Divergent thinking can even come into play when promoting creative projects.

The photo is writer Sherrilyn Kenyon, who has some interesting comments below about influences on her work.

What made me aware of her was a recent newspaper article about how book publishers (including hers) are using professionally produced 30-second commercial spots or book trailers to promote titles.

Maybe you could create your own videos as creative projects on their own, or to promote your music, play, visual art or book. That’s what I did for one of my books Developing Multiple Talents; the (definitely non-professional) video is titled People With Multiple Talents – you can see it at my YouTube channel here or on the book site here.

Sherrilyn Kenyon writes Urban Fantasy and the Dark-Hunter vampire series, plus historical novels with paranormal elements, under the pseudonym Kinley MacGregor. There are over twenty million copies of her books in print. [Wikipedia]

On her site, she comments “There are actually writers whose works have influenced my writing. But not the way most people think…”

Continued: Creative Paths and Influences: Everywhere and Unexpected

From the program site:

“As author of The Artist’s Way, The Vein of Gold, and The Right to Write, her bestselling works on the creative process, Julia Cameron is credited with founding a movement that has enabled millions to realize their creative dreams.

“Julia eschews the title creativity expert, preferring instead to describe herself simply as an artist.”

She says about her online teaching program, “Artists have always mentored. I just do it on a wider scale.”

Learn more about Julia Cameron Live

..

More information from the site:

“The Artist’s Way began with Julia sharing her ideas with a few artists in her living room. Now after selling almost 4 million copies of The Artist’s Way and teaching her creativity tools around the world in lecture and workshop form, she’s taking her teaching online.

“The online course will complement The Artist’s Way, offering unique insights into the 12 week program from Julia, who has more than two decades of experience teaching the creativity tools.

“Artists taking part in the creativity workshop at Julia Cameron Live will have the intimate experience of watching Julia teach from her home in Santa Fe. The web-based creativity workshop will give users the flexibility to watch video lectures and join discussions from their living room, kitchen table or morning commute.”

Julia Cameron Live

~~

“I have always spent most of my time staring out the window, noting what is there, daydreaming, or brooding.”  Joyce Carol Oates

How do you use your time to encourage creative imagination and expression?

In her post If you don’t value your imaginative life, no one else will, author and writing teacher Lisa Rivero notes that some of how she uses her 24 hours each day “might look to the outside world like frivolous fun, downtime, anything but work: reading the writing of others, making notes for future projects, networking with other writers, staring out the window, taking a walk while listening to the latest New Yorker fiction podcast (something I highly recommend), even writing blog posts.”

She explains this is all “part of what Joyce Carol Oates calls the imaginative life” (from The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art):

“All the desks of my life have faced windows and except for an overwrought two-year period in the late 1980s when I worked on a word processor, I have always spent most of my time staring out the window, noting what is there, daydreaming, or brooding…”

Continued: Developing Creativity by Staring Out the Window

~ ~

The understanding of creativity as a mysterious external force with which you carry on “a peculiar, wondrous, bizarre collaboration and conversation”6 (to quote Gilbert’s vivid characterization of the inner relationship) redefines the customary view of things in our contemporary culture and endows the artist with new gifts and responsibilities.

This insight is fundamental to the whole outlook I’m presenting here. It’s also paired with a corollary proposition: that a conscious, working knowledge of the intertwined histories of the daimon and the genius in religion, psychology, and philosophy is indispensible. //

Both the idea of the daimon and the idea of the muse come to us from the ancient Greeks, who in addition to worshiping the gods and goddesses familiar to all of us through the stories of classical mythology believed in spirits they called daimones or daimons (known more commonly today by the variant spelling‚ “daemons”…

In fact, if we are to believe classical scholar Reginald Barrow, worship of the daimons made up an underground mainstream in ancient Greek religion: “Because the daemons have left few memorials of themselves in architecture and literature, their importance tends to be overlooked…

“They are omnipresent and all-powerful, they are embedded deep in the religious memories of the peoples, for they go back to days long before the days of Greek philosophy and religion.

“The cults of the Greek states, recognised and officially sanctioned, were only one-tenth of the iceberg; the rest, the submerged nine-tenths, were the daemons.”7

In one respect the daimons weren’t very different from the animistic spirits that have populated the belief systems of all peoples throughout history.

