From d2e04bac4bde3fb50b2bc8761d7287a42b5dd08d Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Trent Robbins Date: Wed, 6 Dec 2023 22:27:39 -0800 Subject: [PATCH] Format fix --- docs/logs/creativity_2023123.md | 7 +++++++ 1 file changed, 7 insertions(+) diff --git a/docs/logs/creativity_2023123.md b/docs/logs/creativity_2023123.md index c5427f09..3c8c40a2 100644 --- a/docs/logs/creativity_2023123.md +++ b/docs/logs/creativity_2023123.md @@ -52,12 +52,19 @@ More techniques > Here are some other techniques people use to access and maintain the zone: > Introducing a long delay between when you do the work and when it is shown to the world. Annie Ernaux writes about this in A Simple Passion, a memoir about how she becomes obsessed in a banal way with a man who is having an affair with her—the thought that others will read these notes about the tacky sex life of a middle-aged woman feels, to her, almost fictional. She will be far away when it happens. Therefore, she doesn’t feel a need to protect herself. + > Thinking of the work in religious terms, as a service to, or a search for, God. Bergman, Grothendieck, and Pascal all do this. It might be easier to summon the awe and daring necessary to push out into the unknown and against social pressure if the alternative is failing God. Or a fiendish muse. + > Working with talented and open-minded collaborators, if you have the chance, can be a way to enter the zone. Nick Cave, when asked how he’s been able to reinvent himself so many times as a musician, says that his bandmates, especially Warren Ellis, simply will not play anything that sounds like what he’s done before. He has surrounded himself with people whose influence is the inverse of the social pressure of normal society and his audience. + > Another idea if you want to push against the mental pressure that kills good ideas, from Paul Graham’s recent essay on how to do good work: “One way to do that is to ask what would be good ideas for someone else to explore. Then your subconscious won't shoot them down to protect you.” I don’t know of anyone using this technique, but it might work. + > Actively subvert expectations. Kristian Mattsson, who performs under the moniker Tallest Man on Earth, says he pays close attention to his emotions as he’s writing new songs. If he gets excited, purely, he immediately puts the guitar down—excitement means what he is playing something he knows others will like, something that retreads paths he has already explored and been socially validated for. The songs he’s looking for are the ones that he’s ashamed of liking. + > Noticing these subtle differences in creative excitement requires subtle introspection. But you can be even more subtle. If we think of creative introspection as having three levels, Mattsson is on level two. (Level one is just noticing that you find an idea interesting or exciting.) Level two is noticing that your longing to be accepted can fool you to get excited about an idea that you are not actually excited about. Level three is Andrei Tarkovsky. In his diary, during preproduction of his masterpiece Solaris, the Soviet filmmaker writes that he has met a sound engineer that he considers brilliant. The sound engineer told Tarkovsky that they shouldn’t use Bach in the film because “everyone is using Bach in their films at the moment.” In the diary, Tarkovsky makes no further note, but in the film, the music is—Bach. Tarkovsky realized it didn’t matter that Bach was a popular choice that people would praise him for. It was just the right thing. This is very hard to do, so most creatives stay on level 2 and learn that what is popular is a trap. This does lead to good ideas being needlessly killed. But likely more would die if they had let what is popular kill unpopular ideas. + > Work so fast that you don’t have time to self-censor. While writing the intensely confessional My Struggle, Knausgaard forced himself to write five pages a day to overcome his tendency to freeze up in shame. Every time he acclimated to the pace of his writing, he increased the quota so he would always be overwhelmed—at one point he forced himself to write 25,000 words in 24 hours, about a third of a normal-sized novel. It is not the best writing he has done; it kind of melts at the edges. But it is true literature and, like Récoltes et Semailles and Bergman’s workbooks, it is a rare opportunity to observe an uncommon and fertile mind in real-time. + > The mental states where new ideas can be born are hard to open up. And they are continually collapsing. The things you have to do to keep them from caving in will make people frown upon you—your tendency for isolation, working deep in the night, breaking norms. The zone is a place at the margin of society. But strangely enough, this fragile margin is where the ideas that make our society possible come from. Almost everything that makes up our world first appeared in a solitary head—the innovations, the tools, the images, the stories, the prophecies, and religions—it did not come from the center, it came from those who ran from it.