Elisabeth Gilbert: "Elusive Creative Genius"
Daemons, Geniuses & Muses
- Did anything Elisabeth Gilbert said in her Ted Talk make sense to you?
- Do you think you might have an "attendant creative spirit," a "daemon" or a "muse" that assists you in your creative process?
Short Writing
"flow"
Write about a time you've felt
"in sync," "in tune" or in a state of "flow. "
What were you doing?
What conditions made your
flow state possible?
- The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has written extensively about what he calls the "flow" experience in creativity.
- "Flow" might happen to anyone - athletes, business people or artists - whoever is engaged deeply in his or her craft. Flow might even happen during a good conversation.
- Csikszentmihalyi describes "flow" as feeling much like happiness, of being at ease with an activity and oneself.
- When you're in a flow state, you don't sense time passing or any separation from what you are and what you're doing. .
- Another way to say this would be to "feel in tune" or "in sync."
introductions
- Grab a coloured piece of paper.
- Turn to the person next to you.
- Instead of asking your partner "How are you this morning?" draw them.
- When you're finished, write down some notes to yourself about what you learned about your partner (or yourself, or your perceptions of your partner) by drawing instead her instead of speaking to her.
Have you ever found that your inner critic (or a voice that is overly critical of your creative work), is stronger than your love for what you do?
How do you overcome the voice of your inner critic if it gets in the way?
Any ideas?
"Love and hate — a too simple, or too familiar, vocabulary, and so never quite the right names for what we might want to say — are the common source, the elemental feelings with which we apprehend the world; and they are interdependent in the sense that you can’t have one without the other, and that they mutually inform each other. The way we hate people depends on the way we love them, and vice versa. And given that these contradictory feelings are our ‘common source’ they enter into everything we do. They are the medium in which we do everything. We are ambivalent, in Freud’s view, about anything and everything that matters to us; indeed, ambivalence is the way we recognize that someone or something has become significant to us… Where there is devotion there is always protest… where there is trust there is suspicion."
~ Adam Philips in "Against Self-Criticism"
- Is the inner critic necessary?
- Why do we have an inner critic?
Are you familiar with your "inner critic"?
found
poetry
Sonnet 63
Against my love shall be as I am now,
With time’s injurious hand crushed and o'erworn;
When hours have drained his blood and filled his brow
With lines and wrinkles; when his youthful morn
Hath traveled on to age’s steepy night,
And all those beauties whereof now he’s king
Are vanishing or vanished out of sight,
Stealing away the treasure of his spring;
For such a time do I now fortify
Against confounding age’s cruel knife,
That he shall never cut from memory
My sweet love’s beauty, though my lover’s life.
His beauty shall in these black lines be seen,
And they shall live, and he in them still green.
- free-write for 10 minutes on your prompt.
- make mistakes!
- don't listen to your inner critic!
- William Shakespeare
prompts - an example of a constraint
- take something from your bag
- choose a scent
- put your music player on shuffle and listen to the first few lines of the first song that pops up.
automatic or
free-writing
rituals
con-straints
mindfulness
play
"Every child is an artist,
the problem is how to
remain one when you grow up."
~ Pablo Picasso
flow
Discussion
With your partner discuss:
- What encourages your creative flow?
- What word is at the root of the word "encourage?" Does "courage" have anything to do with creative "flow?"
- What inhibits your creative flow?
- What do the words "creative" and "inspiration" mean to you?
- Are you afraid of your creativity?
- Do you have any creative activity that you're passionate about? Something you love doing?
- Do you believe in genius?
- What does the word genius mean to you?