First the stereotype: ‘religious’ people and bus journeys

A religious person, if you slip into the Dickensian stereotype, is not someone you’d want to share a long bus ride with. They would be a tedious companion: thin-lipped, parsimonious, joyless. They’d observe your minor misdemeanours with an arched eyebrow. They’d suck on boiled sweets, probably citrus flavour. They might even start low-level proselytising before you’re halfway, mentioning how the Good Lord saved them a parking space that morning at Tesco’s.

Ask a religious person to paint a mountain and they’d say ‘pass me the protractor’. It’s all about straight lines and patterns. If I follow the rules, I go to heaven, or Jannah, or Nirvana, or whatever paradise suitably offsets the earthly suffering. And if I screw up, then I’ll burn in the other place. Or at least burn with guilt until somebody absolves me.

The English middle-class version adds a veneer of respectability and social conformity into the mix. And, to the delight of many novelists, a sub-layer of rotting, repressed emotions: mores and hang-ups that date back to women with corsets and men with fine whiskers, to a time when upper lips couldn’t be stiffer.

Such is the stereotype, and it still has some currency. If you were to call me ‘religious’, I’d question your motives and feel a little uncomfortable. Couple this, if you will, with the baggage that goes with the word religion. Lamorna Ash in her recent survey of churchgoing (Radical on R4, definitely worth a listen) notes how for its critics, religion is quickly dismissed as the ‘handmaiden of colonialism’, or inextricably bound with sexual abuse scandals and fallen clergy. It becomes synonymous with a certain kind of hypocrisy, whether of the state or in the individual.

And we’re back to the sanctimonious Dickensian character, a Chadband, Pecksniff or Heep, wringing their hands and worming their ways. Such stereotypes exist for good reason, I appreciate. However, I’d like to embrace a more complex understanding, and for that I’m going to get etymological.

Radical reconnection

Re-ligio, to go back to the root of the word, is about reconnection, about re-ligamenting. Reconnecting ourselves to God, but also to a sense of meaning, to others, to self, to spirit or Spirit, to love. For many, being religious in this truer sense requires a radical shift in stance, an about-turn on certain secular attitudes, a reorientation in thinking and lifestyle. Christians call this repentance, but that smacks of hair shirts.

The ‘re-‘ of reconnection implies we were connected originally then it slipped from grasp somehow, and we have to pick up the thread where we left off and find our way back home. I like that. It reminds me of the Odyssean archetype, the homing device we all share that guides so many of our existential decisions. In this model, early adulthood casts us adrift and maturity is about finding spiritual home.

So, I’d like to reappropriate the word ‘religious’, distancing it from the Dickensian, soberly dressed, petticoated stereotype, and embracing this sense of rebellion, radicalism and dynamism. BOOM! So much better.

A religious person is someone who deeply wants to (re-)connect at all levels, who is curious about relationship, who yearns for community and for meaning, who wants to see the divine and aspects of love reflected in the everyday.

Someone who, in fact, could be a rather entertaining companion on a long bus journey.

Flirting with the Muse

I need to head something off at the pass before I explore the parallel between creativity and religion. Most religions, unless you’re using the term loosely (as I will be), are ultimately about getting closer to God or to a substitute for God. There are plenty of books in the literature on creativity that find this parallel by dwelling on divine inspiration as a fundamental part of the creative process. Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way is a classic of this genre, inviting the reader to ‘plug in’ to a divine creative force or ‘higher power’ as you embark on your project.

Fine. However, this is not an angle I want to explore. I’m comfortable with the concept that our urge to create is a reflection of a divine impulse because I have a faith. I’m aware, though, that to others this kind of language quickly feels rather ‘woo-woo’. It’s another way of expressing how to flirt with the Muse. You might as well go and hug a promising tree. Ultimately, they will say — and I would agree — we all have to sit ourselves down at the desk, or wherever, and face the blank page, God or no God, muse or no muse.

Where creativity becomes ‘religious’

The more I explore my own spirituality and ‘religiousness’ in the revitalised sense of the word, the more I see parallels to other, subtler aspects of the creative process, not just the question of initial inspiration.

At a basic level, creativity is a quest for connection that, like religion, starts with both a deep curiosity and a rebellion against the everyday. It too requires an active, relationship-seeking stance towards the world, and one that often has to be chosen in opposition to the prevailing forces of the time (multiple, industrialised distractions, in the main). This aspect of creative thinking is shared with the religious mindset: we have to be mini-rebels, counter-cultural in how we resist passivity and the isolating, deadening effects of screen-based modern life.

Creativity and religion have different expressions of relationship at their core. For the creative process, it is that between subject and object and how the two shape each other. The product is often just a snapshot of this relationship at a certain point in its development. It is a fluid and dynamic connection, not as fixed as the notes on the page or oils on the canvas might suggest. What the outside observer or listener appreciates as a ‘final’ item is really an ongoing affair with the subject and an invitation to relate to it in some way too, to become part of the relationship.

There is a commitment that accompanies this fluidity, though, a ‘decisive moment’, as photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson would put it. Just as religion is about binding yourself (finding a ‘ligament’) to a new way of thinking, so when we create we bind ourselves to a mode of perception, a train of thought that suits the object and the moment. Even when we can’t appreciate where that train of thought will lead, we assent to it, if only to see whether it will serve the ultimate work. It is a step of faith.

And more often than not, when we push into a certain perception of the world through our chosen artistic lens, we get a sense of how much is shared with humanity at large. We realise how our unique perspective — if it is indeed unique — fits in with a wider context of past interpretations and current trends. And don’t we create to have the affirmation, at some level, that our way of seeing the world is shared and appreciated by others? This affirmation, in turn, binds us afresh to our artistic community, and sometimes beyond that, to society at large.

The connection operates not only in terms of a shared perception. It is more grounded than that. Whether I create alone or with another person there is a communion in ways of being and doing, in practice and craft. When alone, this communion is with a previous body of art or a current set of artists doing similar things. When collaborative, it is about figuring ways of making things together but also discovering new aspects about the other and, through that, about ourselves. As with religion, our creativity is being motivated to a large extent by the desire not just for discovery but for self-discovery.

When creativity is similar to prayer or worship

When we create collaboratively we have to set aside our own will to an extent, or at least find meaningful compromises. At the heart of a religious connection to God is a submission of self, just as at the heart of prayer is a vulnerability. To pray with authentic intent is to invite a gaze, hopefully a benign one, onto our most intimate selves and to feel that we are not alone, that we can share this inner world with someone who understands.

When we share our deepest artistic selves we are consenting to being seen at our most vulnerable state. When I ask my wife to be my first reader, I can hardly sit down while she reads, I pace around, muttering to myself, imagining her thoughts and her critique. Then to feel understood, seen and heard is a huge relief. The connection I’d hoped for, the melding of minds is there. Or not.

I suppose what I’m saying is that meaningful connection in both contexts, religious and creative, starts with vulnerability and moves to a place of welcoming scrutiny of our innermost selves.

What place for worship in all of this? Isn’t that ultimately the purpose of religious connection? How does that fit in with this creative analogy?

I think if you’re employing the word bluntly just to mean praising someone or something then yes, the parallels stop here. However, if we deconstruct the act of worship we find components of ritual, attention, receptivity and an offering of self. And this is where the parallels become more apparent again. The creative process requires all of these things:

• a rhythm of work, of returning to the same source and interpretation — often when we don’t feel like it;

• a directing of attention onto the subject;

• an opening out, internally, to new stimuli and inspiration;

• an offering of self through our unique perception on the world: we receive inspiration and we offer it back, transformed;

• the finding of flow that is akin to the rapture of worship, the sense of being swept along by something greater than your understanding.

In a way, when we encapsulate something about the world in our art, when we elicit an emotional response to it, we are in that moment elevating it to something beyond its normal status, attributing it new importance and meaning. Is this an act of worship, in a limited sense?

Ok, that is a bit of a stretch. However, I do think being a creative person is akin to being a religious one, in the groovy sense of a connection-seeker, not a sanctimonious naysayer. And I do sense that, on a more basic, experiential level, it feels spiritually enriching to embark on a creative practice. I’d even go so far as to say that creativity can be a form of embodied prayer. And both creativity and religion involve dark nights of the soul where the relationship runs dry.

For now, though, let’s skip into the sunset and embrace new connections, let’s be more ‘religious’ in our creativity.

Happy creating!

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Most of all, though, I’m impatient with my own creative process. I don’t take the time to meander down the byways of my imagination for a deeper, less obvious inspiration, nor to fully explore the possibilities of that inspiration once it does present itself.

Cave-time and the meaning of patience

I admire people who dwell with that first generative phase, lowering themselves into the cave, refusing to come out until they’ve found something genuinely valuable. My composer friend Josephine Stephenson spent three weeks deciding on the lyrics for her choral work. It was a circular process, apparently, starting with poems by Emily Dickinson, then rejecting them, then trying all sorts of trendy alternatives, then coming back to Dickinson in a new light.

I think I might have spent three hours on that exercise, not three weeks. The pull of productivity is just too strong for me. I’m restless to get on with the creating. It’s that classic tension between being and doing. Just ‘being’ with an idea sometimes feels like I’m on a train waiting for it to move, damn it, right now, let’s go…

There is a decent argument for this kind of restlessness, I realise. We can overthink the initial stimulus and load it with too much importance. It’s what we do with the idea and how we develop it that matters. Composers regularly make masterpieces out of scraps: three-note motifs, an interval, the motion of a wave. And you don’t know the potential of an idea until you start testing it and teasing it out in different directions.

However, even when I’m in this exploratory phase I feel tight-stomached and slightly agitated. I sense an urgency even when there isn’t one. The Latin root of patience, ‘patior’ connotes suffering and enduring. One Greek version, hypomonē, emphasises the meaning of remaining (meno) under (hypo), of being subjected to a burden.

What are we enduring in the creative process, what are we carrying? What makes it painful?

The tension of teetering

I think we’re bearing the weight of indecision and doubt, of the unknown and unshaped. We’re teetering on the edge of multiple decisions, on taking a course of action. That has its own tension, making us yearn for the psychic easing of a resolution.

So, rather than keep with the deep thinking required to wrestle less obvious meaning out of a creative proposition, we reach for the surface, pulling up ideas that have easy categorisation and definition.

This surface thinking represents an intellectual compromise. We need to stay submerged for longer, remaining under (hypomone), and that takes discipline and patience. Or the discipline to be patient. Or the patience to be disciplined?

John Keats spoke of this in terms of ‘negative capability’, where the artist remains ‘in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.’ (‘Irritable’, I like that. Why let facts get in the way of a good mystery?) The capability, then, to accept a lack, a ‘negative’ space: the not knowing, the not deciding, the not doing. It is, of course, far from a passive stance. Sometimes the most furious thinking happens before the pen hits the paper.

Emergence

When watching ‘Portrait Artist of the Year’, part of the addictive appeal is witnessing how the likeness to the subject sometimes refuses to emerge until the very final marks on the canvas, just minutes before the ‘brushes down!’. Out of a wash of colours and a smudge of lines, a profile somehow comes into focus, taking on the power to suggest not just the subject but also their inner world, their whole being.

This is a nice visual illustration of the symbiotic relationship between the artist and their work. The final portrait is, in effect, a collaboration between the vision of the creator, their medium, the connection to the subject and the artwork itself, which as it morphs takes on a life of its own, suggesting the next brush stroke and the next. And more often than not, the collaboration leads to an unexpected conclusion.

The artist shapes the painting and the painting shapes the artist. It’s a creative dance that requires both patience and a step of faith: the belief that something will, somehow, emerge if we just stick with the process.

This belief in turn fuels our patience. If I keep with the deep thinking a little longer and resist easy exits and quick fixes a little longer, then there be treasure.

Let’s see. Let’s see if I can be more patient with a piece I’m about to compose. I’m going to challenge myself to take a breath and dive deeper rather than reach for the surface.

I’m still going to get antsy if someone punches into their packet of crisps behind me on a train, mind you. There are limits.

Happy creating! Please do subscribe for more creative thoughts straight to your inbox:

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It’s a weird and wonderful moment when the ‘red thread’ of a story finally becomes apparent and the jumbled pieces of a narrative fall into place. Weird, because it often feels unbidden, as if someone has nudged the pieces into line while you weren’t looking. Wonderful, because the brain’s capacity to create order out of chaos constantly amazes. It finds patterns however random the ideas we’re throwing at it. The more random, the better.

I often catch my first glimpse of the red thread in the park, when I’ve finished the research phase of a talk I’ve got to give and I’m taking the ideas for a walk. I’ve come to trust that, weirdly and wonderfully, by the end of the walk I’ll have found a way through them all, that the thread will untangle and become taut.

The process seems to be one of testing different starting points, pulling on the thread to see where it leads. Often there are false starts and you realise the ending is actually your beginning, or a quote you’ve chanced on midway through.

It’s always satisfying to observe your brain do its pattern-seeking thing. It got me thinking about that part of the creative process, that moment of realising the Gestalt. And how I might exercise it.

The five-photo challenge

Take loads of photos on your phone this week. They could be quirky or mundane, it doesn’t really matter. Don’t overthink them, just snap happy. If there’s anything that catches your eye and strikes you as interesting, take the shot.

At the end of the week, have a look at the reel and select five shots that fizz. Five, because three would be too easy.

Now come up with a narrative that draws these images together. Don’t spend long on it, just ten minutes. That’s long enough to tease out a thread. (This is just part one, mind you, see below for the extension.)