They were thought to be local, limited spirits who inhabited certain places, affected the weather, brought good and bad luck, and so on. But the Greeks also held a more distinctly spiritualized or psychologized view that eventually outstripped the first.

In this second version, the daimons were understood to exist deep within the human psyche or spirit, where they made themselves known through their influence upon human thoughts, emotions, attitudes, and actions.

References:

6 Elizabeth Gilbert on nurturing creativity – a TED video.

See excerpt of the video in my post Elizabeth Gilbert on fear and creativity and mental health.

7 Quoted in Stephen A. Diamond’s book Anger, Madness, and the Daimonic: The Psychological Genesis of Violence, Evil, and Creativity.

Also see my interview with Dr. Diamond: The Psychology of Creativity: redeeming our inner demons.

Diamond comments in another article that the goal for psychotherapy with artists and other creative individuals is “not to eradicate the daimonic, to drug or rationalize the demons out of existence. Not only is this not desirable; it is not possible, at least not in the long-run. As Rollo May put it, the therapist’s task is to awaken and confront the demons, not put them to sleep.” From my article Learning to befriend our demons.

~~

Creativity researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, PhD (pronounced me-high chick- sent-me-high) explains in his article The Creative Personality: Ten paradoxical traits of the creative personality (from his book Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention) that “Creative people tend to be smart yet naive at the same time.”

He says that “a core of general intelligence is high among people who make important creative contributions,” but according to the studies of Lewis Terman, “after a certain point IQ does not seem to be correlated with superior performance in real life” – including level of creative expression.

From my book Developing Multiple Talents – The personal side of creative expression
Facebook   //  Website

~ ~

In his Demon Muse post A Brief History of the Daimon (and the Genius), Matt Cardin presents a rich overview of concepts related to creative inspiration and entities such as muses.

He writes, “In Hellenistic Rome (circa 4th – 1st centuries BCE), the word genius, like the Greek daimons, referred to spirit beings in general — and also, tangentially (and interestingly), had a direct connection to the word genie, which itself came somehow from the ancient Persian desert demons known as djinnee.

He notes the idea of the personal genius evolved to mean “the individual attendant spirit that accompanies a person and represents his or her divine intelligence and inbuilt life pattern.”

With “the outburst of Renaissance-style and Enlightenment-style humanism in the 15th through the 18th centuries… genius as a guiding and inspiring separate spirit morphed rather suddenly  into a perceived quality of extraordinary intellectual intelligence and/or artistic giftedness possessed by only a few titanic and heroic people.

“This was a significant reversal, since it meant the idea of genius went from referring to a separate force that guided and, in effect, occasionally possessed people to referring to a special inner quality that people themselves possessed.”

[Painting: Kiss of the Muse by Paul Cezanne.]

Video: Author Elizabeth Gilbert (“Eat, Pray, Love”) made a presentation for a TED Conference (Technology, Entertainment, Design) on these ideas, and the video description notes she considered ‘the impossible things we expect from artists and geniuses — and shares the radical idea that, instead of the rare person “being” a genius, all of us “have” a genius.’

For more of her quotes, see my post Just Show Up, With or Without Your Muse.

It takes practice

Writing in his New York Times Op-Ed Column on “Genius: The Modern View,” David Brooks declared, “The key factor separating geniuses from the merely accomplished is not a divine spark.

“It’s not I.Q., a generally bad predictor of success, even in realms like chess.

“Instead, it’s deliberate practice. Top performers spend more hours (many more hours) rigorously practicing their craft.”

Genes and serendipity and hard work

In his article Is genius genetic or is it nurtured?, Joe Smydo includes comments by Christopher Beard, who received a MacArthur Foundation grant, and is curator and head of vertebrate paleontology at Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

“Dr. Beard said he had his parents’ guidance, along with their genes. He’s worked industriously to make a mark in his profession. And he believes that serendipity has been on his side. “Some people would call it luck,” said Dr. Beard.

“The question of whether high-performers are born or made long has captivated the scholarly community, whose search for answers has led to studies of chess players, musicians and leaders in various fields.

“In the 1980s, Howard Gardner, professor of cognition and education at Harvard Graduate School of Education, published a ground-breaking work proposing multiple kinds of intelligence. Dr. Gardner, a 1981 MacArthur grant recipient, also proposed multiple kinds of creativity.

