the class or using note paper or their sketchbooks. My main focus is that the information is engaging, that it helps them learn, and they have a place to capture their thoughts. To a certain extent though, from my perspective as a teacher, that requires the right tools. Through the last few semesters, I have begun to pick up on an increased level of “Why do I need a sketchbook?” or even as I was asked one time after class “How do I use a sketchbook?” (which is a completely valid question.)

I have come to realize that to a group of highly intellectual and analytical graduate students a sketchbook is an oddity. It was something that some of them had never worked in or owned before, and many believed that sketchbooks are solely for sketching. I understand that this makes it a discerning object, especially if drawing as a form of self expression is not your forte.

Even more "terrifying" is that which also makes the sketchbook so great---finger-flip after finger-flip of blank pages. No lines running right to left to tell you where to start and keep your writing. No lines to sever illustrations or charts. No margins to keep everything framed and boxed in. Just blank pages that can be filled with a little, or a lot. Categorized however you deem to place the information. Diagonal writing, full bleed images, illustrations and text, just images, cut outs, sketches, collage, lists, ideas…there is nothing that can’t go into a sketchbook—that wild white abyss—and become a testament to your creating something new and unique centered around a single theme or a testament to your exploration of ideas.

Also, without lines, the possibility exists that the true nature of your crooked handwriting is revealed and with it—the freedom to create mind maps and integrate other images and things that you may discover your mind likes to read much better—and, most importantly, sparks ideas from the randomness and spontaneous placement of the gathered information.

Which brings me to commonplace books and why I am going to begin the summer semester by making the disclaimer that the Sketchbook tool for the class is really a Commonplace Book—a place to gather ideas. To integrate mediums, to take notes, draw mind maps, do musical interpretation exercises, list things, etc.

Commonplace books date back to the late 15th century Europe and played a key part in the intellectual ideas of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Key thinkers used common place books with the goal of nurturing focused thought and logic to lead humankind away from superstition and old traditions (ultimately this thinking leading to the ideas that inspired the American and French Revolution). Commonplace books were also a way for the people of the time to deal with information overload. Similar to our fascination and frustration with the Internet now, the invention of the printing press provided a never before seen amount of information in the form of books and pamphlets. The information would be amassed (through copying or pasting) by scholars and thinkers into their commonplace books and interspersed with personal thoughts, quotes from letters, illustrations and other relevant information that related to the owner’s passion or the theme of the commonplace book.

Commonplace books also by their very nature integrate two of the most essential elements of learning and mentally processing information: reading and writing. By arranging and commenting on the information gathered in a commonplace book, not only are reading and writing a continuous joint effort for understanding the world, but the information also comes together in a unique way to spark new ideas. Johnson discusses how the commonplace book plays an important part in “the slow hunch.” As the owner of the commonplace book rereads or browses all of the information, the lack of organization leads to a more organic and powerful source for fostering ideas or sparking the final “ah ha” of a hunch. Johnson recommends, “Imposing too much order runs the risk of orphaning a promising hunch in a larger project that has died, and it makes it difficult for those ideas to mingle and breed when you revisit them. You need a system for capturing hunches, but not necessarily categorizing them, because categories can build barriers between disparate ideas, restrict them to their own conceptual islands.”

This organic, intensely unique, idea-sparking book is the special roll that a sketchbook can play when it becomes a commonplace book.

A little extra:
• Commonplace books can contain any assortment of information, from ideas to observations, from recipes to photos and scraps of textiles. The most important thing is that you have a place to capture and integrate items that spark your thinking.
• Commonplace books are essentially sketchbooks, just customized with information rather than sketches. So you have lots of styles to choose from. Just remember that the most important thing is to get started and then, as your common place books grow, figure out what are the elements (size, shape, paper weight and texture) that help you work best.
• Commonplace books have been at the side of some of the world’s greatest thinkers: Darwin, Francis Bacon, John Locke, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau to name a few.
• In recent literature, Klaus Baudelaire, of Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events keeps a commonplace book.
• For more information on ideas and the role of commonplace books, I highly recommend Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From. Also wiki is a great source of information to get you started if you want a more detailed history.

