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Create. Marc Silber
Читать онлайн.Название Create
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781633539839
Автор произведения Marc Silber
Жанр Культурология
Издательство Ingram
1.Set your schedule: I’ll work with this book these days of the week: ______________________________
for at least ______ minutes.
2. Get your notebook and begin to write in it daily.
Optional: Have some fun and get different colored pens or pencils, stars or stickers. Use these to highlight your entries, to get across the mood you want. Put stars on big flashes or breakthroughs, etc.
3. Find a good place to work where you won’t be interrupted: set it up with this book, your notebook, pens and dictionary.
4. Write three ways you could put off doing this course (get really creative here).
a.
b.
c.
5. Write down your goals or areas you most want to improve by using this book.
Part One
“Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul.”
—W. Somerset Maugham, author
Chapter One
The Cycle of Creativity and Its Parts
“It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.”
—Albert Einstein
There is a natural cycle to creativity, as there is to all parts of life. For example, if you want to learn to cook a certain dish, you follow a cycle of first visualizing or getting an idea of how you want your dish to turn out. Then you consult the recipe, and get out your kitchen “tools”—pans, cheese grater, etc. (learning how to use each if needed), then you cook the dish, taste it and add more salt or basil, for example, to make it just right, and then you share it with others.
I’ll be covering each of these parts in detail to help you break down the whole subject of creativity into its components for ease of understanding.
What Does Creativity Mean?
Let’s begin with the word “creativity” and see how each part of the cycle fits into this definition by Oxford American Dictionary.
“Relating to or involving the imagination or original ideas, especially in the production of an artistic work.” The derivation is from create: “Late Middle English (in the sense ‘form out of nothing,’ used of a divine or supernatural being): from Latin crear—‘produced.’ ”
Note that when you are exercising your creative abilities you are forming or producing something “out of nothing,” which, by this definition, makes you a “divine” being. How true! When we are creating, whether as an art form or in some other aspect of our lives, we are operating in a higher state, which the Middle English originators considered divine or supernatural. But it turns out creativity is a natural ability that you can tap into any time.
Another important part of this definition is to see that when you are being creative, then go into action, you will have produced a creative product or result.
Now let’s look at the definition of art from the Oxford Living Dictionaries:
“The expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.” Also: “A skill at doing a specified thing, typically one acquired through practice.”
Let’s be clear here that “creativity” and “art” apply broadly across all of life not just to “artistic” activities. Don’t think of it as being segmented into small slices of your life or day, instead look for the many ways to use your imagination to “form out of nothing” with the end view of having produced a creative result, with emotional power. This could be as simple as planning and throwing a fantastic party, inviting your friends, resulting in sharing a truly memorable and creative evening thus adding art to your life.
You can see the cycle of creativity begins with your imagination, moves through the steps of producing it, and winds up at the final stage of sharing it with others.
The Most Important Step in the Creative Process
We begin at the first and most important part of the creativity cycle: it is what we call visualization, the process of forming a mental image of what you are going to create and how you intend it to look as an end result. That’s why it is in the center of the cycle (see illustration on page 20). After all, to even pick up tools to create with, you first had to have some idea of what you wanted to make, no matter how brief or vague. I will show you how to develop your powerful sense of visualization, which in itself will help you unleash your creativity.
Strengthening Your Visualization
A big part of visualization is looking at others’ work, in whatever form. This is not to copy their work, but to be inspired with new ideas from others based on how they were able to create their art. But it’s not good enough to look at it and say, “I like this, I don’t like that.” That won’t let you into the inner workings of their craft. Go deeper: if you like it, look at it and see why you like it. Did it have an emotional impact on you, and if so, what was it?
If you don’t like it, see if you can dig in and find out why. Maybe there was something distracting about it or it had a technical flaw. Or it simply didn’t interest you.
This kind of careful and deep exploration will help you when you create your own work. You’re building a kind of visual collection in your mind with which to work, which is vital in developing your ability to visualize.
As an example, my wife Jan and I have been able to find houses that others have overlooked because of design flaws and outdated or missing elements. But where others might turn away, we saw an opportunity to visualize and build exactly what we wanted, rather than paying more for someone else’s ideas, which rarely match ours.
For instance, when we were remodeling our home in Carmel, with its tired 1980s kitchen, its poor-quality yellow and blue cabinets, a really bad flow because of a peninsula that jutted out, and topping it off, florescent strip lighting on the wall that made it look like a parking garage, we knew it all had to go! But what to put in their place?
As a starting point, we had a feel for our desired look from our previous house, which we had also rescued from kitchen hell. There we ended up with a compact, warm, and very functional kitchen: cabinets with clean lines, with glass fronts in the doors openly displaying dishes, glasses, and other items. Our open functional design followed what Steve Jobs so clearly articulated: “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”
One of the ways the kitchen worked so well is that we had a high-top table and stools at the end of the kitchen, that became the favored spot to eat, no matter how many people crowded around it, being a perfect design that worked and just felt right.
We looked through magazines for kitchens we might like or even elements of them and tore out pages, putting them in a folder (I recommend this simple action for visualization.) Then we hit upon the key points that resonated with us and added to those we wanted to maintain from our