Creativity: A Short and Cheerful Guide

By John Cleese

Creativity can be seen in every area of life—in science, or in business, or in sport. Wherever you can find a way of doing things that is better than what has been done before, you are being creative.

You can teach creativity. Or perhaps I should say, more accurately, you can teach people how to create circumstances in which they will become creative.

A few keys

Creativity can be improved.
Approach your craft with childlike curiosity.
You need time in solitude to be creative.
Be comfortable with ambiguity.
Look for inspiration from others.
Be ok with setbacks.

The Unconscious 

This is how I began to discover that, if I put the work in before going to bed, I often had a little creative idea overnight, which fixed whatever problem it was that I was trying to deal with.

• I can only be that while I’m asleep, my mind goes on working at the problem so that it can give me the answer in the morning.” This realisation was very foreign to me.
  • Similar to Josh Waitzkin’s journaling practice. 

• So I began to realise that my unconscious was working on stuff all the time, without my being consciously aware of it.
• The same applies to speaking. You use the right words the whole time without having the slightest idea how they happen to pop into your head. If you are asked the name of a five-letter Chinese animal that eats bamboo, “panda” pops up right away. But you’ve no awareness of how that occurred. Did your mind look in the “China” file first, or in the “Animal” file, or in the “Bamboo Eaters” one? Or, of course, the “Five-Letter” file? We’ve no idea. It’s literally an unconscious process.

Put simply, you can’t ask your unconscious a question, and expect a direct answer—a neat, tidy little verbal message. This is because your unconscious communicates its knowledge to you solely through the language of the unconscious.

• And the language of the unconscious is not verbal. It’s like the language of dreams. It shows you images, it gives you feelings, it nudges you around without you immediately knowing what it’s getting at.
  • When you hear the call, listen! 

• The absolutely crucial point he goes on to make is that this leisurely “Tortoise Mind,” for all its apparent aimlessness, is just as “intelligent” as the much faster “Hare Brain.” “Recent scientific evidence,” he says, “shows convincingly that the more patient, less deliberate modes of mind are particularly suited to making sense of situations that are intricate, shadowy or ill defined…when we are not sure what needs to be taken into account, or even which questions to pose—or when the issue is too subtle to be captured by the familiar categories of conscious thought—we need recourse to the tortoise mind…This type of intelligence is associated with what we call creativity, or even ‘wisdom.’

The conclusion he came to was that there were only two differences between the creative and the uncreative architects. 

• The first was that the creative architects knew how to play. 

• The second was that the creative architects always deferred making decisions for as long as they were allowed.

Play

• When MacKinnon talks about “play,” he means the ability to get enjoyably absorbed in a puzzle: not just to try to solve it so that you can get on to the next problem, but to become really curious about it for its own sake. He describes this kind of activity as “childlike.”
• They are so absorbed in what they are doing that they are not distracted, they’re just…exploring, not knowing where they’re going, and not caring either.
• It simply means they are able to tolerate that vague sense of discomfort that we all feel, when some important decision is left open, because they know that an answer will eventually present itself.

The first question you must ask is: “When does this decision have to be made?” You live in the real world, so there is always a cut-off point.

• because if you can wait longer, two incredibly important things may happen. You may get new information. You may get new ideas. So why would you make a decision when you don’t need to? Because you’re uncomfortable, that’s why!
• But creative people are much better at tolerating the vague sense of worry that we all get when we leave something unresolved.

Deep Focus 

• The greatest killer of creativity is interruption. It pulls your mind away from what you want to be thinking about. 
• Research has shown that, after an interruption, it can take eight minutes for you to return to your previous state of consciousness, and up to twenty minutes to get back into a state of deep focus.
• But perhaps the biggest interruption coming from your inside is caused by your worrying about making a mistake. This can paralyse you. “Oh,” you say to yourself, “I mustn’t think that because it might be WRONG.” Let me reassure you. When you’re being creative there is no such thing as a mistake.
• The reason is very simple: you can’t possibly know if you are going down a wrong avenue until you’ve gone down it. So, if you have an idea, you must follow your line of thought to the end to see whether it’s likely to be useful or not. You must explore, without necessarily knowing where you’re going.

As Einstein once pointed out, if we know what we’re doing when we’re investigating something, then it’s not research!

• You must create boundaries of space to stop others interrupting you.
• You create boundaries of time, by arranging, for a specific period, to preserve your boundaries of space.
• You treat those ninety minutes with huge respect and don’t allow any interruptions. And, knowing that this chunk of time is sacred, you can then start to play.
• It’s just like meditation. The first time you actually sit still, you become aware of something you don’t notice when you’re dashing around—and that is that your head is full of silly little thoughts and worries.
• So when we are in touch with our unconscious, it sends us hints and gentle nudges, and that’s why we have to be quiet. That’s why we’re practising a kind of meditation. Because if we don’t, if instead we are running around, looking at our watches and checking our smartphones, there’s not a hope in hell that we’re going to notice the subtle messages we’re being sent. 

A word of warning- When we’re trying to be creative, there’s a real lack of clarity during most of the process. 