An aside: pareidolia and apophenia

The phenomenon of seeking pattern and meaning in chance connections is a well-researched one. Two impressive Greek terms to share with you here, for readers who like such things:

Pareidolia: the imposition of a shape or visual image on a random view. I see a crocodile in the clouds.

Apophenia: the imposition of a narrative or meaning on a random set of circumstances. I see a trail of discarded crisp packets on the pavement and imagine a brazen litterer with an addiction to salt and vinegar.

So. Let’s get apophenic.

Putting it to the test

Here are five images I’ve chosen from my mobile feed:

• a beer bottle top bathing in the sun, looking like a crushed beetle

• the ceiling above the Elizabeth Line Tube escalator at Paddington

• seagulls circling a weathervane in Aldeburgh

• sea binoculars that look like a friendly old-school robot

• painted nails on two Latin American friends

The red thread: a quick story (in 10 minutes)

George the sea-viewer robot was sad. He’d loved having midnight conversations with the weather vane cockerel, rooted to the roof on the house close to the beach. They’d found a way of communicating through rusty creaks, covert blinks and a kind of telepathy, metal mind to metal mind.

In the calm of the night, away from the tourists and away from the gulls, they would console each other about the day before. The toddlers who wouldn’t stop jumping on George’s stepping post, wearing it further down, discolouring it from bright blue to a dull grey. Or the birds, mainly gulls, that weighed down the cockerel’s neck with their clumsy perching, and the constant shitting down his back.

Yesterday all that changed. Two noisy tourists came and jammed George’s throat. They didn’t mean to. He remembers them from their gaudy fingernails and excited conversation in a language that sounded sunny but different. They had tried pressing some foreign coins into his slots, thinking it might open his eyes and give them a look across the sea. Perhaps they thought a close-up of the waves would help them feel closer to home, he didn’t know.

The coins had got clogged among all the other detritus already in his throat: the pebbles worn slim, the guitar picks, the ridiculously small change (pennies not pounds). Oh, and that twisted bottle top that someone had somehow seen fit to jam in with their thumb last summer. A thumb tacky with vanilla ice cream, George remembers. It still hurt, one year on.

The new coins from the duo with the painted nails were the last straw, finding the last gap in his mechanism to clog. George was now silent. And as a side effect, his eyelids were now stuck half shut too, so that everything he saw was pixellated into lines and shapes. It was like a mechanical fever. Even the waves appeared to him as black-and-white triangles. The sun was a crude diamond, its reflections on water a net of perpendicular lines.

A few days ago he’d heard some local councillors talking about ‘upgrading the promenade experience’. Maybe even replacing the viewing posts with more modern models that somehow spoke to the viewer.

Well, good. Bring it on.

Meanwhile, the sea seemed closer than before, lapping at the shale close to his base, inviting him in. And the cockerel crowed the same questions into the cold of the night. Why me, George? Why can’t I fly? Where have you gone?

The extension task

Now, consider four other starting points, going through each image in turn. Here’s what came to my mind:

• the bottle cap is a vital bit of evidence in finding a serial killer…

• the Swiss architect who designed the Tube ceiling starts seeing curious geometries in everything…

• the gulls who check the weather-vane for direction before setting off on fishing expeditions…

• the sisters who got their nails painted as a final goodbye…

Five threads to pull on, then, to see how your brain, weirdly and wonderfully, will wrestle the images into five new stories.

Happy creating!

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Also, I’ve been producing an album with the Dovetail Orchestra that involved untangling a Gordian knot of availabilities and conflicting schedules. The final spreadsheet felt like a triumph of design, bringing out my inner Teut. Seeing the first rough mixes arrive in the inbox has been cathartic.

In fact, I thought I’d share some observations from that recording process on the mysterious phenomenon of ‘red light syndrome’, and how it applies outside of the studio.

How red light syndrome presents

The dress run has just gone beautifully, we’re all in the zone. Things are flowing, and there is banter. Then the softly spoken sound engineer informs us the session is running and take one is ready to go. We imagine the red recording light flicking on, even though it’s not there. There is a held breath, a shuffling in the seats. I count us in and we launch into the first take. It’s a little rough round the edges but it has character.

Then comes the scrutiny, the feedback and the second and third takes. And with each take we try to find the same spontaneous flow while also trying to neaten the edges. It’s like chasing a beautiful memory while solving a crossword.

This is the well known tension that comes with the red light: trying to capture the abandon and raw energy of a live performance while having your inner critic run rampant, tutting at your every move. Combine this with Imposter Syndrome (which, interestingly, everybody in the room confessed to) and a sudden awareness of minor ailments such as a slightly blocked nose and an overwhelming desire to sniff, or cold fingers, or an impending frog in the throat, and you have the perfect foundations for creative paralysis.

I imagine it’s similar to a love scene where a pair of actors have to embrace for the first time. They’re relative strangers and have just had time to pop a mint in the mouth before the director announces ‘And…KISS!’

Suddenly the The Veil of Awkward descends.

Keeping connected

Reimagining such self-scrutiny as a welcome, warm attention is a way out of this thinking. The red light is not a warning but a warming. It is an invitation into the now, into finding something new to say even though you’ve said it so many times before. An invitation to become curious again.

This is part of the definition of Flow, in creative terms. In order for effort to seem like play, I need to treat each red light moment as a new creation rather than an attempt to recapture the past. The attention shifts then, subtly but profoundly, from ‘getting it right’ to ‘keeping connected.’ I need to remain alive to shifts in the sound, to my collaborators, to being true to the spirit of the music.

Connections, then, to sound, to people, and to artistic intention.

If I focus on this connectedness, on this playful curiosity about what others are doing, about how the sound is mysteriously evolving, then I can trust my fingers on keyboard will follow. Closing my eyes allows me to tune in all the more to this, to shift focus from the inner critic to the rich detail in the sound and the possibilities of the moment.

Connections in our recording session:

• When the backing singers slipped from an ‘aah’ to a hum and changed the temperature of the whole section. We all played with more delicacy.

  

• When our baglama (Turkish lute) player switched from fingers to a long plectrum, brightening the attack on the strings and making the room glitter. My touch on the keyboard sharpened.

  

• When some of the singers who’d never been in a studio before came and delivered a brilliant take straight away, without need for retakes. It made us all smile and relax.

  

• When the saxophonist got up from his second nap of the day, stretched briefly, and then busted out two incredible fast-paced solos over the top of a Latin American number, each perfectly timed. It upped our game and gave us confidence.

Outside the studio

I wonder if there are more pressure points in our creative lives where we can escape the paralysing self-scrutiny by seeking wider connections? Where we can adjust the gaze inwards to outwards?

I’ve been practising a piano part for a trio recently, some Dumky by Dvorák. I thought I’d freeze in the rehearsal and fluff all the passages I’d been assiduously repeating along to a metronome. The opposite was true. I was carried along by the energy of the other players and my absorption in the trio’s sound as a whole. We kept each other flowing.

Or when I was on the streets of Bath last week, doing some street photography, I noticed my nervousness around taking candid snaps diminished when I imagined myself as a legitimate part of the street, in the crowd and not an external observer. When I connected with the passers-by and felt part of the flow of the street, the shots presented themselves so much more readily.

When I do my public speaking, I ask for the house lights to be on so I can see and connect with the audience rather than feel under a spotlight and alone on stage. That way it can feel more like a conversation than a monologue, and I need that sense of a more casual connection to feel comfortable.

I offer all of this because I find it more helpful than the usual advice to overcoming red light syndrome that normally is of the ‘try to forget the microphone/camera/audience is there’ variety. Or, worse: ‘Just be natural’. Hear that and you’re more stilted than before. Best, I think, to just accept the situation and find new connections to get you into flow.

What advice have you found helpful when it comes to dealing with performance anxiety or the pressure of a red light situation, where your actions will be caught for posterity? Please let us know in the comments below.

Happy creating!

I’ve noticed several things about my creative thinking after digesting some poetry. But first, let me say that Alice Oswald is a genius. For my January read I blew the dust off her collection, Falling Awake, and have been so deeply impressed and excited by how she writes. Liminal states are explored from the perspective of raindrops, clouds, shadows, breezes, badgers and, yes, the severed head of Orpheus as it floats down a river. I commend the collection to everyone, evangelically.

A few observations of what happens when I read poetry:

• I struggle for meaning, re-reading each phrase multiple times. This is an important part, the effort involved. I feel good after it.

• I allow multiple interpretations for each metaphor and allusion.

• I get lost as I do so, and enjoy being lost in those multiple meanings.

• I re-read the poem once finished, looking for fresh patterns: motifs, structural devices, lay-out, and punctuation.

• I imagine what I would do with the same poetic image, what formulation I would give it. I begin to assimilate the thinking on the page.

• I marvel (even swear) at the poet’s observation, her ‘notice’, her turn of phrase and feel inspired to dig deeper into my poetic awareness.

• I notice my own use of vocabulary widens as I speak or write afterwards, as if I’m mirroring metaphorical patterns I’ve just read.

• I feel released momentarily from the press and burden of thoughts around the daily agenda.

• I observe my own senses being sharpened as I look for creative possibilities, for example in my morning park-walk (see below).

‘Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer’ - Simone Weil

Just as a morning lectio divina, a quick dip into the scriptures, is designed to open the heart and mind to prayer (disclaimer: I don’t do this, I just know the theory), so poetry directs our mind into creative patterns. And it does so more effectively and efficiently than reading, say, a newspaper or even inspired prose, because of how it rehearses fundamental processes of creative thinking, laying them bare:

ideation: unearthing seed ideas in the peripheries of our imagination rather than making do with the first idea that comes to mind.

conceptual manipulation: encouraging plasticity of meaning, of language and associative patterns. Creativity flourishes when there is ideational fluency and flexibility.

whole brain activity: actively linking linguistic processes with broader aesthetic concerns. We balance the micro-focus with a macro appreciation of the Gestalt (a key relationship that I explore in an earlier Substack).

disruption: breaking habitual patterns of processing meaning, spinning our mind into fresh directions.

attentional absorption: reading poetry requires our full focus as we grapple with the hermeneutics, and this encourages a flow state.

liminality: reading a good poem suspends us in that space between the concrete and abstract, reality and dream: the perfect soil for creative associations and divergent thought.

All of these processes lie at the heart of the creative quest for the new and surprising. As Alice Oswald herself (so poetically) puts it, the art of poetry is ‘listening through language.’ The choice of words helps her hear a new idea, opening a new path of exploration, and that new path in turn suggests a fresh choice of words.

An example of one of Oswald’s wonderful formulations, from the poem ‘Cold Streak’:

I notice the lark has a needle
pulled through its throat

Can you read this without a sound coming to mind? How does a needle of sound make you feel? For me it’s tight and trilling, surgically precise in its way. Is a note of suffering introduced to the bird, to its song? How does this counter the usual notion of birdsong as welcoming the dawn, a liberation, an opening into a new world?

Getting lost

Every time we are confronted with a metaphor or symbol, it offers a gateway into our own rich subliminal thought-life. It invites our own, deeply personal response. A good metaphor is essentially about divergence: it opens up tributaries of meaning, suggesting a different flow and destination. It enables us to lose ourselves in thought and embrace ambiguity in an environment where fast-track, direct (and often unthinking) communication prevails.

I was chatting to a friend yesterday and he said that, for him, this is one of the beauties of reading poetry, the sense of getting lost, the immersion into a mysterious world and the release from needing meaning. I agree. I think we should allow ourselves more moments of getting lost like this. It gives permission to our creative minds to meander and to ignore the usual pressure for assigning pat answers and quick meaning to everything we observe.

The more we invite this kind of divergent thought into a day that is otherwise packed with convergent tasks, the more we are feeding our creativity. Poetry, with its insistence on metaphorical language, is therefore a multivitamin for our creative mind, best taken regularly and over long periods. You could argue the same for listening to music, another intrinsically metaphorical language.

A response to Alice Oswald’s inspiration

In the spirit of these Substacks, I wanted to give the chance for my reading to find its full cycle and yield a poem of my own. The following is inspired by the walks I take around the park,  normally at the cusp of dawn. I imagine the park waking up from the ravages of a night party, and I’ve tried to incorporate some of Oswald’s syntactical style, including a lack of punctuation. See what you think:

After the party

the cuticle moon
on a bruised
thumb of cloud

other clouds
lipstick smudges
on a grey collar
all crack and no plump

other clouds
remnant ash-piles
tipped lazily from a
divine mantlepiece

meanwhile tipsy birdsong beneath, trilling
to an insouciant sky whose memory
has been rubbed blank
by the night

meanwhile a twig does a line of frost
and its tree, cracking,
is dismantled

meanwhile a swan rehearses death
on a milky pond
drifting, pre-ghost

meanwhile a cormorant coughs
and the reeds phlegmmed with dew
shiver against a
pill blue sky

as a sun somewhere
shakes the cold off
questioning the dank

as a bus
uncanny neon
fringe headache
alarms the day

Enjoy your poems, enjoy getting lost in good art, enjoy searching for your own direction and response, and do share anything you’re finding inspirational in the comments. Happy creating!

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What stance do you have around New Year’s resolutions? Are you at the soft or strong end of the spectrum? Do you rigorously list and mind-map your goals for the year, or do you soak in a warm bath of good intentions? Whatever language you put around it, I think this time of year is great for creatives because we get to re-create ourselves, reinvent who we are creatively and enjoy the promise of newness and surprise.

Here’s how I’m thinking about my creative resolutions this year, in the hope that some of this might find some useful parallels in your look ahead too.

Stealing back time

First, I’m going to reassert that creative goals are central to who I am. They are up there with doing regular planks and avoiding too much sugar. If I can fit in ten minutes for Joe Wicks, I can damn well do the equivalent for my creative training. It’s all part of the mind-body-soul balance.

