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by jeffparsons
491 days ago
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I have this when I'm drifting off to sleep but not quite gone yet. I can effortlessly compose compelling melodies in my head, sometimes even parts for multiple instruments simultaneously, as if I'm simply listening to someone play it. But if I want it to go in a particular direction, it does. The couple of times I've willed myself to wake up and find a keyboard, the melodies still made sense — I wasn't just a drunk guy thinking he can sing. I've occasionally been able to do the same with architecture: design a massive sprawling palace with ease as I fly through it. And much like the music, on the one and only (I think?) time I woke up and sketched as much as I could remember, it still all made sense. But in my normal waking life I am creatively constipated. My mind aggressively criticises and crushes ideas before they get a chance to grow organically. I have one side of the creative process in my waking life (filtering) but very little of the other (synthesis). This makes me think a couple of things: 1. I totally get why artists use drugs so much. Any way to tap into that other state must be incredibly tempting. 2. It would be so amazing if we could figure out how to record in high fidelity and interpret what's going on in these altered states of consciousness. Maybe you've composed a whole symphony while you slept once, and you just don't know it! |
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There's an exercise I've had a bit of success with over the years: Identify a problem, then write down the first ten solutions to it that come to mind, no matter what.
It's important to write down each response you think of, no matter how impractical, ineffective, implausible, or ridiculous. You'll start to notice when you hold back from writing something down, no matter if it's because you think it's unoriginal, it seems like it doesn't fit the problem, or if you think it's too taboo. It's that _noticing_ that you're training, that's the goal. All forms of preemptive filtering keep us from letting the beginning of an idea take root, so the other ideas that might have followed from it never even occur to us.
Children are much better at this game than adults. When asked to invent a better paper clip, adults tend to focus on how to improve a standard paper clip's paper-clipping, how economically it could be made, or to focus on and change one feature at a time. Children can come up with ideas like building-sized paper clips made of cotton candy, to suggest a pony could be a good paper clip because you could tell it when to open or close its mouth and because it makes them happy, or to tell you how faeries would make paper clips so they could fly around on them.
It can help to have a good way to avoid feeling too embarrassed to write down every idea. Maybe you feel less inhibited when you pre-commit to deleting everything you typed, or tearing up and burning the paper you wrote them on after you're done. I know that saving the ideas makes me more likely to judge them by how other people might react, but perhaps saving the ideas might help for others.