• Our rational, analytical mind, of course, loves clarity—in fact, it worships it. But at the start of the creative process things cannot be clear. They are bound to be confusing. If it’s a new thought, how can you possibly understand it straight away? You’ve never been there before. It feels unfamiliar. So, much of our “Tortoise Mind” work takes place in an atmosphere of uncertainty and gentle confusion.
• It’s therefore really important that you don’t rush. Let these new notions of yours slowly become clearer, and clearer, and clearer. 
• Real clarity will eventually emerge. And at that point you’ll have…a new idea! Notice that I did not say “a new good idea.” It might be a terrible one. It might be brilliant.
• So how do you decide which it is, or whether, in fact, it’s a bit of both? Because what you do at this point, when this new idea of yours has become pretty clear, is to bring in your critical, analytical, fact-seeking mind to assess it.
• It is, however, very important that when you first have a new idea, you don’t get critical too soon. New and “woolly” ideas shouldn’t be attacked by your logical brain until they’ve had time to grow, to become clearer and sturdier. New ideas are rather like small creatures. They’re easily strangled.
• There’s quite a good way of telling when your creative period has done its job and it’s time to move on. If you find that you’ve had lots of vague new ideas and are starting to feel a bit overwhelmed and confused, that’s the moment to start work on clarifying them, prior to bringing your logical thinking to bear.
• Now you’re in a logical, critical period. After a time there, however, when you’ve assessed everything, you will get a bit bored. That’s a sign that now is the moment to go back into your creative thinking mode again. And so you go backwards and forwards between the creative mode of thinking and the analytical mode of thinking until, finally, you get to something that’s a bit special.

This back-and-forth process is called iteration. It’s what creative people do all the time.

“Write about what you know”

• I think this basic rule applies everywhere: you are most likely to be creative in an area that you already know and care about.

Looking for inspiration

• As a beginner it’s not very likely that you’ll come up with a very good one. So “borrow” an idea from someone you admire—an idea that really appeals to you personally. If you start working on that, you’ll make it your own as you play with it. You’re learning, and learning from something or someone you admire is not stealing. It’s called “being influenced by.”
• If you want to be creative in the world of science or architecture or medicine, you have to spend years educating yourself before you are ready to start thinking creatively about anything your colleagues might not already know. However, in the Arts, it sometimes happens that successful novelists never quite achieve the originality of their first novel. This is because beginners sometimes have a freshness in their approach that later fades away.
• It’s the psychological equivalent of the Law of Diminishing Returns. This is why even the very best minds seem to produce work that can divide itself into three stages. 
  • First, they produce original work as they learn their craft; 
  • Second, when they’ve mastered their craft, they begin to express their mature ideas in their best works; 
  • Third, there’s a tailing-off of their powers, as their insights become more familiar.

Coping with setbacks

• The anthropologist Gregory Bateson once said, “You can’t have a new idea ’til you’ve got rid of an old one.” This insight helped me to view my fallow periods as preparatory to the fertile ones, and therefore as an inseparable part of the whole creative process. 
• When the juices are not flowing, don’t beat yourself up and wonder if you should retrain as a priest. Just sit around and play, until your unconscious is ready to cough up some stuff. Getting discouraged is a total waste of your time.
  • As George Leonard said, Masters love the plateaus. 

Get your panic in early

• Writing is easy. Writing well is difficult. So if, like me, you feel a little bit rattled as you face your challenge, here’s my advice: get your panic in early! The good thing about panic is that it gives you energy. You never think, “I’m panicking, so I’ll have a nice snooze.” Instead, the panic will help you get down to the job.
• But don’t expect to solve anything for ages. Just begin to make a few notes, knowing they don’t have to be any good, and you will throw them away soon. Apart from anything else, this will help you to calm down, because if you have zero expectations at the start, you can hardly fail. And you’re already priming your unconscious…

The key thing is to start, even if it feels as though you’re forcing yourself through an emotional roadblock.

• Begin with simple stuff, such as…Who are you writing for? You might be writing for academics, in which case you don’t have to be interesting.
• Then you can start pondering, “What am I really trying to say?” “What is the point of this piece of journalism, or speech, or book, or play, or pamphlet, or email?”

Think up different approaches, compare them, begin gathering key facts and research—it never does any harm to have a few quotes! And—in case you haven’t realised this yet—recognise that all this time you will be feeding your unconscious and it will be chewing everything over the moment you stop working. Which is why, if you now go for a walk, by the time you get back, you’ll have a couple more ideas to add to your notes.

• Finally…as you get further into this piece of writing, remember just one thing: “Brevity is the soul of wit.” It is also the soul of not boring people. Remember the famous apology, “Sorry this is such a long letter, but I didn’t have time to write a shorter one.” So when you finish your first draft:

Cut anything that is not relevant (there will be more than you think). Don’t repeat yourself unless you really want to.

The dangers of over-confidence

• As a general rule, when people become absolutely certain that they know what they’re doing, their creativity plummets. This is because they think they have nothing more to learn. Once they believe this, they naturally stop learning and fall back on established patterns. And that means they don’t grow.

Testing your idea

• When you’re sure that you really like your new idea, you can proceed from thinking to doing, from planning to action. This might be a small step, or a huge one.

Kill your darlings

• His point was that any good work of art will change—sometimes in major ways—during the course of its creation. At the beginning of the process a writer may get a great idea—one that they particularly like. This is their “darling.” Inevitably, as the project develops, parts of the story will change and that “darling” may not fit well into the new version of the narrative. A good writer will jettison it. A less good writer will hang on to it, so hindering the transition of the story to its new form. I’ve noticed that younger writers tend to cling to their darlings. Those who are more experienced have got so used to redrafting and rewriting that they find it easier to let them die. They are, quite simply, more murderous.

Seeking a second opinion

• If you are an experienced writer, and you show people your work, there are four questions you need to ask: 
  • Where were you bored? 
  • Where could you not understand what was going on? 
  • Where did you not find things credible? 
  • Was there anything that you found emotionally confusing?
• Once you have the answers to these, then you go away, decide how valid the problems are…and fix them yourself. The people you have asked will probably suggest their solutions too. Ignore these completely.

While you’re considering all this don’t ask yourself who is right. Ask which idea is better.