Secondly, I’m going to steal back some time. We all know our creativity is contingent on having a string of moments where we are intentionally creative, that quality time is scant and scarce, and that it is therefore our most precious resource.

So, I’m going to steal back some silence and de-noise my day. I’m not going to put on the ‘The Rest Is Politics’ while I wash up or hoover. Nor reach for the radio when I do short trips in the car. I’m going to leave my headphones at home when I go for a walk. The bathroom and bedroom will be phone-free. It’s about embracing the space, reclaiming it from the noise of the everyday, and allowing my mind to incubate ideas or even generate new ones.

I’m also going to plan a weekend retreat and save up for it, make it happen.

Question 1: How are you going to steal back some time for creative thinking? Which routine task could you ‘de-noise’?

Honing your craft

Which element of your craft has gathered dust and needs fresh attention? I’ve done a brief audit and think I’ve avoided my singing for long enough. 2026 is the year of the voice for me.

I conduct choirs from time to time, you see, and although I can hear the pitch and detail of what I’d like, I can’t easily reproduce it in my singing, or not without sounding like Kermit with a cold. At its root, it’s a crisis of confidence. I know that in the past, when I was teaching student pop and jazz groups, I’d be singing lead lines and landing the backing vocals with gusto. I’m not saying it sounded good, but it did sound confident. I need to reclaim that.

Part of this is about privacy while learning. Luckily I have a church nearby which I can pop into and sing in without fear of the neighbours chortling at my high notes. (In my head my neighbours are constantly there when I practise, doing comedy double-takes and spitting out their coffee at the sound, or whatever. It’s a standard paranoia.)

I’ve got a good knowledge around vocal technique and have had good teachers in the past. I just need to reapply it to my own voice rather than just expect it of others. So, off to church I go.

Question 2: Which element of your current practice needs honing? How are you going to create a space and place for it to happen?

A new string to the bow

A new year should bring with it a new skill, I believe. It’s good to keep challenging ourselves in that respect and remain dynamic, avoiding complacency. I’ve chosen to learn the notation software, Dorico. At the moment I use freeware (MuseScore) to type up my music, and I do so begrudgingly, very begrudgingly. I resent the time it takes and how fiddly it seems, I get a knotted stomach as I search for the right shortcuts, I swear at the staves when they refuse to reorder on the screen. It’s an ugly business and I put off the moment as long as possible, often resorting to pencil and manuscript instead.

My goal, then, by this time next year, is to be fluent in Dorico. To be frolicsome with it, typing merrily away while looking in the opposite direction, flinging notes up on the screen as fast as I can hum them. I’ve seen YouTubers do it, so why not? It’s going to take a big dollop of patience and quite a few phone-a-friend moments, but it is within grasp, surely.

Question 3: What new skill are you going to develop this year that will sharpen your practice and introduce better flow?

Who are my buddies for the year?

Regular readers will know that I’m big on collaboration and that it is My Thing. Yes, we all need cave-time, solitary deep thinking and freedom from other people’s opinions. And we need to keep our collaborations flowing in tandem with that, in symbiosis. As I regularly put it in these Substacks, it should be a beautiful figure-of-eight.

With that in mind, I’m looking forward to setting some fun goals with my creative accountability buddies this year. With my writing buddy, I’ve already done a short story on the subject of ‘Tinsel and Remorse’. Maybe that can be a future Substack once I’ve polished it up a bit. With my photography buddy, I’m hoping to capture the ‘dance of hands’ in some way and plan in the occasional photo-walk. And with my composer buddy, I’m going to invite early feedback on a piano piece I’m writing for my daughter’s wedding, as well as do a piece for the choir I run.

If time allows — or should I say, if I make the time for it — I’m going to see if I can read through some piano trios with violinist and cellist friends, testing my sight-reading and my chamber skills.

Question 4: Who are your creative buddies this year and what small, fun challenges can you set each other?

Intentional input

I’ve left this one until last because in a sense it’s the easiest bit. It’s about improving and expanding our creative input, whether through passive absorption or through active reflection. It’s the fun part, essentially: choosing new podcasts, widening the range of books we read, switching up the YouTube channels we follow, joining different discussions online and off.

The key to all of this is intentionality. For the input to be deemed ‘creative’, I return to the definition of something that is ‘new, surprising and valuable.’ What will trigger fresh ideas, will be beyond your normal sphere of being and reference, what will deepen your contact to the things that matter and inspire you to create differently?

I’m hoping to re-engage with poetry this year. I like how its abstract images and linguistic games release my mind, invite funky associations and set me on a different neural pathway. I’m going to listen again, more regularly this year, to the podcast Poetry Unbound and marvel at how its skilled presenter, Pádraig Ó Tuama unpacks each poem, making each line seem more lyrical with his soft Irish accent. I have a shelf of poetry books that look mournful and dejected. This will change. A poem with every porridge, perhaps? You’ve got to love the alliteration, at least.

Question 5: How will you expand your creative input this year? How will you open yourself to creative surprise and exploration on a daily basis?

Jolly good luck!

Even if we don’t end up sticking to the plan, it’s fun to make these plans isn’t it? It’s fun to entertain new possibilities and to dream a little, reminding ourselves that we have a choice, every day, every month, every year, to do things differently, to be more creative.

So, here’s to an inspiring 2026 for us all, with good creative choices at every stage!

It seems appropriate to be writing about flickering in a season of twinkling and sparkling. I hope you’re reading this surrounded by candles or fairy lights, sipping something fortifying and hunkering down, ready to muse on the year ahead.

First, however, I want to talk about falling:

The Fall-from-the-sky, or ‘Eureka’ experience

In a recent patch of early wakings, I found myself listening to an engaging series of short reflections by the author Rebecca Stott, in which she described her writerly inspirations and processes. Her first novel, Ghostwalk (2007), apparently came to her fully formed after an epiphanic conversation with a stranger in a taxi. The whole plot with all its characters and twists seemed to pour out into her notebook as she flew to South America. By the time she landed, her novel had been born. A true ‘Eureka’ experience, a falling-from-above.

It reminded me how some composers claim to have had a similar experience of receiving a picture of the whole piece in one flash of inspiration. Sometimes they attribute the source to God, other times to the universe. Their role is ‘merely’ to transcribe the inspiration faithfully.

It’s quite a Romantic view of creativity, this idea of a ‘gift from above’, but it endures not least because of its dramatic allure, its aura of mystery and its suggestion of a genius or chosen one. The one who hears from God.

The composer Jean Sibelius was more of a pantheist than a conventional churchgoer, but he still had room for this notion of direct divine revelation. While composing his much-loved fifth symphony, he famously wrote in his diary:

“Music is, for me, like a beautiful mosaic which God has put together. He takes all the pieces in his hand, throws them into the world, and we have to recreate the picture from the pieces.”

Compare this to Johannes Brahms’ reflection:

“Straightaway the ideas flow in upon me, directly from God…clothed in the right forms, harmonies, and orchestration.”

Or here’s Stravinsky on his break-through work, The Rite of Spring (Le Sacre du Printemps):

“I had only my ear to help me; I heard and I wrote what I heard. I am the vessel through which ‘Le Sacre’ passed.”

Elgar talks of walking in the Malvern Hills and sensing the air was ‘full of music’. All you had to do, he wrote, was to ‘take as much as you require.’ Brahms also speaks of plucking musical ideas out of the air as he hiked in the Alpine region of Mürzzuschlag. (That’s not entirely surprising. I think most of us would sense an abundance of inspiration when walking through the Alps. Certainly more than when popping across the local park to Tesco’s, but that’s another story.)

Not quite that simple…

This doesn’t mean, of course, that these ideas simply flowed unimpeded onto the manuscript. It’s interesting that, actually, Brahms, Sibelius, Elgar and Stravinsky were inveterate revisers, constantly doubting their first ideas and returning to them to reshape and refine them. Sibelius wrote of the looming presence of his ‘strict inner judge’ throughout his career. The first flush of inspiration may have felt natural and flowing, but the process of crafting it into a finished product remained as painstaking as ever.

Maybe their perfectionism was even a response to this initial, unchecked splurge of idea, as if they doubted its validity on some instinctive level? The easier the inspiration, the harder it is to give it final shape?

The Flickering

Compare this to the much more prevalent model of inspiration that, I think, most of us experience on a day-to-day level. And, in fact, the one to which Rebecca Stott returns in the final of her five reflections, having not been able to replicate the ‘eureka’ of her first novel. She talks instead of a flickering of an idea at the edge of her consciousness and how it stubbornly continues to burn, very gently, until her attention fuels it into something fuller.

Many creatives speak of this notion of following a glimmer in the dark. There’s that famous quote by the American essayist, E.L.Doctorow, with its memorable metaphor:

“Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

Neil Gaiman re-imagines this as us having just one headlamp, edging forwards as far as that single beam allows. It’s more about trusting the darkness than the light. Virginia Woolf gives us the walking equivalent:

“The process of writing is like walking through a wood, letting the path open before you as you go; you do not know exactly where you are headed, only that you must keep moving.”

Stephen King speaks of the process of excavating a buried idea, brushing off each new artefact as it appears. We could go on, but it seems very natural, almost self-evident, to perceive the process in this way, of essentially groping in the half-light and then reviewing the ideas once they surface.

The emphasis, then, is on trusting the process of slow emergence, on putting the words or notes down as they come to mind without worrying about their final shape too much, on trusting that, despite the darkness, there is something just around the corner and that we have to just fumble on, squinting, peering for the next flickering.

The ‘still small voice’

I’m minded about the parallel here to spiritual faith. Very few people get to experience God in a series of Moses-like revelations, with clouds broken by Hollywood-style shafts of light and pillars of fire. For the prophet Elijah, God was not in the fire and drama of an earthquake but a ‘still small voice’ in the calm afterwards. Later, the psalmist writes of needing to ‘be still and know’ God’s presence, intuiting it in the silence.

We need to have a quiet mind, generally, for the flickering to make itself felt.

In terms of our creativity, that flickering could just be an interesting word, the merest glimpse of a character or a suggestion of a scenario, a faint abstract image that seems to promise more, a falling interval or a brief sense of overall Gestalt.

In terms of faith, it may be the briefest reassurance that we are not alone, perhaps, or a prompt to feel or see a situation differently, a possibility of peace or being able, despite everything, to sense some love.

All of these feel so fleeting, so wispy, so unpromising, as if they could be false trails. Our creative endeavour is generally about trusting and following such tiny trails nevertheless, while acclimatising ourselves to the dark and even feeling comfortable in it, making it our collaborative friend. And if you do ever have a ‘fall-from-the-sky’ moment where the whole work suggests itself in one dramatic revelation, then good for you. I think it’s a rare occurrence indeed, and more often experienced when you’ve been mulling an idea for a long time already, having let it incubate and coalesce subliminally.

Thanks for reading, and for following these thoughts this year. Please do subscribe if you haven’t already for more creative inspiration next year.

In the meantime, very happy Christmas and New Year. May the flickerings be strong and many!

Smorgasbord. I’d rather not type that word. It’s up there with hygge, Zeitgeist or umami, all over-used in my opinion. However, I’m going to make an exception today because it does feel like the right word for my very various and enriching collaborative creative experiences last month. Better than ‘buffet’, anyway.

I’ve had the chance to lead workshops involving community groups and conservatoire students, Renaissance trumpets and Persian ouds, pop songs and Shostakovich symphonies. I’ve duetted with famous people and jammed with GCSE schoolchildren. Somebody even offered to play a couple of notes on a conch. A conch. That was a first.

So yes, a true smorgasbord of musical opportunities, personal interactions, inspiring environments and creative ideas. All of which have taken me away from my regular posting of this Substack. Apologies for that.

Teetering at the edge

Throughout all of this there has been a consistent feature: the reluctance to start improvising together. It doesn’t matter whether they are highly proficient conservatoire students fresh from playing their last concerto, or older people coming back to their old friend of a guitar and trying to remember the three chords they learned when they were a teenager. We all need encouragement, as a group, to start the collaborative process together.

It’s not a natural everyday occurrence for most of us, after all. We know how to create by ourselves, tucked up in the comfort of our habitual creative space, but it’s a whole new ball-game when you’re in a roomful of others, wondering how and where to start. And then you’ve got someone like me saying we’re going to improvise a scherzo inspired by Shostakovich and include a middle section about things that are dear to us. It can all be a bit much.

I’ve lost the sense of trepidation around this initial phase, this sense of teetering on the brink of a new, unknown enterprise only because I do a lot of it. I wonder, though, if it’s a bit like asking people to gather in a room with a rail of fancy dress costumes and saying, go on, take your pick, let’s all dress up like film heroes. Who’s going to get undressed first? Or try on the glitzy feather boa?

We need to understand the scope of the game, to be given permission to play it as we wish. And sometimes we need a gentle yet firm nudge to get started. It’s understandable. I hate fancy dress and I think I’d need more than a gentle nudge. A walloping two-handed shove, more like, and a stiff whisky.

Dive in, the water’s warm

The metaphor I like to use here, from the facilitator’s point of view, is of encouraging people into water to take a swim. You can’t get people swimming by talking intelligently about front crawl, or by splashing around in puddles. You need to get everybody into the water, nicely submerged.

And the place for the swimming instructor to be, perhaps, for this bit is in the water themselves, not shouting from the sidelines. So, when I start a workshop, I tend to be behind a piano or on a cajon (a box-like percussion instrument). I quickly gauge the level of the group as best I can, pick a few notes and chords that I feel are easy for everybody, then start pulsing them at the keys. I’m in the water already, and there’s an implicit invitation to join me there, in a flowing river of sound.

