Author: Thomas Cotterill

I am a manic-depressive made philosophical by my long struggle with the disruptive mood disorder, during which I spent sixteen years living as a forest hermit. I write philosophical essays, fantasy, and science fiction. My attempt to integrate creativity, psychology, philosophy, and spirituality imbues everything I write. You will find hundreds of related essays and articles on my blog. I live quietly in British Columbia's scenic Fraser Valley, a beautiful place in which to wax philosophical.

Did the Human Mind Create the Cosmos?

In the early days of the Christian era, a curious flip or reversal of reality occurred in the minds of the period’s thinkers. Faced with the insecurity engendered by the steady decline of the Roman Empire they decided the old assumption that “I die but the world goes on,” should actually read, “the world dies but I go on.” Thus the idea of immortality was born. Life continued eternally after death. The individual survived, while the world eventually ceased to exist.

Do human beings literally create the cosmos by thinking and conceiving ideas about how it works? (Image: public domain.)

A similar phenomenon of reversal is growing in our own time. Faced with the rapid decline in the importance of humankind brought about by the discoveries of science, some of today’s “thinkers” have taken to reversing the idea that puny man discovers or uncovers a pre-existing universe and its preset laws. They offer instead the elevating concept of man-the-god, a being that creates the universe and its laws in an ongoing off-the-cuff manner simply by thinking about the cosmos and how it works. There were no black holes, according to this way of looking at things, until some astrophysicist thought them up! (A more likely explanation is that the concept came first and then someone juggled the facts to fit the concept, but we will leave such “cynical” considerations for a future post.)

How Artists Develop Their Artistic Vision

Artists must develop over time, and they do this by examining and exploring the implications and ramifications of their personal vision of existence. In other words, they explore their philosophy of life. When the artist combines this activity with their view of a particular branch of the arts, what emerges is their artistic vision; the artist’s preferred subject matter and style. The combination is sometimes so unique that the artist’s works, whatever they may be, are instantly recognizable.

Many creators hold their personal artistic vision with religious zeal. (Image: public domain)

Artists create because they want to express their vision. Their powerful need to make sense of life means they create for their own edification as much as anyone else’s. Yet each artist has his own way of thinking about the nature of vision. Joseph Conrad described vision as, “the inward voice that decides.” Things were more fluid for Virginia Woolf who declared, “The vision must be perpetually remade.”

Build Novel Chapters with Scenes

At the level of structure, writing a novel is like a construction project. Understanding the basics will allow you to use imaginative architecture. (Image: public domain.)

How should we writers construct our chapters? Inevitably, the process starts with scenes. Some authors create lengthy scenes and simply make the big scene into an entire chapter. Novels constructed this way can seem slow moving, weighty, and dull, although skilled writers have made this work throughout the centuries that novels have been written. Writers of a more commercial bent often turn out short scenes and declare each little episode a little chapter. We have all seen the numerous genre books with three-, four-, or five-page divisions. While conceptually simple, and conducive to a fast-paced story, the scheme looks and feels crude. Most writers use multiple scenes, separated by spaces or asterisks, to assemble each medium-length chapter. This most popular arrangement combines reasonable pace with satisfying variety and complexity.

Write enough scenes to reach the desired or planned climax for the chapter. If you end up with too many scenes and your chapter is becoming too long, reconsider what you need to accomplish and look for places where there is already a nice climax and end the chapter there. Do not try to do too much in any one chapter. Only experience can help you here. Get in there and give it a try!

Synergistic Thinking

Creative thinking requires the skilful blending of linear and non-linear thinking. In more commonly used language, this means we must combine logical thinking with associative thinking. Before we go on, let us be clear that associative thinking is not the same as intuition. Associative thinking brings related ideas and events together in imagination or memory in ways that are not necessarily logical. Association may link a red barn with a red car (because they are both red) even though there is no logical reason to connect them. The associative connection may not be rigorously logical, but it is definite and understandable. Intuition is more emotional, more vague, a mere feeling or inarticulate hunch.

Synergistic thinking makes a synthesis of linear and non-linear thinking. In other words, it blends logic and association. (Image: public domain)

Sleepwalking Through Reality

Concepts, abstract or general ideas, are a veil that hides reality from our eyes. Without our knowing it, they create a powerful illusion. Anyone who unquestioningly accepts their society’s consensus worldview is suffering from cultural hypnosis. Most of us are affected. We sleepwalk through our lives never understanding that much of what we assume to be true simply is not. We are not even aware that concepts can have this effect.