Immersion

It is late November. Wild hurricanes of leaves dance down the streets creating a song that is crisp and lonely. When I stand on the back porch and look towards the woods, the trees are bare branched and I can see the nests of squirrels and birds silhouetted in the light of the sunset, which comes earlier and earlier every evening.

With its earthy color palate of browns, golds, and grays, and promise of colder weather to come, November is unapologetically about turning inwards. Trees shake off their showy autumn mane of leaves and the sap returns to the core. Animals and people gather food, share, nest and sleep longer (or desire too). The weather turns chilly and we spend more time inside, with coffee or tea, with books, or working like elves with a desire to wrap up the year.

Amidst all this, or because of it, I find November a perfect month for remembering the importance of returning to our internal selves. Whether it is a walk outside in the brisk air (often scented with wood smoke here in New England), a moment to ourselves, special time with family, or indulging in a few hours to explore an interest, a personal passion or favorite hobby, it is all about taking time to turn inward towards the core of who we are. Or, in other words, taking time to immerse ourselves.

Immersion is important because it allows us to recharge. Similar to incubation, the second stage of the creative process, immersion allows us to enter a space where we can experience flow, a sense of being connected, or allow our usual mental chatter or activities a vacation. This important and mysterious phase of the creative process usually takes place away from the active attempts of solving the problem—away from the “work.” It is where the subconscious is able to mull things over without the censors of the conscious mind. (How many ideas have you had before falling asleep? Or even in the shower when you are still waking up?)

Magical things happen when we allow ourselves to become immersed in an interest, a simple activity or a moment. Ideas and memories rise to the surface like bubbles in champagne—little trails of thought, connected and disconnected—are uncorked and released. Some linger, and new ideas form and sometimes become tangible solutions or new endeavors.

During the next few weeks on The Paper Compass we will go back to our roots, immersing ourselves in our core creative medium: paper. We will explore some of the ways to cultivate immersion and ideas through journaling, common place books, and letters. These are just some of the ways to gather ideas, consciously and unconsciously, and create a playground (or a launch pad) for ways to work through them or develop them.

I hope that you will join us! In the meantime, I encourage you to take some time to immerse yourself in something special this holiday.

Best wishes for a wonderful Thanksgiving.

Summer Challenges Commence! Tapping into a Season of Creative Experiences

“She needed the sun to mellow and temper her mood to the sticking point.” – The Awakening, Kate Chopin

Summer is my favorite season for creative exploration. Fall is for thinking and working, winter for nesting and dreaming, spring for planning and awakening, and summer—summer is for relaxing and adventuring. This combination of playfulness and exploration seems to unlock something within. The veil between the current moment and memory seems thinner, more transparent, lending itself to glimpses of our childhood; our own current desire to slow down and enjoy, even if just for an afternoon; and sometimes it allows us to rediscover our inner wanderlust and desire to try new things. All of these elements come together to create a perfect season for tapping into our deep well of personal experiences for creative inspiration.

Last summer, inspired by a random childhood memory of bubble gum, I decided to revisit Big League Chew. It became a weekend mission to locate a pack of Big League Chew, which I was lucky to find down town at Walgreens. On the way back home, I opened the pouch and the scent of the powdered strings of gum, with its deep chemical purple color, transported me back to elementary school and the local 5&10 store C.W. Curry’s in Old Greenwich.

All this before I even put the gum in my mouth, which was its own time-travel experience. I was so excited by this endeavor that I enlisted my childhood partners-in-crime, my brother and sister, to do the same thing by the end of the week. This call to action, usually in the form of a text message, to hunt something down to remember it better, continued informally over the summer and was a point of much discussion of old and good memories. It also was a great source of details for stories that I was writing in my creative writing workshop that I take in the summer with Julia Thacker.

This summer, I thought that I would use the next eight weeks, the “dog days of summer” to invite all The Paper Compass readers to embark on Summer Challenges and share their experiences. I will post the challenge and then everyone can reply in the comment thread. You can speak of the memory, or the act of doing the challenge, or discuss a creative project that you may be inspired towards. Many of my memories were captured in my sketchbook or short writing assignments. I encourage you to do the same so that you can record the experience for future inspiration.

I hope that you will join us on this playful and creative exploration of the summer season.

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.