It is only once they’re in the water that people realise that they can give in to it and let it carry them. It is far less effort than they might have thought. They are often surprised by how buoyant they are, how sustaining the water is in that respect, how little they have to do to stay afloat.

This realisation requires a submission of self, in a way, an acceding to a group flow, to the possibility that the creativity of others can keep us afloat without having to push in any particular direction.

Forget the fanfares

And precisely because there needs to be this submission, I think it’s helpful to get playing as soon as possible in the process, rather than do the rigmarole of going around in a circle introducing everybody in the room. I know this feels a natural thing to do, to give people a voice and take away their strangeness by giving them a name. And yet, even if this is done humbly, without fanfaring job titles and creative experiences, it is still a process of individuation, not of collective belonging.

We bond quickest and strongest when we’re united in the actual task itself. Self-introductions can come later, once we’re already in the water and realise how warm it is.

I also like how in this metaphor, when everybody’s in the water together, bobbing with their heads above the waves, you can’t actually see the rest of the bodies, the rest of what distinguishes them. We’re all just paddling away without realising it, enjoying the feeling of sun on our heads. Once you’re in, the water actually begins to feel warm too. No good just dipping in your toe and recoiling at the cold. Plunge in with a gleeful leap.

Toes touching the bottom

The caveat here is that nobody enjoys feeling out of their depth and wondering what is lapping at their ankles beneath. It feels good to be able to touch the bottom. And so the task as facilitator is to judge a safe depth initially and incrementally steepen the challenge throughout the session.

I like to pick an opening exercise that people could do in their sleep, like playing a single note and re-colouring it, exploring the basics of tone. Or just rocking between two chords for a bit, to acclimatise to the sound and capacities in the room.

If the group is more able I’m conscious they can easily feel patronised, and that this perceived condescension can be a barrier too. So in that scenario we’ll start by using some scales (‘Lydian dominant, go!’) or some cool chord progressions, or more complex conceptual briefs (‘find a way in sound to escape from a small room’).

However, the aim is always for the first plunge to feel easy and natural. Inviting, even.

Parallels in conversation

I think some of this dive-in approach can be applied to creative conversations, like a marketing meeting. It’s harder to spot the difference between engagement and avoidance in this context, perhaps, but still possible.

We need to start from the premise that most people, particularly in a group setting, will prevaricate when faced with the task of generating an innovative idea, even in the context of a ‘blue-sky’ meeting. You can guarantee that there will be talking around the task, assessing the barriers and problems, or the similarities to past problems, or budgetary issues, or the allocation of potential roles and responsibilities. This is just weather-talk, filling time before addressing the matter at hand and offering something genuinely new and surprising. You could call it meta-dialogue.

The usual ice-breakers are also meta-dialogue, often a warm-up to nothing. You might get a nice buzz going in the space but I don’t see much evidence of it enabling the right kind of focus afterwards. As before, I believe being united on the creative task itself is the best form of bonding, and that conversations will naturally evolve from there. We don’t have to guess each other’s favourite fruit first, or find someone with the same star sign.

Bah humbug? Well, remember I am talking about a creative task here. Not a purely administrative one, like cascading information about a standard operating procedure. For that I’d need a warm-up, (and possibly a two-handed shove and a stiff whisky).

It needs a sensitive facilitator, then, to get people ‘into the water’ in a creative scenario. Imagine walking into a room and being invited to one of three tables with an engaging, on-topic creative question. Then being told you have five minutes to come up with three ways of answering it, before moving onto the next table with a freshly shuffled group.

SPLASH. We’re in the water, and it’s warm.

It got me thinking about how the dickens, in the deep darkness of that cave, anybody found the web in the first place, let alone arrived at the figure of 110,000 (there must be a lot of guesstimating going on, surely), or what kind of bug-eyed, creepy insects the spiders catch in a cave like that, how they divvy up said bug-eyed insects between 110,000 of them (must be quite the feeding frenzy), and how it’s got to smell horribly eggy down there. And, most importantly:

Do spiders get bored?

I mean, not these Albanian ones. They’re clearly having a great time in that cave, webbing and multiplying. No, I mean the solitary ones that you see hanging out on the washing line in your garden. Or the one that, rather inconveniently, has spun his home right outside our kitchen window, such that I find myself recoiling slightly at seeing him at 4am, having to remind myself that he’s on the other side of the pane.

A brief description in the spirit of Knausgaard’s short observations. (Not suitable for arachnophobes.)

He is a big fat garden spider who has installed himself right at eye level. And in the glare of the kitchen neon light I can peer at his every detail, every hinge and whisker, the pin-prick eyes, the delicate silk-hooks, those jaws that seem to be in constant motion as if he’s chewing gum.

The thing that still makes me queasy, even after weeks of getting to know each other — I like to think he’s interested in my kitchen habits too, somehow, that he’s casting one of his eight eyes over how I’m scrubbing scrambled egg off the bottom of the saucepan, perhaps tutting at how, again, I’ve left a bit — the thing that still fascinates me is his plump abdomen. So very plump it seems distended, comically out of proportion with the spindly little legs.

Maybe he’s a she? Maybe she’s pregnant, ready to burst. I imagine her squirting out a stream of mini-spiders in a billowing silk line, like a row of tiny dandelion seeds bobbing in the early morning air.

Or maybe the grand tiger-striped middle is entirely natural and perfectly in proportion for a garden spider, thank you very much, nothing to see here; in fact all part of the swagger of having your own web on premium window-side property.

Imagine instead, then, a Falstaff figure with his fat stomach stretching against a striped doublet, his legs splayed while his body sways gently from too much wine. He’s so stuffed from over-eating he can’t move a limb.

By flicking on the kitchen strip-light, surely I’m attracting witless moth-like insects into his lair, surely I’m gifting him with multiple breakfasts? He should be grateful, not just sit there looking smug, criticising my washing up.

Nobody ever calls a spider lazy.

This Falstaff spider does a lot of sitting around. And yet no one would accuse him of being lazy. Nor of being bored. We recognise that the stillness is strategic and part of the master plan. Falstaff is not zoning out on SpiderTube, or whatever, doom-scrolling his night away.

The stillness is tense and active. He is constantly watchful and alert so that, at the slightest trembling of a radial thread, he can scuttle into action, wrap up his prey and do whatever spiders do. Suck out the little moth’s brains through a proboscis? I have no idea.

(You may have noticed by now that I have very little general knowledge about spiders. I could ask Gary (ChatGPT) for some tips, but where’s the fun in that? I don’t want Gary to start picking holes in my metaphors.)

When Falstaff does get some food stuck in his web there is a lot of sudden leg action. It’s out of character, somehow, this flurry of activity. And fascinating how the legs all coordinate as they mummify the corpse, working away in a quick, methodical circles.

The web trembles as Falstaff tucks in. I feel the need to look away at this point, out of decency. Nobody likes being stared at when they’re mid mouthful. Or when they’re being slowly devoured either.

What has all this got to do with creativity?

Good question. I think you’ll have guessed where this is all going. Falstaff the Spider has made me think about two things: the nature of boredom, and the constant self-criticism we creatives subject ourselves to around being lazy.

Let’s define boredom as being a mental state where you feel you are lacking stimulation. I feel you have two choices here. You can either reach outside for stimulation or go into yourself and be content with your thoughts.

I want to choose the latter more often in my life. Not impulsively reach for the World Service at 4am, but rather lie still, alert to my thoughts, creating a web to catch morsels for later devouring.

You’ll expect me here to do a diatribe on modern living and how much we crave stimulation, how we’re addicted to it, how we’ve forgotten to embrace its counterpart of still reflection.

Nope. I’m taking that all for granted. It’s so endemic, it’s staring at us right in the face, a daily challenge. We all know this.

My resolve is to try to be more spider-like in my still watchfulness this week, to try and welcome those moments when, between meetings, or stirring the porridge, or going to the loo, or queuing for something, I can choose to reach in rather than out for stimulation. I can still pounce later on any ideas that get caught and that’s a valid part of the spider experience; but first I need to be still.

A stillness streak

It’s going to be an interesting experiment, to see if I can get a ‘streak’ of still episodes, a sequence of small yet decisive moments where my fingers hover over the screen of the phone but don’t commit, don’t press.

And in the process of finding some kind of dot-to-dot stillness, I’m also going to discipline myself not to accuse myself of laziness and being unproductive. I’m going to choose not to feel guilty — as far as one can choose that — if I don’t learn Welsh while stirring the porridge. Or if I’m not listening to a podcast while I walk to a meeting.

Yes, I realise there is a performative contradiction here, as I type busily away on this Substack early in the morning. However, this coming week I’m going to step back and go Full Spider Mode. Still but watchful.

Wish me luck. It’s not going to be easy.

Do join me on this Stillness Streak and let me know any thoughts if you’ve tried something similar in the comments below.

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Happy creating!

The French Symbolists introduced this idea of ‘correspondences’ at the turn of the last century, delighting in how music sparked poetry, or how a painting could translate to a score. People had, of course, been making such connections long before, but less purposively and, I like to think, without quite the same flair and panache of Baudelaire, Mallarmé et al, with their boozy weekly gatherings in Parisian salons. My impression is that each artist kept more or less to their own lane, that said. I’m not aware of Debussy sketching his lilies or penning a quatrain. Maybe he did, though.

Anyhow, this week felt like the right moment for the triple challenge. The clocks have slipped back, the mornings are longer and more winsome, and I feel the early dawn gives a fresh creative impetus.

And, because I believe in creative constraints and don’t have much time this week, I’m setting myself a strict one-hour time limit on this challenge.

But first, why?

By seeking correspondence between these three media, I’m trying to fire up some left-right hemispheric activity in my brain and see if pinging between the two (logical to spatial and back, in crude summary) will yield a creative surprise. I’m giving myself a short time-frame so I can keep shuttling between modes of creating, maintaining a tension between them somehow. My theory is that if I dwell too long in any one discipline then I may lose out on some of the cross-pollination and some of the alchemy. It’s a totally unfounded theory, I hasten to add.

Three hopes

I’m hoping for more ideational fluency and plasticity than normal and to have my synapses zapping in funky directions. A synaptic symphony.

I’m hoping I might get some new insights on how I work as a creative artist from imposing different narrative forms on the same source ideas.

And I’m hoping to test my self-identification as a Jack of All Trades (and yes, a master of none.)

For me the natural process is to start with the most fixed element — the photo — and to pass through the words, mixing figurative with concrete idea, before ending with the most fluid medium, sound. I wonder what it would be like to work in the opposite direction, moving from sound via word to image? The former feels more of a divergent creative process and the latter more convergent, perhaps?

Enough prevaricating. The clock starts…now.

Here we go with a starter image, shot while roaming the South Bank in London on a photo-walk last week:

The image

I like the contrary motion of this, the balance of elements (lights, staircases), the overall geometry and use of stark shapes, the way the people are placed more or less at the coincidence of lines, the tonal balance between greys and the warm squares of light, and the potential for story: who are these people, where are they going, do they know each other, and is that camera in the top left corner spying on them?

The words: a short story

The father and daughter tread slowly upwards, lost in conversation while bracing themselves for the staircase to give way to the main road above. Neither want this. The walk always ends too soon. They have only just warmed up their stories, embellishing the past week, finding entertainment in small detail.

They have one more minute, perhaps less, before the lip of the stairs means they have to part ways: she to her workplace a few tube stops away, him back by bus, train, and bus again to an empty house in Oxted.

Fifty-five minutes every Thursday morning, that’s all they get. To make sense of the past, to forgive some of it, to find themselves in each other again, to feel a semblance of an old connection. They try, in that last climb of the stairs, to revive some memories of gelaterias, or beaches, or Christmasses. They know that, up there in the noise, the road will announce their separation, telling them who they have to be that morning and why.

The thick, smooth walls on the way up feel like ramparts that shield them against this immediate future. The sounds above come to them in muffled half-sentences: a siren that fades, the deep clacking of bus wheels over girders, a snatched call from one worker to another, the flapping of a bored gull overhead.

They don’t even notice the man that passes them on his way down, even though he stinks of morning jog, even though he has baked bean stains on his otherwise pristine white T-shirt. He is thinking in Czech, although he dreams in English these days. This is the easy finish to his weekly run before stretching out by the brown river at the bottom, next to a pop-up café that does feisty cortados.

Kryštof is a mathematician, and quite a good one, publishing every other month to decent reviews, invited to the occasional key speaking slot. He works with probabilities, in the main.

For five months now (or four months, two weeks and three days to be precise), he has tried to calculate the probability of his crossing paths with that charming couple of father and daughter exactly at the intersection of those staircases, where they turn on each other half-way up. Bang in the middle. It has become an obsession.

Each week they don’t notice him as he passes. This morning he’d upped the pace on the approach by two strides per twenty seconds, giving a cadence of 125 steps per minute. With his length of stride, and given the probabilities of various variations in their route, he felt certain he’d meet them dead centre. They’d even brush shoulders. Maybe the woman would look up, say hello this time. He liked her hair when it was down, her expression of concern as she listened, the roundness of her accent.

He missed them by 1.5 seconds. Excruciating. And she had kept her head down as usual, studying the steps as they climbed, soon to turn out of sight and into the breach of another week.

The sound: a short piano improvisation

I ended up with the scrag-end of the hour to improvise a response to both of the above. A matter of minutes. The result is raw, just a beginning. But that’s enough for now and for this article. This exercise was about seeing how different modes of creativity rub along, what stories they conjure, what technical choices they suggest in each medium, and what openings they offer for further development.