“In Dr. Gardner’s view, “Picasso probably could not have been Mozart and Mozart probably could not have been Picasso because they had different kinds of intelligence,” said Kenneth Kiewra, professor of educational psychology at University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

“In recent years, the mystique of high-performers has been grist for popular books, such as Daniel Coyle’s “The Talent Code: Greatness Isn’t Born. It’s Grown. Here’s How,” Geoff Colvin’s “Talent is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else” and Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers: The Story of Success.”

“The books downplay the notion of genetically predetermined greatness and suggest that other factors, including many hours of strategic practice, differentiate high performers.”

Just Do The Work

In her post “Creative Inspiration vs. Creative Resistance,” Jenna Avery asks if it is necessary to be “creatively inspired” before pursuing creative projects, “or is waiting for creative inspiration a pitfall that trips us up?”

She adds, “Another way of saying this is: Do you have to be in the ‘right mood’ or ‘right energy’ in order to be creative? Steven Pressfield would call this ‘resistance,’ and say instead that what we need to do is show up and ‘do the work’ no matter what pain, doubt, terror, or mood we might encounter in the process.”

Jenna Avery is an intuitive coach who works with clients to enhance their creativity and life purpose. Learn about her programs at JennaAvery.com.

Steven Pressfield is author of The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles.

~~~~~

Related :

Genius: The Modern View, By David Brooks, New York Times

It takes more than talent.

Grit and perseverance mean more than talent.

Outliers and developing exceptional abilities

Audio podcast interview with creativity researcher James C. Kaufman, PhD

R. Keith Sawyer on developing creativity with time, risk, love and hard work

developing multiple talents, self-exploration, developing creativity, creative potential, creative personality type

The photo is John Dabiri, a Professor of Aeronautics and Bioengineering at Caltech, who was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship last year for his work that “draws on a wide range of fields—including theoretical fluid dynamics, evolutionary biology, and biomechanics—to unravel the secrets of one of the earliest means of animal locomotion,” according to a profile on the MacArthur site.

The bio notes, “Dabiri’s research has profound implications not only for understanding the evolution and biophysics of locomotion in jellyfish and other aquatic animals, but also for a host of distantly related questions and applications in fluid dynamics, from blood flow in the human heart to the design of wind power generators.”

The Connected Mind

That profile reminds me of creativity researcher Shelley Carson’s idea of ‘brain set’ as a take-off on ‘mind set’ in her book Your Creative Brain, particularly the ‘connect’ brain set.

She explains that “in this brain set you are generating multiple ideas, you’ve activated numerous associational networks in the brain and one idea seems to lead to another to another to another.”

From my post Shelley Carson on Brainsets and Creativity.

Her book: Your Creative Brain: Seven Steps to Maximize Imagination, Productivity, and Innovation in Your Life.  

Innovation-nurturing environments

In a post on his blog about his book “Where Good Ideas Come From,” Steven Johnson notes part of why he wrote it was “to grapple with the question of why certain environments seem to be disproportionately skilled at generating and sharing good ideas.”

In the book he considers “human environments that have been unusually generative: the architecture of successful science labs, the information networks of the Web or the Enlightenment-era postal system, the public spaces of metropolitan cities, even the notebooks of great thinkers.”

In addition, he also looks at “natural environments that have been biologically innovative: the coral reef and the rain forest, or the chemical soups that first gave birth to life’s good idea.”

The book has dozens of stories about incubating creativity “from the history of scientific, technological and cultural innovation,” including how Darwin’s “eureka moment” about natural selection “turned out to be a myth; how Brian Eno invented a new musical convention by listening to too much AM radio; how Gutenberg borrowed a crucial idea from the wine industry to invent modern printing; why GPS was accidentally developed by a pair of twenty-somethings messing around with a microwave receiver.”

His post: Where Good Ideas Come From.

Book: Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation by Steven Johnson.  

These videos are also in the post Steven Johnson on Where Good Ideas Come From, by Maria Popova on her excellent blog Brain Pickings.

Sparks of creative genius are rare

In his interview article Steven Johnson: ‘Eureka moments are very, very rare’ (The Guardian 19 October 2010), Oliver Burkeman comments on the book and notes that Johnson thinks good ideas “are built out of a collection of existing parts”, both literally and metaphorically speaking.

