The majority of what I have read of this book chapter so far has been a description of two examples of the creative process; the creation of the mobile, and the collage.
(puppyy!)
These examples serve to show that a new and original idea evolves over time in small ways until it is fully formed and unique.
I agree with this, also, I think that ideas come from things we see around ourselves and the furnaces of our own minds.
The good-idea-process is particularly relevant to me because I create works of fiction and of poetry, both of which - if they are going to be worthwhile endeavors - need to be original and engaging. My poetical process, the more spontaneous of the two types of writing I do for fun, is what I'm going to describe here.
Kayleigh McKay
The Dead of Night
The eyes are tired,
A subtle burning,
Time slows down,
The ticking clock is loud like a
chime.
Lights hurt like fire,
The mind loses its hold
On the things it perceives.
The frustration of inability
To travel to the land of
imagination.
Lidless eyes
Dreading the return of the sun.
The world is soft
In shades of grey,
The breeze is cool
And it carries the sound of
crickets,
And the smell of rain:
A secret place is this,
The dead of night.
This was written, as you may surmise, in the middle of the night when I couldn't fall asleep. The style here; fragmented images and sentances that are intended for description of a ceratin feeling or moment, is common to most of my other poems, so is not a "creative leap" where I come up with something completely new and totally different from anything that's been done before.
Poetry, for me, is a free-write session that usually describes an image or a feeling, in this case the feeling is Dear God, why can't I fall asleep?.
This whole poem is basically a description of what I observed and felt at three o'clock in the morning. I took the phrase "lidless eye" from the Lord of the Rings;
because I liked the phrase, and it also described my inability to keep my eyes closed for a significant length of time. Then, I turned my attention to the open window at the foot of my bed, and I wanted to make it sound magical-y at the end, I had fairies and gardens in my head, so I mentioned nature-y things, and repeated the word 'and' because I thought it had a nice sound - almost sing-song - and ended by saying that it was a secret place (also because most people are alseep at that time).
So, I made no great leap of intellect while writing this poem, but rather watched as, during the writing process, the poem evolved alongside my thoughts.
I owe a bit of my style of fragmentation to Sylvia Plath who writes in a similar way, I played with the idea of a zombie; the dead of night(....get itttt?) and used the idea of a secret and magical place, none of which were previously unknown.
The book goes on to make a claim about creating a painting that I find to be simply wrong, and I have the biting urge to refute it.
"The untrained observer seldom sees the changes made while the work was in progress, changes which can greatly alter a work. Nor does the finished painting directly reflect such preparatory as planning sketches or decisions about how the subject of the painting is to be arranged. This is true for any high-quality work of art; the finished product hides from the audience all preliminary work that went into it."
The higlighted bit is what I have a problem with. For one thing, art, by nature, doesn't conform to rules. And there is no reason on earth why a work of art cannot display some of the process of its creation, the process itself is a form of art. It is perfectly acceptable not to erase a single pencil line from the moment your begin on the final piece; it's a stylistic choice.
In a letter to Jacques Hadamard, Albert Einstein describes the thought/creative process that occurs inside the heads of mathematicians. I had never really given the matter any thought, so it was completely new information. Apparently, he thought of things in "visual and some of muscular type" and in order to explain his ideas "conventional words or other signs have to be sought for laboriously only in a secondary stage." Huh, I guess that I do that sometimes, when I'm trying to deal with some sort of mechanical thing, (like, how do these two pieces fit together?).
And, in closing, I have a list of notable inventions that have been made since the 1400's (useful when you wind up on the show Jeopardy; you're welcome). Cheers.
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