It was also about registering if my mind felt zingy and creatively fertile by the end of it. It does. I’m ready to do some deeper creative work now.

So, even though listening back to my half-formed musical thoughts makes me cringe, and I wouldn’t normally share something as fumbled as this with my musical friends (some of whom are on this Substack mailing list), I’m not going to ‘let the perfect be the enemy of the good’, as they say, and just swallow my pride and post it. Here’s me, explaining my thinking and then bashing out the first thing that comes to mind on my electronic keyboard:

What interests me is that I wouldn’t have had those motifs or structural pointers for either the short story or the piano improvisation without the catalyst image. I think either could be developed into a novella or tone poem in their own right, if I were so inclined, and that they could hold their own place. And yet, also, the three do synergise and complete each other in a way, making sense as a trio — in my head, at least.

Did I end up thinking in different ways? Well, maybe I had access to new narratives, but I noticed that I wasn’t in any way hearing sounds as I typed the story, or visualising the photo as I improvised. Once in a particular mode of creating, I stayed there. I think this exercise has been more about setting up interesting mental templates — associative hierarchies, we might call them — and then working within those in each domain.

I wonder if the three creative products work well together and make sense to you too? Or are the connections too subjective, too random? Do comment below, I’d love to hear your thoughts. And send me your own Triple Challenges…

Happy creating!

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If you’ve enjoyed this article on Substack, please do ‘restack’ and help me introduce others to these creative thoughts. Thanks!

‘Threshold anxiety’, ‘displacement activity’, ‘amygdala hijack’, ‘learned helplessness’ and, one of my favourites, ‘mauvaise foi’. These were just some of the choice terms I drew on in my last article (Avoiding the task, part 1) for describing the various inner games we play when avoiding knuckling down to a creative task. Over the centuries we’ve developed multiple vocabularies for this resistance, whether from philosophical, cognitive or neuro-scientific domains.

I want to add a new vocabulary to the whole endeavour this week: the language of temptation. For this we’re going to go back to the first centuries C.E., to the world of rake-thin hermits in loin-cloths meditating in the baking heat of the north African desert, living off a meagre selection of seeds and desiccated insects. A select few of them chose, bizarrely, to perch on a makeshift pole or pillar. (I can’t quite imagine how this worked when it came to loo breaks, but still.)

These are the desert monks and nuns, the abbots and abbesses of the first generations of ascetic Christians, seeking a sterner path to salvation than ever before. From their writings and reported practices, they sound rather formidable, other-worldly even, more stoic than the Greek Stoics before them, and with lashings of self-masochism. An interesting bunch.

One of these monks, Evagrius Ponticus, set down his experiences in the desert in a work from the 4th century, Praktikos, that was to guide fellow monks and Christians in their spiritual practice. Of particular interest is his writing on temptation, which he breaks down into constituent parts to show how one thought can lead to the next, taking you deeper down the rabbit-hole of distraction and away from virtuous living.

This chain of thoughts was called logismoi by the Ancient Greeks. They had already recognised that specific mental patterns arose when faced with five powerful emotions: greed, desire, fear, anger and defensiveness. Each logismoi represented a reactive habit. And the congruence of such habits formed a slippery slope, one that led away from true self-knowledge and actualisation.

As ever, these Greeks were onto something.

Evagrius took this concept a step further, naming eight logismoi that led, in his view, to sin. They start with crude temptations of the body — gluttony, lust and avarice — then progressed to the emotional issues of dejection, anger and despondency. Finally came the spiritual battles, the hardest-fought of them all, against vainglory and pride.

Body, emotions and spirit. This categorisation offers a full checklist for our own temptations, or distracting thoughts. Learning to discern where the temptation is attaching is all part of overcoming the resistance.

I recognise that ‘temptation’ is a tricky word, one that could easily be bundled off in the ‘naughty-but-nice’ category. Perhaps you dress temptation up in a sparkly red costume with little horns and trident, a cartoon devil that whispers in your ear when you fancy a chunk of Dairy Milk. This, though, is part of its hold on us, this illusion of harmlessness. The reality is our brains can learn new habits frighteningly quickly. What begins as a frippery, a small distraction, can end up a as an addiction that upsets our impetus, saps our creative energy and distorts our sense of identity.

So, maybe the first step to resistance is to take the whole endeavour more seriously, while holding our stumblings and fumblings lightly along the way.

Recognising the vicious cycle

This is how Evagrius categorised the process of temptation (and yes, this is a redacted, rather oversimplified version):

1. First comes the probole, the initial provocation, often unbidden. We see an advert for Cadbury’s Dairy Milk (insert your favourite, most tempting chocolate here). Maybe it just pops up on the screen as we’re searching for something else. Perfectly innocuous…

2. We ‘pair up’ that thought with a bodily response. In this a case, a mild hankering for chocolate when faced with a mental task. It’s just a tickle at this stage, the lightest of prods in our subconscious.

3. We slip into tacet consent with that thought. Gosh, how delicious that first bite would be, how creamy and satisfying. Just one chunk, after all. Harmless. And actually, I am feeling a little peckish as it happens…

4. We become captive to the thought. I now have to nip to the corner-shop. Possibly get a multi-pack of Dairy Milk to see me through the week.

5. The habitual reaction deepens into a compulsion, or addiction. We find we can’t get through the situation without chocolate. And that triggers a whole other set of insidious thoughts that could involve guilt, self-accusation and loss of control.

The antidote

Evagrius reminds us that the first step is to be constantly watchful for where the thought is attaching and the progress it is making. (Bear in mind his formidable checklist: gluttony, lust, avarice, dejection, anger, despondency, vainglory, pride.)

He reaffirms the monks’ belief that demons can’t bear to be laughed at. And so the first response is to smile at the distracting thought in its probole phase, see it as a pesky little thing with no real power, chuckle at how easily it has been caught out. He ‘outs’ the thought, objectivises it and diminishes its hold.

He then advises the monks to give the unhelpful thought to God and move on. This is, obviously, tricky to do if you don’t believe in God. Maybe an alternative is to note it down, to see it reduced to an impotent scrawl on a page, releasing on it in some way and directing your thought-life back to the task at hand.

Evagrius also suggests that cracking on with something practical helps to busy the mind and body. He argued that performing an act of hospitality was particularly powerful here, as you are deliberately taking the gaze off yourself and onto somebody else.

Do with that suggestion what you will. Maybe a short burst of weeding to break the thought pattern? At least a walk around the block, thinking about a friend you haven’t been in touch with? Over to you…

Summary thoughts

You’ll recognise a lot of the tactics above, I’m sure, from the perspective of CBT or mindfulness exercises. We name the distraction, isolate it, then move away from it promptly (no dilly-dallying, nip it in the bud!) through busying ourselves with something else. Those with a faith may be encouraged to ‘give the temptation up’ to God at an earlier stage than perhaps is typical. We tend to engage God after the fact, I find, looking regretfully at the balled-up chocolate wrapper.

The main, universal invitation in all of this is, I think, to be more holistic and thorough about recognising those forces that pull on our psyche, and to acknowledge how quickly they get embodied and ritualised into habit. And to assert that our creativity really matters. It is what makes us, us. There is a jeopardy involved in not pursuing this central creative calling.

We don’t have to do the equivalent of sucking on dried termites and climbing up poles, but there is the opportunity here to consider how important our creativity is to us, to weigh that importance against the resistance we face, and to be more resolute in how we deal with that resistance, whatever name we end up giving it.

Good luck, and happy creating!

Facing the resistance. An inner monologue:

Tea! I must have tea. In my favourite over-sized mug, of course. Where’s that mug gone now? I can’t have tea in that chipped mug. Let me just find my special mug, my creative mascot. Can’t compose without it.

The kettle is filled and the switch flicked. A few minutes, then, for me to nip on the phone and scroll through the newsfeed. Apparently, Attorney General Pam Bondi is still lying to Congress, and people are still outraged. I’ve seen the clips before but I watch them anyway.

The kettle is doing its crescendo. It’s a slow news-day, so I’m already on email. There’s an invite for some work from a school. I ought to get back to the school straight away. The job might go elsewhere if not. It’s urgent.

…I’m now twelve emails in, as they’re all urgent too. The kettle needs reboiling.

Ok, mug found, tea poured, and I settle at the piano.

Ought to wash up those other mugs first, though, can’t have those hanging around.

Now I can settle at the piano.

Why did I even set myself this blatantly over-ambitious task of composing an entire Mass for eight-voice choir? It’s ridiculous.

I should start with just a little anthem, an ‘Ubi Caritas’ perhaps. That’s what other composers do, right? Much more practical. But oh no, I have to take on an entire Mass! What am I trying to prove?

Talking of other composers, I still haven’t listened to Roxana Panufnik’s mass yet. Or Paul Mealor’s either. Perhaps I’d better take a listen, set up some reference points.

I need a biscuit or two, though. Can’t sit down for a long listen without some sustenance. Where’s the fun in that?

Damn, out of biscuits. I guess that’s a quick trip to the corner shop, then.

Listening now to Mealor’s Mass with some chocolate digestives and it’s fantastic. Just far better than anything I could write, damn it. I dab at the piano. It sounds so derivative compared to what I’ve just heard.

I do manage a few chords but:

Critic-on-the-shoulder: That harmony is so eighties. Are you sure? Is this some kind of cheesy love song?
Me: Nice on the ear, though.
Critic: Naff, more like.
Me: Give it a chance, let’s see where it goes, eh?
Critic: Every time we do that, we end up going around in circles, don’t we? How is this time going to be different?
Me: You’ll see. Anyway, I want to write something that people will actually listen to. Buy, even.
Critic: Buy? Come on. You’ve got more chance making money leaping up a beanstalk.
Me: Didn’t stop Mozart.
Critic: You’re no Mozart, my little friend. Remember what Mr Potts said?
Me: My old composition teacher? Why are you bringing him up?
Critic: If I remember rightly, and I definitely do, he said you’d better consider plumbing or some other ‘more reliable income’.
Me: Mr Potts never wrote anything interesting himself, is the thing.
Critic: Well, how would you get this performed anyway? Which choir would take on a new work like this? And then what, after a first performance? Consigned to the shelf as usual. What’s the point?

He has a point, in that there seems to be no point.

Still. Let me give at least this first line a go before lunch. Hang on, is that the time? Already? I’ll never get this done before lunch. Need more of a run at it, to get into flow.

There’s always Saturday, isn’t there? If we don’t end up going into town as I promised…

Analysis

There are various different vocabularies for describing this kind of resistance, each according to the background discipline. If you’re a cognitive behavioural therapist, you’ll refer to avoidance behaviour and task aversion. Psychoanalysts might talk about repression of creative desires and their eventual transference into the work, or their sublimation into symbolic activity. In creative studies we refer mainly to flow states and what might block them, including distractions and threshold anxiety. If you’re a coach, you might think of limiting beliefs and the activation energy required to overcome them. Neuroscientists may point to the amygdala hijack that happens, that sense of overwhelm at the start. Sartre may have called your reluctance to respond to your core creative identity an instance of ‘bad faith.’

I like this one. Imagine Sartre saying ‘bof, c’est de la mauvaise foi’, eyes lidded, cigarette hanging off lower lip:

So, if we wanted to we could label the various different types of avoidant behaviour as follows:

Categorising the resistance:

Tea! I must have tea…Can’t compose without it.
Procrastination / Ritualised avoidance (a comforting preparatory routine masking fear of beginning)

A few minutes, then, for me to nip on the phone and scroll through the newsfeed
Displacement activity / Behavioural avoidance (substituting trivial mental engagement for the difficult creative task)

There’s an invite for some work from a school. I ought to get back to the school straight away. It’s urgent.
Task aversion (gravitating to easier, externally validated tasks)
Instant gratification bias (preferring quick social reward to slow creative labour)
Cognitive distortion to create false urgency

I’m now twelve emails in, as they’re all urgent too. The kettle needs reboiling.
Compulsive busyness that prioritises the urgent over the important / Displacement / Avoidant over-functioning (activity as defence against anxiety)

Ought to wash up those other mugs first, though
Another classic displacement activity, or form of threshold anxiety

Why did I even set myself this blatantly over-ambitious task of composing an entire Mass for eight-voice choir? It’s ridiculous.
Limiting beliefs / Perfectionism / Fear of failure

I should start with just a little anthem, an ‘Ubi Caritas’ perhaps. That’s what other composers do, right? Much more practical. But oh no, I have to take on an entire Mass! What am I trying to prove?
Impostor syndrome / Self-doubt as protective strategy

Talking of other composers, I still haven’t listened to Roxanna Panufnik’s Mass yet. Or Paul Mealor’s either. Perhaps I’d better take a listen, set up some reference points. I might be inspired too.
Rationalisation (recasting avoidance as research)
Comparative thinking (setting up future self-criticism)

I need a biscuit or two, though. Can’t sit down for a long listen without some sustenance. Where’s the fun in that?
Procrastination through minor reward-seeking

Damn, out of biscuits. I guess that’s a quick trip to the corner shop, then.
Behavioural avoidance again, now with physical displacement

Listening now to Mealor’s Mass with some chocolate digestives and it’s fantastic. Just far better than anything I could write, damn it.
Negative self-comparison / Self-sabotage / Limiting belief

I dab at the piano. It sounds so derivative compared to what I’ve just heard.
Inner critic activation

Critic-on-the-shoulder dialogue:

They’re so eighties.
Inner critic (CBT: maladaptive inner dialogue. Psychoanalytic: superego voice)

Naff, more like.
Catastrophising / All-or-nothing thinking

Every time we do it, we end up going around in circles, don’t we?
Learned helplessness

You’ve got more chance making money leaping up a beanstalk.
Limiting belief

Remember what Mr Potts said…
Transference (importing external voices of authority)

There seems to be no point…
Existential anxiety / Bad faith

Need more of a run at it, to get into flow.
Perfectionism (holding out for ideal conditions)
Avoidant postponement (waiting for a perfect block of time)

There’s always Saturday, isn’t there? If we don’t end up going into town as I promised…
Procrastination / Behavioural avoidance cloaked as planning

What do we do with all of this?