Burkeman concludes, ‘What all this means, in practical terms, is that the best way to encourage (or to have) new ideas isn’t to fetishise the “spark of genius”, to retreat to a mountain cabin in order to “be creative”, or to blabber interminably about “blue-sky”, “out-of-the-box” thinking.

‘Rather, it’s to expand the range of your possible next moves – the perimeter of your potential – by exposing yourself to as much serendipity, as much argument and conversation, as many rival and related ideas as possible; to borrow, to repurpose, to recombine.’

He adds, ‘This is one way of explaining the creativity generated by cities, by Europe’s 17th-century coffee-houses, and by the internet. Good ideas happen in networks; in one rather brain-bending sense, you could even say that “good ideas are networks”. Or as Johnson also puts it: “Chance favours the connected mind.”‘

Less static

But creatively connected doesn’t mean endlessly stuffing ourselves with sensory and cognitive input.

As author and intuition consultant Nancy Rosanoff notes, “Because our culture bombards us from every side to keep busy, we really do have to make an active effort to do nothing.”

Rosanoff suggests encouraging the incubation period of the creative process by finding activities that will “take your mind off the problem: “Take a day off, get some exercise, cook a nice meal. In addition, there are some things you can do to help access your intuitive side: playing an instrument, meditating, doing yoga, and yes, even sleeping. You can’t force an illumination; don’t even try.”

Jon Kabat-Zinn, author of Coming to Our Senses, points out there is a “commonly held view that meditation is a way to shut off the pressures of the world or of your own mind, but this is not an accurate impression.

“Meditation is neither shutting things out nor off. It is seeing clearly, and deliberately positioning yourself differently in relationship to them.”

From my post Living more fully without so much inner static.

Also see articles on Meditation and mindfulness.

~ ~

We believe in the goodness of people. We believe in the power of the internet. We believe that Maya Angelou was absolutely right when she said “when you know better you do better.”

We need your help. We need your support. Learn more. Spread the word. Post our badge on your sites to show that you LINK with love.

From LINKwithlove.org by artist Kal Barteski – I learned about her site from the post by Brené Brown, PhD: Link With Love.

“I’ve designed Dream Boogie with SARK to be a fabulous, sparkly dream disco, where your dream can let loose and become REAL in your dazzling dance from dreaming to DOing. We’re going to have a blast!

“And while we’ll be emphasizing lots of laughter and play, this is also a comprehensive, effective study program for those who are truly ready to make change, based on techniques I’ve developed in my 25 plus years as a transformational teacher, business leader, bestselling author, and artist.

“In this innovative dream productivity program, you’ll be working directly with me and getting to connect closely with other like-minded souls who are also dancing with dreams, projects, businesses, and other great ideas. I’m delighted to utilize state-of-the-art technology to provide a happy abundance of multimedia tools and resources that gently facilitate ALL learning styles in the dazzling dance from dreaming to DOing!

“It takes place on the phone and online, making it easy for you to commit to your dream in a highly focused, deeply JOYfull, and wonderfully integrated way, without the challenges of traveling or paying for airfare or lodging. YES, that means that you can attend classes in your pajamas, and complete your assignments while taking dream-filled walks…”

Part of the program: “Dream DOer Inner Views – Enjoy a delicious collection of 18 interviews on different dream-building topics, to inspire and motivate you in fabulous new ways.” Here are some of them:

~ ~ ~

SARK, developing creativity, psychology of creativity, nurturing creative mind, nurturing creativity, creativity program

“Fear is good. We view fear as a disease. It’s not a disease.” Psychologist Robert Maurer

“I don’t do anything anymore that feels safe. If it doesn’t scare the crap out of you, then you’re not doing the right thing.” Sandra Bullock

Fear is a simple label for a variety of experiences from mild discomfort to real terror, sometimes helpful for personal growth and creative work, but at other times or in more intense forms like anxiety, limiting or destructive.

But fear does show up for all of us at times, even for those who are accomplished and talented.

Michelle Williams commented about working with Ryan Gosling in “Blue Valentine” that when director Derek Cianfrance wanted them to improvise and “surprise” him with their acting, rather than simply following a script, she felt a lot of fear.

