DRMacIver's Notebook
Creativity on demand
Creativity on demand
One of the things in my bags of tricks is using random prompts for things. What should I write about today? IDK, draw a tarot card, flip to a random page of a book. Write something in response to it.
Another thing in my bag of tricks is making big lists. Can’t think of anything? Think of 100 things instead! Can’t think how to start the list? Come up with a bad idea. Or, even worse, a mediocre one.
Another thing in my bag of tricks is to look at something mundane and figure out what’s interesting about it. Cleaning the kitchen is an example of that. So is making apples. To some degree the entire spellcraft thing is about this.
The point that I’m trying to get at is that with all these tools in my toolkit, it’s pretty easy for me to solve any drying up of the creative wellspring. Not only can’t you run out of ideas, there are reliable procedures for producing more ideas.
For example, here off the top of my head is a spell for writing a blog post at the end of the day:
Get a sheet of paper. Write down what you did today - not in detail, just a list of high level things.
Pick one. If one of them catches your eye, use that, otherwise pick semi-randomly.
Try to pick out some specific features of it - things that remind you of other things, or some way it’s unlike other things in that category. Especially focus on how you made any decisions about it, or how it felt.
Write about that.
Anyway you’ll notice I’m not using this spell right now. I can’t rule out that I might in future - I did do the first part of listing out stuff that happened in my day, and for example I thought I might write something about some work I’m doing on parsing with derivatives, which I thought was interesting because of a series of pickles I got myself in and out of, or I thought I might write about the lunch I made for myself, in which I took some leftovers from our sunday roast and some vegetables and turned it into a vaguely Chinese meal.Fun fact: Left over roast potatoes are great when stir fried with a bit of ginger. There’s also something to be said about the experience of waking up, or my changing relationship with audiobooks.
I didn’t though, partially because I’d already started on this, partially because I didn’t really feel like it.
I’m reading a recent translation of Max Weber’s “Science ad a Vocation” right now, and the following passage struck me:
In both [a laboratory and a factory] it is necessary for somethign, and the right thing at that, to occur to people if they are to achieve anything worthwhile.
But inspiration cannot be produced to order. And it has nothing in common with cold calculation.
I’ve also recently been reading “The Cult of Information” by Theodore Roszak, which is surprisingly good, and it has a similar thing in it about how a computer-focused education with its heavy emphasis on procedural thinking cannot possibly teach children the full range of creative and intuitive thought that we need them to develop.
Anyway, the point is that on some level I think they’re wrong. Intuitively I believe that I really could write a couple of pages of instructions that you could semi-mechanically follow and produce a pretty good essay out of. I’m not claiming you could produce every good essay this way you understand, only that it’s possible to produce a pretty good generator of essays this way, one that means that you should never have to suffer the problem of sitting down in front of the computer and not know what to write.
And yet, every time I think about actually doing this, my soul rebels.
Things like the random book prompt or tarot prompt or the like seem mostly fine. The above spell for coming up with something interesting about your day to report on also seems mostly fine - maybe a little over constraining, and requires me to look at uncomfortable questions like “What did I do today?” sometimes, but it’s actually an interesting exercise.
But if you tell me to, say, roll a die and use it to determine on the basis of that what to write today, I will fight you.
If, on the other hand, you tell me that if I’m not sure which one to write then I get to roll a dice to pick one, that’s just a spell for making decisions. Great stuff, no complaints. Big fan, even.
The thing about procedures is that they’re great tools and terrible masters. The kitchen cleaning procedure is very good because I need to do the thing and I don’t want to have to make decisions about how to do the thing. A writing procedure that removes all decisions would be terrible, because the decisions are the creative process. I can be aided in making them, but anything that tries to take the ultimate authority away from me causes me to bristle.
And this is sortof a problem for the goal of creativity on demand, because the problem isn’t actually that I can’t produce creativity on demand - I can - it’s that I don’t want to. The whole experience is one of dragging myself kicking and screaming towards some goal.
The idea of a fully mechanized process for writing, even one with explicitly allowances for breaking out of it and doing your own thing, is still fundamentally designed to take away the first and most important decision about creating something: Whether you want to do it at all. Once that decision is taken away from it, the creative part of my mind mostly just wants to sit there and sulk and refuse to participate.
And you know what? Too bad. Gonna write anyway. When the dishes gotta be done, you do the dishes whether you like it or not. When the daily writing gotta be done, you do the daily writing whether you like it or not. It’s probably not going to be as bad as you think, and if it is you can stop, but that’s no reason not to start.