Behavioural change starts by naming those things that are holding us back and introducing some distance from our immediate emotional response so we can take different, more constructive decisions.

In this first part, I just wanted to get you thinking about the choices, minor or major, that lead you away from the creative task. Yours might well be different to mine. It doesn’t matter, the main thing is to recognise them, identify them and make a different choice. One that draws you in to your creativity rather than spins you away.

In the second part next week, I’ll be sharing a different way of framing this whole enquiry, drawing on the Wisdom literature of desert monks and nuns:

Part 2: Temptation and how to resist it (or not)

Happy creating!

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Surprise for a creative person is like a rare butterfly. It tends to flutter onto our shoulder when we’re looking in the opposite direction. And it’s what we’re all after, this gentle fluttering of a new thought into the mind.

I say fluttering because, in my experience anyway, it’s rarely a bolt out of the blue that has us screaming ‘Eureka!’ in the bath; more often a light nudge into a new direction, a subtle uncoupling from the tracks, a match-flare in the cave.

When I define creativity, I usually lean on Margaret Boden’s formulation of a process that yields something ‘new, surprising and valuable’. Even if that’s you finding out, for the first time, that peanut butter, jalapeños and plum slices go extraordinarily well on toast. (I cannot verify that one.) It doesn’t have to change the world.

Notice that, aside from having value, the creative product needs to be both new and surprising to you. Not just mildly novel, but excitingly so. There needs to be a tingle. That’s a sure-fire sign we’re onto something genuinely creative.

Yes, we usually have to go through the hum-drum of repeating our old ideas first in order to get to the tingle. However, I reiterate: the creative mission is to catch ourselves being surprised by something. That’s the ‘tell’. It’s sensing the butterfly on the shoulder.

So. How to catch the butterfly?

The nitty-gritty

Enough lepidopteral metaphor. Let’s break this down strategically. I think we can be surprised through finding:

• new material

• new takes on old material

• new ways of thinking

• new ways of making

• new collaborations
  

The question is how to create the best environment for all the above to happen. I have eight suggestions for you:

1. Beat the algorithms

When it comes to finding new materials to work with, I find a lot of this is about keeping our ears to the ground on a daily basis, while avoiding the algorithms that will pull us back onto well-worn tracks. Instead of curated playlists, try switching on the radio, for example. When I’m doing my morning stretches, I begrudgingly put on Radio 3. I say begrudgingly, because they tend to play pieces that I think can’t possibly surprise me. Or they opt for baroque opera with alarming regularity. (Opera and early mornings do not go well together, in my opinion.)

What I actually find is that I hear something new in the interpretation of pieces I’m familiar with, a fresh detail in the middle section usually: the bit you’d normally gloss over if scanning for pieces elsewhere, but can’t when mid-cat’s pose. It’s a rare thing to listen to a work from beginning to end in this day and age.

Or Radio 3 serves up something that’s completely new to me. Last week they broadcast this piece by Jean Mouton (I mean, who on earth is he?), and I felt a tingle. It sent me scurrying away on a wonderful treasure hunt to find other pieces by him to programme for the choir:

The same will be true for your daily reading or perusing of images: you’re after something anti-algorithmic. Anything that randomly selects material and that has a better potential for surprise. I’m deliberately scatty on Spotify, for example. If anybody were to look at my play history, they’d see a befuddling mix of hip-hop, neo-soul, jazz, classical, Arab songs and Renaissance choral music. And I’m quite proud of that.

Beat the algorithms, embrace surprise.

2. Fresh eyes

We can of course return to old material with fresh eyes. My wife has watched Jaws at least 54 times, and each time she finds something new and surprising. You might say it’s a bit obsessional, but it’s also creative in its way.

In a previous post, I talked of how composer Nico Muhly picks up old scores as a daily discipline, finding something fresh in them each time. I’m trying this with old novels, just dipping in randomly to look not at the story but the craft, observing the words on the page at a critical distance. The same is true when I flick through my photo-book of Henri Cartier-Bresson. There’s always some fresh detail there to savour, and I think that’s perhaps one mark of artistic genius.

What’s the equivalent for you in your creative discipline?

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3. Fresh constraints

New ways of thinking and making are often helped by setting yourself different constraints. Instead of writing for piano and violin, pick a Celtic harp and kazoo (actually no, not a kazoo, never a kazoo). Lop the bass line off, compose for soprano-alto-tenor instead. Why not? Or write a radio script rather than a short story, a dance routine for 3 active legs, a photo-walk focussing on orange circles etc. etc.

4. Patience, patience

Once you’ve picked your new constraints, remain patient. Nine times out of ten, I deprive myself of surprise through not being patient enough. Had I pushed on just ten minutes more at the keyboard I might have found that ‘lost chord’.

Recently I was composing something at the piano to say thank you to a team. I wanted the style to be emotionally direct and accessible, but with an element of surprise. I was noodling endlessly in D major, my fingers slipping back into the standard chords and clichés. It was so cheesy and I was ready to give up. Then I gave myself just ten minutes more.

Would you know, this tingly chord turned up (a Gm11 if you must know) at 0’45”?:

5. Press record!

Often I find an enticing sound only to let it flutter out of my head (back to butterflies again). It is a good practice to have a recording device running, even if you’re just speaking ideas into it as you walk, or videoing your warm-up routine. I know a couple of creatives, the wonderful Vilk Collective, who set their recording software running whenever they doodle in their attic studio, because they never know when that lost chord may drop. They must have terabytes of archived material.

6. Strategic incubation

We need to allow enough time for our ideas to marinate. I touched on this in my last substack, but often the newness and surprise only comes when our subconscious has had the space to get involved. This is the all-important incubation period in the creative cycle, when seemingly random associations get made (what if pigeons learned baroque opera?), bridging one part of the brain to the other, linking present to past, asking ‘what if?’ and bypassing the usual rational tramlines.

How long we need to incubate depends on the complexity of the creative task. Einstein incubated his experiments for years before coming up with theories. You might just need a micro-nap to find that elusive sentence. It all depends. The main thing is to be strategic and build space for incubation within your creative practice.

7. Collaborate!

And then there’s collaboration. This is a massive topic for me, the subject of my doctoral research. (So, expect many a future Substack to be dedicated to collaborative creativity, and what a fine animal it is.) Suffice it to say that I believe our biggest surprises often happen when confronted with the ‘strange’ thinking and actions of others. Their choices and motivations get you scurrying back to the drawing board, reappraising your own way of doing things.

Collaboration, to return to our original metaphor, is the equivalent of going into a butterfly enclosure at Bobby’s Butterfly Bonanza with two lines of honey on your shoulders.

One of my happy places is improvising with musicians in the Dovetail Orchestra, a group that brings together local players with people who have been displaced from all over the world. For example, when Özcan from Turkey sings, we often have no idea where he’s going to take us, nor what part of the song structure he will land in. The wonderful thing is he often doesn’t either. It’s a mutual surprise! And that’s all part of the beauty of working with him.

Are you collaborating enough in your creative life? With the right, thought-provoking people? Sometimes it’s too easy to keep to our creative caves and not let anybody in to challenge our thinking.

8. Choosing the byroad

We know we are creatures of habit and shy away from change, not least because it requires mental effort. If there’s a chance to take the motorway over the byroad, we’ll take the quick route, the one that gets us from A to B reliably and without too much thinking. And in so doing, we miss all the scenery. We miss the surprise.

When we look at our creative thinking, there are actually many times when we are faced with this choice of motorway or byroad, either subtly or explicitly. This week’s encouragement is to take the byroad more often and to see where it leads.

Happy creating!

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On the days before I have to give a talk, you’ll see me lapping the local park, head bowed and muttering to myself, occasionally gazing into the middle distance. Sometimes I gesticulate, conducting a musical phrase, or pause to try a sentence out loud. The neighbours have got used to it now.

I’m honing the words of my talk, hearing how they hang together, testing the argument on an unsuspecting sycamore. The stimulation of being outside helps me find fresh images and metaphors. As I pace around the path, so I’m mentally test-driving the corners between paragraphs to see if I can stay on track, committing certain key lines to memory. I’m also testing whether the little quips I found so amusing actually hold their humour out here in the harsh light of day, in front of an imaginary audience.

I call this process ‘walking the talk’. After a few laps of the park, my script is sharper, slicker and more embodied. And often it’s completely transformed from what I’d initially dreamt up in my study while sat, stolid and lumpen, at my desk.

So yes, I think better when I walk. In fact, I utterly rely on it. If I don’t get to walk a talk before I go on stage it feels precarious, as if it’s going to float out of my mind and escape. The walking helps to ground the words and make them feel organic.

Do I have to do this next bit?

Can we skip the part where I have to prove to you that walking is generally good for creative thinking? It’s so blindingly obvious that it doesn’t need empirical evidence, surely? Just as we don’t have to scientifically prove singing together is good for your mood (who needs dopamine measurements?), or that regular sleep helps focus (who needs electrodes on the scalp?), or that sparrows prefer fruitcake (who needs a Victoria sponge?).

I made up that bit about the sparrows. Just checking you’re still with me.

If you insist, here’s a study Stanford University did in 2014 where over 80% of the participants reported their ideation (ability to form new ideas) and divergent thinking improved while walking.

There are plenty of big walk-thinkers who back this up anecdotally. Dickens claimed he would ‘explode’ if he didn’t regularly walk ‘far and fast.’ Rousseau declared ‘my mind only works with my legs’. Then there’s Nietzsche, Mann, Beethoven, Thoreau and Woolf: all inveterate walker-thinkers, to the point of compulsion. I’m sure Gary* could come up with many more. My favourite walker-thinker quote is from the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. He wrote, rather poetically:

‘I have walked myself into my best thoughts.’

*Gary is my name for ChatGPT, see my last article.

Personal observations on perambulatory thinking

The Stanford research suggests walking is more helpful for divergent thinking than convergent. I’ve found this not to be true. When I ‘walk my talk’, I am both free-associating (divergent) and rehearsing/finalising the material (convergent). Walking gives me the headspace to do both effectively. Here are some other observations:

• In the first ten minutes I usually ‘skim off’ the anxious everyday thoughts that bubble to the surface. There is a clearing of the mind, a stilling.

• Then there is a both a focussing and a release. I bring the central theme to the front of my mind, while also letting associative thoughts roam around it freely. I have an image of stars orbiting a planet here. You need both.

• I can hear you saying ‘of course you do!’. That’s how focussed thinking generally works, right? However, the point I’m making is that you need to stick to the central theme for a bit longer than usual. Let it be a gravitational planet a while. No planet, no stars.

• I encounter the dog-walkers and overhear their conversations, take in the birdsong, see a familiar face and am brought back to the present moment. This allows my mind to release its conscious processing and slip into subliminal working instead. Then I’m incubating my ideas, not ignoring them but marinating them. They will resurface later, surprisingly tastier.

• And sometimes those snippets of conversations and casual observations can be tasty morsels in their own right too.

• As I meander, so my thoughts meander at the same relaxed pace. I need this Andante tempo. No good trying to compose a speech while zipping around on a scooter, Presto Vivace. The natural pace of walking allows for ideas to unfurl naturally and pleasantly.

• The repetitive motion of my step invites a similar ostinato rhythm in my mind. It helps me to repeat and rehearse phrases without getting bored. That’s also why I find praying using mantras is facilitated by walking. If I try repeating my mantra while dutifully kneeling or sitting, I’ll get to about four repetitions and then get hopelessly distracted (and no, don’t buy me a rosary). I can’t do the sentence-per-breath technique, it makes me too self-conscious. Walking holds me to a natural cadence and sends the prayers out into the world rather than bouncing off a magnolia wall.

• Being outside enables me to have conversations aloud with myself in a way that feels less contrived, somehow, than in the privacy of my room. Indoors I sense a scrutiny, as if the neighbours are eavesdropping with a glass to the wall. Or that there’s a Greek chorus there, looking distinctly unimpressed.

• There are fewer opportunities for displacement activities when you’re out walking. It’s just you, your breath, your tread, your thoughts. No kettles to boil, no mugs to rinse, no emails to write.

• The last point assumes you’ve left your headphones and phone at home. Of course.

• Every walk, like any journey, has its terminus. There’s a built-in deadline and that’s helpful to bring summary focus. That’s one of the reasons I love to write on trains too.

• Finally, post-walk I inevitably feel perkier, ready to get back to the desk and pull together the strands and give the talk its final shape.

I’ve made perambulatory thinking absolutely essential to my talk preparation. And beyond that, it’s key to my creative strategy in general, as well as a much-needed routine for my wellbeing.

Do you walk-think too? What have you noticed? If you haven’t tried it regularly, let me invite you here to include it in your creative life and see what a difference it makes.

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In a recent post, A Surprise Ending, I commented on how sonata form is predicated on, well, not having a surprise ending and how, in fact, it is a deliciously complete and replete way of thinking — one that finds its parallel in the novels of Austen and the Brontës.