Williams said, “I mean, it’s exciting when you catch yourself in the moment and realize you’re not thinking and words are coming out of your mouth and you’ve never done that before. And I feel like I grew so much. But it never stopped being terrifying.”

[From Michelle Williams, Ryan Gosling ad-lib on 'Blue Valentine', by Glenn Whipp, Los Angeles Times January 5, 2011.]

In our interview for her movie “Halloween H20″ (1998), I asked Williams whether she enjoys the experience of fear and seeks it in park rides or scary movies or anything else, and Williams joked, “I do it every day driving in Los Angeles.”

She noted that the fear element of the movie was part of its appeal: “I think that’s what is great about this film is that it’s a rush. And it’s pure, unadulterated, fabulous escapism. And we all need that.”

Part of being creative

Natalie Portman once commented, “Fear is intrinsic to everything you do as a creative person. You’re constantly putting yourself up there to be trashed. If I thought about it too much, I’d just be crippled. I’d rather create.”   [Los Angeles Times Oct 15, 2009]

From post: Developing creativity – some quotes on fear

Many years ago, she talked about experiencing stage fright – a variety of fear or anxiety that many people have at times, including actors and other performers, as well as public speakers.

“When I was little, I was so uninhibited I could do anything in front of people, but now I have terrible stage fright. I’d love to do a play, but I have nightmares about missing lines onstage…”

“The anxiety I now feel about acting has nothing to do with movies, though — it’s just a part of getting older. You become aware of your body changing and of the fact that people are judging you — and you’re really aware of that when you’re in the public eye.”  [LA Times, approx. 1997]

Embracing terror

Alan Alda wrote in an article of his, “When I’m faced with a kind of character I’ve never tried before, the fear can rise to the level of terror.

“But, it’s a terror I look forward to, and I don’t like to take on a part unless it scares me a little. I’ve found a tremendous value in this kind of fear… I don’t just scare myself with playacting. I scare myself in the rest of my life, too.”

From article How to Be a Nervous Wreck.

Psychology of fear and creativity

Robert Maurer, PhD, a UCLA clinical psychologist, has interviewed many successful actors, writers and other creative people, and researched social and neuropsychological aspects of achievement and creative expression for many years.

An article about him said, “Maurer tries to teach writers to accept fear as a natural part of the creative process. He tries to get writers to lose their fear of failure and of taking risks.”

Maurer notes, “If you find the right relationship, does fear go away? No. You publish your first novel, does that make fear go away? No. So your skill at being able to nourish yourself and give yourself permission to make mistakes and learn from them is your single greatest attribute as an artist and as a human being.”

From Writers can use fear to advantage, by Victor Inzunza

Dr. Maurer notes that even thinking creatively can induce fear:

“Innovation triggers the alarm mechanism in the amygdala section of the brain that’s known as the fight-or-flight response,” he writes.

“More simply put, the thought of change ignites fear… It effectively shuts down all nonessential brain functions, including creative thinking.

From post: Disarming the brain’s fear response

Fear may be indispensable for creative expression

“Fear is good,” Maurer has declared. “As children, fear is a natural part of our lives, but as adults we view fear as a disease. It’s not a disease. Children say they are afraid or scared, but adults use the clinical terms anxiety or depression.

“A writer should not view fear as something bad, but as essentially doing something right.”

Robert Maurer is author of a book that, in part, helps deal with the fear alarm system we have inside: One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way.

But fear may also silence us

But another psychologist and creativity coach, Eric Maisel, PhD warns, “Only a small percentage of creative people work as often or as deeply as, by all rights, they might be expected to work.

“What stops them? Anxiety or some face of anxiety like doubt, worry, or fear. Anxiety is the great silencer of the creative person.”

[Above quotes are from my article Fear and Creativity]

More Self-Actualizing

In his article Creativity in Self-Actualizing People, personal growth leader Abraham Maslow wrote: “It seemed to me that much boiled down to the relative absence of fear.

“They seemed to be less afraid of what other people would say or demand or laugh at… Perhaps more important, was their lack of fear of their insides, of their impulses, emotions, thoughts.”

~~~~~~

Photo of Robert Maurer, PhD from his site The Science of Excellence

Also see articles by Robert Maurer

Sandra Bullock quote from post: Artistic confidence – Embracing fear and discomfort as an actor

Related articles :

Dealing with stage fright or a fear of public speaking

Facing the Enemies Within – Courage and Fear, by Jim Rohn