“Creativity can be described as letting go of certainties.”
– Gail Sheehy –
You’re facing west. You have a telescope. You look through it and the distance appears closer. There is more detail to be seen. That’s what telescopes do and why they are useful.
What if you turned it around and looked through the other end? You would naturally expect to see the distance in the opposite way. Everything would be smaller and more distant. Or would it?
Facing west, you look through the other end of the telescope and see the east, closer and more detailed. You’re looking ahead but seeing behind.
It’s impossible. It makes no sense. But what if that was what you saw? What if that was how the telescope worked?
This is my favourite approach to writing, and tasks generally. It’s an approach I take without even thinking about what approach I might take. For me it is the most interesting and creatively stimulating way to go about tackling something. It is basically doing one of two things, sometimes both: 1) seeing things from the opposite direction and, 2) seeing things absurdly.
I find two things happen when I do this. The first is that I see something in a different way and not necessarily a wrong way. In fact if I see everyone is going right, I want to go left. It’s not that I want to be contrarian. I just want to see and understand what happens when I go left. What would I find? Has something been missed by only going right? Right might well be the correct way to go but can something be found by looking left, something that could be incorporated for an even better solution? This is what I mean by seeing things from the opposite direction.
The second thing that happens is I introduce humour and fun into the process of finding the solution. That is what I mean by the absurd element. I don’t care at all whether something is actually possible. I assume the impossible as true. Given that, what would I see looking though the telescope the wrong way and thus seeing behind myself? How would I react? How would others respond?
I don’t think humour and fun are just for writing. Any task is more easily taken on when those elements are present. People are generally more creative, more productive and, in my opinion, more likely to find what they are looking for. And once found, knuckling down to see it through is pretty easy. In a sense, you ride the momentum you’ve created – the flow.
I think a good example of my approach is a short story I wrote last year for Rose City Sisters. It is a blog that features flash fiction – 1,000 words or less. It also requires “a Pasadena connection,” as the blog is out of Pasadena. I find I always work best this way: with constraints, in this case 1,000 words and Pasadena. In a way, I feel as if I break the rules while staying within the rules.
As I wrote in my short bio for the site, “Having never been to Pasadena and knowing little beyond a parade and a football game, the writing became very compelling. What to write? Why, a Pasadena of the mind, of course.”
The title of my story was, “I’ve never been to Pasadena.” It’s about a man in who has a house with a large basement he decides he wants to fill. So he literally puts Pasadena in it. When asked why, he simply says, “I’ve never been to Pasadena.”
I had a huge amount of fun writing that story and in the end I think it turned out pretty well. And it was so easy to do because it was fun.
It’s fiction, of course, and therefore has a good deal of license. A lot of tasks don’t. In order to come up with a solution, we have to return to reality and the possible. But most things are possible. The right solution simply hasn’t been found yet and the right solution is often in a place we don’t expect it to be. Sometimes, once found, we think it was obvious and wonder why we didn’t see it before.
The reason we don’t see it sooner is that we tend to get locked into thinking a certain way, looking for answers in the same places. That is why looking at something from the opposite way and/or with an absurdist approach helps. It widely expands the places where we look for answers. It’s creative and, in my experience, it works.
Maybe I should put it this way: when looking for an answer, stop working. Start playing.
Related link:
- What Star Trek did to me (Writelife)
Bill Wren is a writer-editor, social media enthusiast in Fredericton, New Brunswick. He has worked for traditional broadcast media, worked freelance and spent about 15 years with a very large telecommunications company where his writing focus was marketing, technical, web sites, newsletters and so on. He also writes fiction, humor and (gasp!) poetry. He has two blogs: Writelife and Piddleville.
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Great post, Bill. It seems like a key to creative success is being able to look at normal things in a different light. The “flipped” telescope is a great metaphor for this process.
I like the opposite or inverted or whatever you want to call it approach because, I think, you see that’s really where a lot of really good ideas came from.
In the industrial age, we saw a great deal of machinery that was modeled on what we would tend to think of as the opposite of what machines are: people and other animals. A lot of machines replicated human muscle movements. The internet is peppered with a lot of non-tech metaphors to make it more easily understandable: windows, folders, twitters and so on.
Often, unrelated things provide the answers. It’s a matter of looking at them in new ways and those new ways are often rooted in things that seem contrary to what what we are doing. (Hope that made sense.)