That parallel got me reminiscing about a talk I did about a decade ago for the impressively named ‘Bristol Institute for Advanced Studies’ (IAS), a centre for interdisciplinary research here at Bristol University. To a group of mainly non-musicians (but wildly brainy artists and scientists), I unpacked the first movement of a Beethoven sonata at a piano, explaining the processes involved, then invited them to write a poem inspired by those processes. And then I set one of the poems to music afterwards through an improvisation at the keys.

I think it worked, although I did perspire a great deal, dear reader.

I explained at the time that this cross-genre translation had been done before, into various literary forms from novellas to prose poems. Gary now tells me that there are notable examples by Hesse, Rilke, Neruda, Valéry, Lorca and Pound.

(Gary is my name for ChatGPT, by the way. Seemed apt. All the Garys I’ve known have been IT-oriented and had an aura of vast, untapped knowledge. I digress.)

Even without Gary’s help back then, I felt that the so-called ‘sonata poems’ I’d read were only very loosely inspired by the musical form. Perhaps you could say they evidenced ‘sonata thinking’ more than a strict adherence to its form or structure. Some astute readers will prove otherwise, I’m sure: please do leave a comment.

I was after a more exact and exacting translation, where the musical processes were rendered more obviously. That was the gauntlet laid down to the esteemed members of the IAS back then, and to you now. Can you express a mini-sonata in word, music, gesture or some kind of visual medium?

Let me be specific on what the form entails. Musically-trained readers might like to skip this bit, go and turn the kettle on and feel slightly smug.

Broadly speaking, sonata form comprises:

An exposition section presenting (usually, though not always) two or more contrasting principle ideas. Often each idea carries its own cluster of related themes.

A development section that puts these ideas through their paces: fragmenting or extending them, subjecting them to different keys, playing with different features and appreciating kinks in their shape etc. This is the fun bit where the composer shows off.

A recapitulation where these ideas return, transformed by what’s gone on before. In classical examples, they are all presented in the home key to emphasise a sense of homecoming.

A coda, or afterword, to wrap things up neatly.

I’m missing quite a few details. Musicologists will lament the lack of introductions, transitions and closing material. I can only apologise, but the above is a decent outline at least, enough for a springboard into sonata thinking.

In the spirit of this Substack, I’ve given the challenge a crack myself with a ‘sonata poem’ written after climbing a small but spiritual mountain in Pembrokeshire. I’ve added subheadings to highlight the sonata thinking.

An Encounter with Brynach
A Sonata Poem

[Exposition: first idea]
Breathing deep the fern on Carnengli,
summit of the angels,
head tipped back to greet the sky,
ribs filled full with the savour of pink thrift,
I was higher than the plovers,
wiser than the wrynecks and
giddy on heather and damselfly.

[Second idea, related but contrasted]
Here on black slate St Brynach had lain
cloaked in hard tight rain
and supping on dew
pearled from gorse.
Here on mire and moor he’d wept
and cried in the curdling dark
to be back where voices sang,
together and strong.

[Development section, riffing off ideas, introducing conflict and changing syntax]
I didn’t think I would see him there
but the cloud thickened and tensed,
the gorse sharper,
the thrift cast grey
the plovers low as choughs,
eddying,
now fearful and giddy,
seeking the vale
in short held breaths.

And Brynach was there:
in the slate, pearl black,
in the pinkish rain,
his cry held in the
still hover
of a gull

before it fell

alone, strong, white.

[Recapitulation of ideas and coda, smooshed into one]
Here and then St Brynach had spoken
and in the sighing sun once more
we weren’t alone,
but breathed deep the dawn
on Carnengli,
summit of the angels.

Your turn! I’d love to see a sonata hip-hop track. Or a sonata dance or photo sequence. Anything that takes the form and delights in its path.

Happy creating!

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‘And if I were Beyoncé putting on a special gig just for you?’ I ask my students, pointedly. ‘Would you be late for her too?’

Some look at me blankly, clearly struggling to combine the image of Beyoncé with me, a bearded middle-aged man.

My point is that if they really value a person or an activity, they would be early. Even camp overnight. Not slink in thirteen minutes late eating a biscuit. I put it to them that, ninety percent of the time, our lateness is within our control and is a reflection of how important we deem our punctuality. And by extension, if you’re late, you’re essentially saying to the person waiting that their time isn’t as valuable as yours and that, frankly my dear, you had other priorities to fit in beforehand.

This is unfair and hyperbolic, granted. I’m not Beyoncé, not even remotely close, and getting to a weekly music session is not the same as attending a rare gig. And yes, sometimes circumstances conspire against you, despite best intentions.

Best intentions, for example, are no match for the delayed 14:54 to Swindon, now departing from platform 13 at 15:47…

And yet a kernel of truth is there: we make time for the things that really matter to us. We could create a Beyoncé Scale 1-10:

Beyoncé 10: unmissable, beautiful life-changing event
Beyoncé 1 : cleaning the grout with a toothbrush

I think this can be used to test the strength of our creative calling too. Just how important is it to us, judged on the time we clear for it in our lives? Where on the Beyoncé Scale is writing our book, or throwing that pot, or composing that song?

Are we ‘turning up on time’ to our creative pursuits?

Going more Gandalf

I think it is worth, as a first step, reassessing what a ‘creative calling’ is, and how central it is to our identity. First of all, let’s promote that word ‘calling’ to ‘vocation.’

Vocatio in Latin means ‘I summon’. Vocation is not just a calling then, but a summons. It’s not a ‘hiya, woohoo, over here’, more of a Gandalf-style ‘Thou Shalt Come!’. If you get a summons, it’s usually to a place or person of authority, whether a headteacher’s office or a court. You don’t ignore it. You go.

I put in my credo that to be human is to be creative. It is our central summons. I believe we feel our most fulfilled when we respond to that core creative urge in some way. Life just gets in the way.

I think it’s helpful to reassert our summons regularly — to look in the mirror while you’re flossing in the morning and call yourself a Creative, because that’s what you are.

It’s then a question of degree: how gifted I am in a certain creative pursuit, how much time I therefore dedicate to it, how much that pursuit defines my professional identity, how much it pays my monthly bills, and where on the Beyoncé Scale it falls.

Starting with a curious perusal

I was listening a few days ago to the sassy American composer, Nico Muhly being interviewed on Radio 3’s ‘This Classical Life’ with Jess Gillam. It’s a great episode, you should check it out. I enjoy how he describes the creative process with choice wording, cunning metaphors and very neat sentences. You could transcribe his sentences directly into The New Yorker and it would read perfectly.

One of the revelations was that he likes to peruse a random score almost every day, his current favourite being motets by Thomas Tomkins, the Welsh Tudor composer. That’s quite niche, but apparently the polyphony is sublime (and I suddenly feel the need for more Tomkins in my life).

This curiosity is key to his creative habit, and I find it inspiring that he is still keen to learn and be inspired by past models, even though he’s being commissioned by every world-class ensemble under the sun.

Despite the pressures of everything else in his day, he is ‘turning up on time’ to this curiosity. And I think this is a great starting point for us too. Nurturing creativity isn’t about producing lots of great work; it’s first and foremost about tuning in to our curiosity and seeing where that leads.

In other words, if you’re a time-poor, frustrated creative, it’s enough to listen to or study something inspiring a few times a week. You are still responding to your central summons.

And here we come to another point in my credo: that creativity is not about productivity, or not all the time. It starts by finding something that is new, original and surprising to you in what you’re reading, hearing or seeing.

You’ll then find that those ideas, those curiosities begin to accumulate and take on weight, and the need to express them on paper, canvas or manuscript creeps up the Beyoncé Scale.

Happy Creating!

(As ever, please do like and subscribe if you’ve enjoyed this article. Thank you!)

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Monomyths

We know the usual story: the hero has their calling, their testing in a foreign land, their transformation and their return home. It’s set out in Campbell’s ‘Hero’s Journey’, a neat summary of mythical grammar and the archetypical structure of storylines the world over — the monomyth.

As chronological beings, we are hard-wired to want linear or cyclical narratives. We are goal-orientated, even if that goal is the thing we most fear: death, the ultimate telos. When confronted with a labyrinth we are suckered in, drawn inexorably to its centre because only there, we believe, will we find meaning and resolution. Sod it if we can’t find our way out again, at least we got there, reached our telos and discovered the key.

Buddhist mandala patterns are the perfect representation here, a deep echo of our psyche, even perhaps the coils of our brain:

We deeply need stories with an ending that ties up what has gone before, even if that tying up is in the form of a question (although that is irritating, isn’t it?). We deeply need balance and closure.

And so: the boy has to get the girl (or whatever variation of that), the baddy has to be killed after one last fight (as messily as possible, preferably skewered on a blunt railing somehow), the missing person found, the murderer revealed.

No surprise then, that in music as much as in novels or film, the predominant form is one that favours some kind of return and that gives closure for the ear. From a basic minuet through ‘da capo’ arias, sonatas, symphonies to clever arch forms, serialism and minimalism: all have their sense of return(s) embedded, whether large and triumphant, or gentle nods to previous motifs.

In fact, classical sonata form, the one that has the most emphatic sense of transformation and return, bears a strong resemblance to the structure of an Austen or Brontë novel: the same balancing of antithetical characters, the same developing of those characters through conflict, the same sense of resolution affected by that conflict. Rochester’s house may burn down and he may be blinded by the flames, but at least he survives to be reunited with Eyre.

The Greek ABC?

You might say, yes, but what about Greek tragedy? As theorised by Aristotle in his Poetics, the hero has their moment of travail, their peripeteia, and never recovers from it. In fact, they usually die. Rather than a neat ABA or ABA’, it’s an ABC, where C is the death (or at least maiming) of the hero.

Otherwise, where’s the tragedy and where’s the catharsis? Imagine if Oedipus found out that, far from being prophecy, all this stuff about him killing his father and marrying his mother was just idle rumour peddled by a jealous half-brother bent on seizing power of Thebes? Imagine if Oedipus skewered his half-brother on a blunt railing then went back to solving more riddles, this time with more purpose than ever before?

That’s Freud scuppered, for a start. And it’s about as cathartic as soggy popcorn.

And yet. When we dig deeper, it turns out that the final act of a Greek tragedy still acts as a return, a homecoming of sorts, except that the emotional rhythm of tragedy — pity, fear, catharsis — dictates that the return is leaden with a solemn new fate.

We don’t escape into a new world but limp back, forever scarred, to the old one, to a lawless Thebes, an Argos soaked in blood, or a poisoned Athens. The previous order has collapsed and is now re-established in the shadow of tragedy.

And so the story of Greek tragedy is actually an ABA’ in disguise, where the final ‘A’ is a variation in a minor key of the first. It always circles back.

This week’s challenge: finding the fine line

What does this mean for this week’s creative challenge? I’m fascinated to see whether, in the name of originality, we can subvert this need for a return. I’m wondering whether we can come up with an ABC that satisfies as a story, in whatever medium you choose.

The thing is, the ‘C’ section will feel like a bolt out of the blue if it bears no relation to what’s gone before. Rather than delivering a wonderful surprise, it falls flat as a narrative device, because surprises generally work best when they reveal something new about the characters that we’ve got to know, when they stick within the frame of the established story.

It’s not a plot twist if you’re not twisting the plot, in other words, but rather devising a completely new plot altogether, e.g.:

A: Jack comes back from the market with magic beans and a beanstalk shoots from the earth
B: Jack grabs money, golden eggs and a harp from a Giant
C: Geoff protests against a motorway being built over his farm

Who’s Geoff? Why do we care about the motorway? What happens to Jack?

The average reader will confront a rupture like this by retrospectively applying a story-like logic. They will think: Aha! Maybe the motorway is a symbol of the giant, the modern obsession with speed crushing all that goes before it. Or that Geoff is the everyman, and that his plight highlights the lack of magic in our lives.

Our minds will search for meaning, filling in gaps in the storyline, smoothing over cracks in tone and register. We will backfill from ‘C’ until it makes sense.

Maybe we need to strike a balance, then, and create a vitally new ‘C’ section that still has a few subtle references to A and B, just enough to keep the scantiest of threads and correspondence of meaning.

It’s a fine line to tread. It must still feel like a final departure, just bearing the traces of the original story. So:

A: Jack comes back with magic beans and the stalk grows
B: Jack nicks eggs and a harp
C: Geoff is in an empty pub staring at his pint of Guinness…

Tehran and Toblerone: some examples

I’m really enjoying the TV series Tehran at the moment (I know, late to the party), and an added treat is that it has this catchy theme tune by Mark Eliyahu:

If you listen through to the end it has a convincing ‘C’ section: a frenzied drum outro that takes the groove into a new world with chords from the ‘B’ section floating over the top. Marvellous!

Or what about this playful triptych by visual artist Sara Blessed?:

I’d love to read, see or hear your ABC creations, so do please comment below with any examples.

Happy creating!

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What comes to mind from that one word, what images flow from it? Spend a moment just free-associating, see what crops up.

Now try ‘rust red’.

Immediately the thought-life gets richer, doesn’t it? Why the rust and why is it red? We have the beginnings of a story.

Creative cognition is all about combinatory thinking, even if it’s just smooshing together two words. We take an old thought and combine it with a new one, and that’s where creativity kicks in. We go from ‘monkey’ to ‘ravenous monkey’, or ‘towel on a chair’ to ‘wet towel dripping on a chair in a desert’.

Learning and creativity have a lot in common in this respect, to the point of being coterminous. When we learn we are being creative, and when we create we are learning. They occupy the same patterns of cognition, and are both examples of constructivism, or binding new knowledge onto old. In some taxonomies, ‘creating’ is even named as the ultimate stage of learning. If you can create, that demonstrates you have assimilated the knowledge to the degree where you can turn it to your own ends.

