Thomas Cotterill

Where Creative People Get Their Ideas

Where do creative people get their inspiration? There are probably as many answers to that question as there are creators, and in all likelihood, every creator uses more than one source. However, such non-specific statements explain nothing. An example or two, while indicating only a miniscule portion of the possibilities will be far more illuminating.

The painting titled Golden Light by John Atkinson Grimshaw.

Trivial incidents in an artist’s life can inspire complex works. Art can sometimes inspire art.

This may not always be obvious, but all inspiration is actually a two-part process. There is an outer stimulus, and there is an inner response. The inward component goes beyond the pure emotional response to the experience. What the creative individual feels, stimulates some deeply held emotion-laden idea or value. There is energizing resonance.

Do You Know What You Really Want?

Have you become discouraged in life? Has it occurred to you to question what you are doing, or where you are going? Does the nagging feeling that “there must be more to life than this” eat away at you? Worse, have you entered the “midlife crisis” or had a full-blown psychological breakdown? All these things are distressing to one degree or another, and all, even the less pressing, require a remedy. They all stem from a loss of personal vision. That loss has come about because of an inner conflict, a conflict that probably remains below the threshold of conscious awareness.

Not knowing what you want can cause debilitating depression. There is a remedy, and you are already carrying it around with you. (Photo: Public Domain Pictures)

Silver Quill Blogger Award

Katherine Givens has nominated me for the Silver Quill Blogger Award! It is a genuine pleasure to be so honoured by a young up-and-coming author and poet. Thank you, Katherine.

Honours always come with obligations so I will take care of these right away.

As per the award’s rules, I have answered the following questions:

Is Genre Fiction Junk Fiction?

In these days of inclusivity, equality, and the breaking down of barriers, there are those (both writers and readers) who would abolish the boundary between literary and genre fiction. Some now say that genre writers are striving for the same things as literary writers; they just do it in a different, more accessible, reader-friendly kind of way. That is to say, literary writers are just a bunch of stuck-up snobs who look down on hard-working genre writers for no good reason. If this is true, then either everything is literature, or everything is genre fiction. The argument has successfully removed the time-honoured distinction.

In this age of inclusivity we must not lose sight of the difference between literature and genre fiction. (Image: public domain.)

The Creative Magic of Absorption

The way to get creative projects rolling is to get enthusiastic about them. We must keep thinking about what we propose to do long enough for the priming effect of absorption to begin drawing forth the relevant ideas and information from our inner and outer lives. Isaac Newton believed that to solve a problem required “thinking on it continually.”

We are at our creative best when completely absorbed in what we are doing. (Photo: Wikipedia)

By continually thinking about our project, we get into the creative mood specific to that project. A cocoon or atmosphere of feeling surrounds what we are doing. We have enveloped ourselves in a creative possibility cloud. As our mood-focussed attention gathers the relevant ideas, images, and bits of information around the emotional nucleus, the proposed project will take shape and the momentum will steadily increase. American sculptor Louise Nevelson said of the artist’s work, “It absorbs you totally, and you absorb it totally, everything must fall by the wayside by comparison.”

Androgynous Minds Generate Synergistic Thinking

I have written elsewhere that the most creative among us possess the power to combine linear conceptual thinking with non-linear associative thinking. This ability to unite the two thinking modes works the creative magic that sets these people apart. A person who heavily favours one mode of thought over the other will inevitably lack outstanding creative powers.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge claimed that a “great mind must be androgynous.” (Image: Wikimedia)

Just such a situation exists in the minds of ordinary men and women. It is unfashionable to say so, but the fact remains that, overall, men favour a preponderance of abstract, conceptual, linear thinking while women prefer a greater reliance on associative non-linear thinking, source of the old-fashioned, and misnamed, “women’s intuition.” Therefore, being normally one-sided, most of us are limited in our creative reach.

Why Personal Philosophies of Life Are Becoming Rare

Einstein had his cosmic religious feeling, but today’s preference for emotion at the expense of reason represses or impairs the urge to work out a personal philosophy of life. (Photo: S. Brunier/ESO)

What Einstein referred to as the “cosmic religious feeling” is a drive, like sex, hunger, thirst, and so on. Fear exists to make one run when flight is necessary. Anger makes one fight when struggle is necessary. Thirst makes one drink to avoid death by dehydration. Hunger makes one eat to avoid death by starvation. Lust makes one copulate to ensure the survival of the species. The cosmic religious feeling makes one quest for answers – the purpose being to advance the cause of Man’s ever-growing consciousness and to enhance our scientific understanding of the cosmos. The tools of this quest or task are introspection and intellectual striving. One of its interesting by-products is art.

Revealing New Angles on Psychology

The best way to understand anything complex is to view it from more than one angle. Assimilating different perspectives provides insights not attainable in any other fashion. In that spirit, I offer a concise attempt to understand human psychology from the perspective of the creativity and human cognition researchers. I have positioned everything around the key concept of emotional cognitive structures, the brain’s way of storing its data in emotionally related clusters.

It can be useful to view psychology from the more concrete perspectives of creativity research and recent investigations into brain function and human cognition. (Image: public domain)

Using Mood to Enhance Your Creativity

Scientists studying human cognition have found that memory and mood are inextricably intertwined. Even more interesting is that we can take advantage of this situation by using a simple technique known as nuance priming.

We can deliberately use mood to enhance our ability to notice relevant information within ourselves and in the world around us. (Image: Vintage Printable)

Nuance priming is also a creativity research term. It means recalling or getting into a particular mood in order to exploit the brain’s habit of using feeling tones to sort and store information in related clusters called emotional cognitive structures. This is a fancy way of saying that the brain files ideas and memories in groups according to their feeling tone. Recall feeling tone X and we will get access to other things stored with the same, or similar, mood. This is a kind of deliberate associative (as opposed to logical) thinking. However, we are not actually doing the associative thinking. We are setting up a scenario to make use of the brain’s natural associative way of doing things.

Creativity Can Cause Anxiety

Being Creative Means Taking Risks

Creativity involves a thought that goes beyond the generally accepted, provokes anxiety in others and tests the security of one’s own perceptions. – Peter Lomas in Cultivating Intuition

Anxiety is the hand maiden of creativity. – T. S. Eliot

Surreal image of a ghostly face, and a woman flying near the Eiffel Tower

Strong innovation, striking originality, and prolonged gestation periods can all generate feelings of anxiety.
(photo: publicdomainpictures.net)

These quotes may explain why so many great creators show signs of psychological stress. Depression is famously common among writers, for example. However, this is not to say that mental disorder is necessary for creativity to flourish.