In the recently published "Against Happiness," popular writer Eric Wilson disparages our current love affair with putting on a happy face. With our "feel good" culture and the widespread use of happy drugs, everybody's trying to be cheerful and there are no decent dollops of melancholy and sadness, he says. When this happens, art becomes bland, unchallenging and redundant.
http://talentdevelop.com/articles/ArtandHapp.html

Early researchers linked confabulation with amnesia and abnormal brain chemistry. Nowadays it's more pleasantly harnessed to the marvelous potential of the human imagination. Fantastic and spontaneous outpourings of irrelevant associations and bizarre ideas come quite naturally to ordinary creative folks.

Every so often some researcher will publish fresh info on the mental or physical problems of creative folks. The general implication of some of this stuff is that you have to be just a wee bit sick in order to be creative.

His conclusions include the startling finding that some of the great artists peak early, while others don't do their best till later on. We are of two main types, he says. Some are quick and dramatic, what he calls conceptual innovators. Others are slow and plodding, what he calls experimental innovators.

Some letters from readers had me wondering about the role that self-hypnosis might play in the creative act. Being curious, I adapted techniques used in recent experiments with students at the Architectural Foundation in London, England.

Replacement "units" can be tailor-made to the previous addiction. A cigarette, for example, burns down in about eight minutes. The idea is to make eight-minute poems, paintings, or whatever. These units can be repeated in about the same frequency and timing as the previous addiction. This is habit management and it can be a lot of fun.

Many artists have told me art gives them a purchase on the universe and their reason for being. Like me, in childhood they often found themselves unable to compete in more socially acceptable ways.