Perhaps with creativity there is more emphasis on the end-product being imaginative and off-piste, containing an element of surprise. You could represent it as:

Learning: 2 + 2 = 4
Creativity: 2 + 2 = tutu

How do we exploit this constructivist pattern as creatives? How do we deliberately set our minds into creative motion through combining concepts and practices, learning as we go? I thought that, in the spirit of this Substack, I’d give it a go.

Elgar, an Abbot and clouds

I was improvising on the piano recently, taking this piece by Elgar as my starting point. Recognise it?

It’s ‘Nimrod’ from his Enigma Variations. The variation that gets rolled out on national occasions where audiences are invited to puff their chests and feel a swell of pride in the imagined glories of the past.

For my improvisation, I could just riff off the falling sevenths in the right hand (shown with orange lines). That would be decent enough. However, what makes this more interesting is combining those falling gestures with the rising couplets in the middle line (in blue) of the left hand.

Now, I feel, we have a story: the legato falling against the marcato rising. The ideas are in creative tension and I can play with how they move towards or against each other. They happen to be antithetical, but I could have picked a more complementary or subtle counterpoint.

All that matters is that the two or more ideas you settle on begin to chirr when brought together, that they begin to whisper something new.

(I’d record some improvisations here for you if I could, but I’m currently on holiday and without a keyboard. My fingers are going through the motions instead, paddling the air like a flipped woodlouse. Maybe I’ll add an audio file post-publication, once I’m reunited with my trusty Blüthner.)

I’m now wondering how I could transpose this basic juxtaposition of ideas, this fall-against-rise into different media. I’m reading Samantha Harvey’s marvellous book, The Western Wind at the moment, so my mind is half in medieval Somerset. The falling line brings to ear the descending cadence of an old Abbot’s speech: slightly patronising and sermonising (imagine ‘Dearly beloved brethren’, from high to low in a slow glissando). In the rising couplets I can hear the short words of a stolid, stubborn, illiterate monk, a new arrival to the medieval monastery.

So, here’s a quick dialogue combining long falling statements from the Abbot with short, upward-inflected questions from the novice monk in his charge:

Long descending statements with short rising questions:

Abbot: Brother, you are very, very new to the yoke of the Rule. Bear with it a while longer and you will soon find in it succour to the soul, I promise you that much.
Novice: Will I?
Abbot: ‘Reverend Father’, don’t forget, my son, as we are bound together in spiritual family here: you to me, and us all to our heavenly Father.
Novice: Reverend Father, will I? Get used to it?
Abbot: Many a monk will have searched their soul in their first months here, but soon the walls and cloisters become as fortresses to your resolve, mark my words. Now, Matins approaches and I have yet to find my rosary, so…
Novice: If it’s a mistake? What then?
Abbot: There are no mistakes in the will of the Good Lord, child, and you’d do well to remember that before you loose that tongue further and set it wandering on misguided errands.
Novice: Is your rosary red? With rust? On the chain?
Abbot: Whether my rosary is a fashionable Italian red or not should not concern you, my son, although I will divulge that I did in fact receive it as a delicate and timely gift from the wonderful Monsignor Farnese on his last sojourn.
Novice: I think Martha has it? The maid? In her chamber? But you’ll know where, Reverend… Father?

Ok, so I’ve played into the Corrupt Priest trope, but it was fun. I observed that it was quite hard to keep the novice speaking in questions, and was surprised to see the ‘rust red’ image return unbidden. I certainly didn’t start out with that final reveal in mind. Our minds combine ideas subconsciously, of course, and that’s part of the surprise.

Here’s a photographic interpretation of falling long lines punctuated by staccato ideas, again courtesy of Sara Blessed:

Are these ‘Mare’s Tails?’ Cirrus Uncinus? Or sinister vapour trails strewing and sputtering their chemicals against an innocent blue? Or sky jellyfish? You decide. The main thing is the clear counterpoint, the combination of ideas, the constraints observed, the story suggested: something created and something learned.

Instead of taking a seed, take a pair of seeds and see what grows out of that hybrid.

I’d love to see your response to the falling-line-rising-couplet theme, so do comment below to share some ideas:

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As usual, please do take a moment to heart and restack this if you’ve enjoyed this creative prompt. Thanks!

Happy creating!

The ‘micro-notice’

We are used, as writers, to relishing the finer details, the tiny things that we see and others overlook. We are often told how this will help make our descriptions pop and feel more realistic.

I remember one of my early writer friends describing this as the notice. What is your personal observation, your unique take? What do you notice, what it does it say about the setting or the character, and how does it drive the narrative forwards?

Noticing something is often to do with zooming in. One of my favourite writers, Jim Crace (Harvest, Eden, Quarantine…) is known for his forensic detail. He specialises not just in ‘notices’ but what I’d call the ‘micro-notice.’

I remember in particular the microscopic accounts of decaying flesh and matter in his Being Dead: the colonisation of bacteria on the skin and fat, the tissue as it liquifies and mulches, the attrition of sea-salt on bone, the gases that bubble and burst and their molecules of sweet stink.

The book starts with two corpses, and with each chapter the parade of parasites that attend them gets smaller and smaller, creating a marching order from foxes down to barely visible fungi. As he zooms in to details of decay we’d normally never consider, he gets us thinking more widely about the ravages of death, our impermanence and the mundane materiality of our bodies.

He zooms in, we zoom out.

Being Dead runs with this metaphor of decay and applies it to decomposing relationships, emotions and memories. It is a beautiful and bittersweet read. And it also is typical of Crace’s writing approach, a fine example of how by going into minute, sometimes scientific detail, you can enrich your metaphors and symbols.

Such notices and micro-notices can also substitute for emotional language. In this short video, Crace shares how an ‘objective’, detailed description can invite a keener subjective response in the reader than a gushing description of a character’s emotions. So, a description of a coffin — its tarnished brass handles, the gloss of the black paint, the flowers that have slipped — is enough for us to respond with our own sentiment, our own recollection of grief. We don’t need to be told how very, very sad the character is. He puts it this way:

‘Be specific with the thing and reticent with the emotion.’

What’s happening?

The devil’s in the detail. We are indeed back to that truism. And God’s in the detail, too. Think of Blake’s poem on how divine creation is reflected in the smallest of things:

To see a world in a grain of sand
And heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.
(from Auguries of Innocence)

It got me thinking about how this micro-to-macro relationship works. Could it be that the closer we zoom in, the more abstract our view of the object becomes and therefore the more potential there is to free-associate, accessing the peripheries of our imagination? And does this mining of the peripheries yield a more original and evocative metaphor?

Is describing a small blade of sunlight and its illumination of the veins of a petal more evocative than painting a big canvas sunset?

I suppose it depends on how skilfully we do either, of course. One description can be as hackneyed as the other if we’re not careful. You might think my sunlight-through-petal-veins is clichéd, for example.

This is all too easy to talk about theoretically, so I decided to go on a photo-walk to put the concept to the test. What if I wanted to write a poem based on summer turning into autumn and that liminal state between the seasons?

Giving it a go

When I do my early morning loop of the park, my gaze normally falls loosely over the whole scene, the macro. I might take in the sweep of the grass down to the pond:

Or appreciate the clouds and the general invitation of the sky to think big:

This morning, though, I set my phone’s camera to ‘macro’ and began kneeling into the grass to spot something photogenic, like patterns on pre-autumnal leaves:

The first, on the left, makes me think of mottling, freckling, of liver spots and ageing. The second bears a light scorch mark, a singeing as if being licked by a match flame beneath. The third is a leak of bleach from the centre, or a re-pigmentation, a vitiligo of sorts.

Good. Already getting some more poetic images than my usual autumnal tropes. I carried on, this time spotting some feathers among the detritus:

The first looks freshly hatched, a mixture of delicate barbs and down, their gentleness almost a promise of life in the bed of decaying leaves. In the second I was drawn to the batch number on the empty Biscoff packet, its strange specificity next to a commonplace, anonymous feather, its incongruous red and vibrance among all the dead browns. Is this grubby little wrapper a leaf in its own way, shed and left to curl unseen?

A poem about shifting into autumn

Here is my attempt at riffing off some of those images in a short poem:

Summer is sickening.

The barbecues sputtering out,
the parties greying with the day,
the balls grounded from flight,
and the dogs curiously quiet.

The grass smells blank and
the lake, rain-starved, stinks
of crowded duck and mould.

The leaves, now fevered and
stricken by yellow-rash,
begin their burn and curl,
falling from seen to unseen,
browning among other things shed:

the feather, the biscuit wrapper
with its grubby red,
the damp fags left for dead.

I took twenty minutes on that, trying to work from the macro to the micro. I’m not sure I got there, and could have gone deeper. I think Crace would have described the fetid mould and the patterns of the leaf rash in scintillating detail. Still, it’s a start.

Micro-notices across the senses

So far, I’ve kept the focus on visual elements. What would pass as micro-notices in the rest of the senses? Here are some thoughts:

Instead of smelling vanilla, how about clotted cream and crushed pods?
Instead of a forced gait, the twist in the arch of a foot.
Instead of a beautiful chord, the pent-up tension of an interval that won’t resolve.
Instead of birdsong, the rough edges of a chirrup and how it abrades the silence.
Instead of the smooth gloss of a pot, the braille of dimples in the clay.

You get the drift. Happy zooming!

‘Create 8’

I was chatting recently with a composer friend who was feeling a bit demotivated, mainly through being time-poor and overwhelmed with domestic pressures. I suggested a daily mini-task to spark some ideas:

In just 5 minutes, compose a sequence of 8 chords that has internal logic, surprise and beauty.

‘Create 8’, I called it. Nice and simple, with clear constraints. (It might remind you of the French Oulipo school of ‘constrained writing’? They set tasks like writing a paragraph without the letter ‘e’. More on that another time.)

A while later I thought, hang on, I really ought to be trying this out myself and not just dishing out tasks to other people. So, this August I’ve been doing my own chord sequences every day. Look, here’s the proof:

You can listen to them if you want, with me explaining some of my thinking. I’d love to hear your comments, if you have time.

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It got me thinking about why 5-minute tasks work so well to pump-prime the creative mind for the day and beyond. What are the principles at play? And what would the equivalent be in other art forms?

1. They need to be bright and tight.

Bright, in the sense of giving enough challenge to your mind to have to wrestle a bit with the task, to set it alight, and to shine a potential path for future creative ventures. Can I make something larger out of these chords when I have time? Are they ausbaufähig, to use that beautifully eloquent German term? Are they ‘out-buildable’?

Tight, because you have set strong constraints and a tight deadline. It’s important to select your own constraints and timing, but 5 minutes ensures you don’t dilly-dally. There’s no excuse. Anyone can fit in 5 minutes in their day. And it really boosts the confidence to see what promising material you can devise in just that wisp of time.

2. There needs to be convergence.

You need to complete the creative cycle. This isn’t about chucking ideas in the air, seeing where they land, then pottering off. It’s about fetching them together into a pleasing pattern afterwards to yield a seed. Each ‘create 8’ sequence for me feels complete in itself, full of creative potential. It is a kernel of things to come.

3. It needs to be fun…

…like a sudoku over breakfast, or a quick crossword. I don’t do either, but I imagine the same buzz. A quick bit of brain-training that sets the neurons ajangle.

4. You need to keep the same constraints for at least a fortnight.

You’re doing a controlled experiment, of sorts. And therefore the conditions need to be kept consistent for you to be able to observe internal tics and habits in your own creative choices across time and to learn from them. So, stick to the path unless it really nettles.

Observations

I’ve noticed that I love chords that stack fourths and fifths. Is it because they sound spacious and clean-edged? Or because they fit nicely under my large-ish hands? I have a decent span, so playing chords that splay the fingers feels good.

I’ve also noticed that I try consciously to avoid said fourthsy, fifthsy chords. And that creates another counter-pattern of its own (narrow clusters).

So, I end up devising sequences that aim to disrupt both of those ruts, the issue and the counter-issue. That’s a creative challenge in itself, a task-within-the-task that suggests new shapes and forms, new ways of thinking, even the occasional surprise (which is the ultimate goal of any creative).

Keeping to 5 minutes a day is a small test of resilience. I can feel the usual resistance as I sit down to the keyboard. The stagnant mind still fugged with sleep, the what’s the point?, the initial fumbling for a starting point. I remind myself this is all part of the process: the internal block, the smile at the usual distractions — and the cracking on with it anyway because, hey, what have I got to lose?

5 minutes whoosh by. They really do. And I feel competitive with myself to complete the sequence within that time-frame, congratulating myself when I do get something down.

I like having some small yet complete chord sequences to share with others. Their neat completeness prompts me to share in a way that, perhaps, a loose indecipherable sketch wouldn’t. And, once shared, my attempts have already spurred some of my composerly friends to try their own ‘Create 8’ and WhatsApp me their results. We’ve set up a virtuous cycle.

Analogues

What are the equivalent bright, tight starters in your creative discipline? I was thinking maybe:

- 10 photos that explore angles.

- 20 sentences that vary in length and make a mini story about unseen relationships.

- Your own version of a Haiku. Pick new syllable counts and a governing theme to be keep to for a fortnight, e.g. light, gaze, wrath…

- A sketch of a body part in macro.

I’d love to know what you currently do that fits the bill. Or what you might now endeavour to fit in as this summer begins to ebb. Please do comment if you’ve time. (And feel free to heart below if you enjoyed the post! It helps engagement. )

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