Many of us sleepwalk through our lives in a muddled state of cultural hypnosis. (Image: public domain)

To dispel the illusion, we must peer past preconceived concepts at the raw data of experience. There is a hidden reality, but it is not on some astral plane or stashed in some mystical “beyond.” The hidden reality is all around us, firmly rooted in this world, yet invisible to eyes blinded by consensus notions of what we are seeing. The hunger that cries, “There must be more to life than this” is, in part, the hunger to experience what lies behind the obscuring veil of concepts. Many sense its presence, as indeed they must, but immediately fall into the very trap they need to escape. They conceptualize the nature of this hidden reality in bizarre and obscure ways, thus trading a consensual illusion for another, even more unrealistic, one.

Artists Strive to Give Life Meaning

Powerful artists infuse their work with a blend of deliberately chosen emotional themes, their own emotionally important ideas, and subtly distinguished shades of meaning. The great work always starts with the individual, yet manages to present universal aspects of life. Artists do this by looking for the universal elements of their own experience. They never lose sight of the simple fact that we are all human beings. What happens to one of us, in some specific way, has undoubtedly happened to others, in somewhat different ways. Artists suggest the underlying commonality and reveal the universal. In this way, they make the specific general, the individual universal.

Lighthouses and stars are examples of those images with a rich array of symbolic meanings favoured by writers, poets, and painters. (Image: public domain.)

Successful Novels Are Filled with Emotion

British author Colin Wilson highlights a critical aspect of art when he writes, “A work of art holds an emotion as a bottle holds wine.”

Book Titled Living Vicariously by E. Motion

We read books to enrich our emotional lives by living vicariously through the moving experiences of a novel’s characters. (Image: public domain.)

Writers should never underestimate the novel’s vitally important role as an emotional mechanism. A novel is a “device” to make people feel. Therefore, when planning and writing each scene we need to ask ourselves what emotion we wish to arouse in the reader and toward which character or setting we want to direct the feeling. Paying attention to these two tasks will ensure each scene has the right kind of well-focussed emotion. Our scenes will seem satisfying and have weight.

How do we handle the novel’s cerebral aspects, its “message?” Most people are not intellectually inclined and even fewer enjoy a sermon. Readers will not tolerate long-winded theoretical or ideological explanations. We must transmit all content of an intellectual nature to the reader via the “carrier wave” of feelings. As we search for some emotional way to convey an idea, we should keep in mind that all thoughts carry a mood or feeling just as all emotions have thoughts for companions. The human mind stores its information in what the scientists call emotional-cognitive structures. Note carefully the term’s hybrid nature, the blend of feeling and idea. By wrapping our ideas in a suitable emotional package, we can deliver them to all readers.

How Creative People Think

Highly creative people are different from the average person. It is not that the typical man or woman on the street is not creative. It is just that the quality creator functions at a greater level of sophistication and (often) output.

Creative people are both more flexible and more selective in the way they think. (Image: public domain.)

Three factors make these creators stand out.

First, such people possess the ability to think profitably by a variety of means. That is, they have at their disposal a range of thinking techniques. There is a characteristic flexibility to their thinking not usually seen in ordinary life. In most cases, they did not consciously acquire this powerful set of thought tools. They picked them up unknowingly as they pursued one interest or another. Often they have explored a series of interests. The primary thinking tools are contradictions, comparisons, images, and metaphors.

Classic Writers and Personal Computers

Among important writers of the past who would have welcomed and used personal computers?

Laptop computer surrounded by faces of classic authors

Word processor anyone? Would great writers of the past have welcomed personal computers? (Image: public domain.)

H. G. Wells was a great believer in science and progress. In fact, he was a science teacher until tuberculosis forced him to give up that profession. Always an early riser, and a disciplined writer who believed in regular daily production, he did all his work at a desk in his study. Writing came before all other tasks for the day. I see him as a definite candidate for a well-equipped desktop computer.

The Wound and the Bow Revisited

Edmund Wilson, author of The Wound and the Bow, argued that suffering was the mother of creativity. But what if suffering and creativity are actually siblings? (Image: public domain.)

Some argue that creativity and genius spring from a profound sensitivity to subtle differences. Such sensitivity, such fine perception, makes possible deep and powerful art. However, it also leaves its possessor wide open to pain and damage from life’s rough and tumble course. The less sensitive miss the subtle insults, the small slights by omission, and the finer points of innuendo. The more sensitive and perceptive do not.

One is, therefore, tempted to speculate that creativity does not, as is so often assumed, come from being wounded or mad or riddled with polarities, ambivalences, and conflicts, but that these difficulties are simply another product of being sensitive. Collateral damage, as the military types would say. Inner torment is not the parent of creativity; it is its sibling.