Creativity

Last Sunday may have been Halloween to the rest of the world, but this time of year is something even more terrifying at Stanford: midterm season. If you think ghosts and goblins are scary, you should witness the arcane ritual of Trying to Write on a Tiny Folding Desk or the horror of Breaking Your Last Scantron-Approved Pencil. So if I don’t post on this blog every week, know that I have not been eaten by zombies or enchanted by witches – I’m just bent over my desk next to a pile of flashcards.

Today I want to talk about creativity. Though I haven’t had as much time as I would like to write recently, I have had plenty of opportunities to flex my creative muscles and think about just what it means to use your imagination.

First, where does creativity come from? A few weeks ago, we had the opportunity to handle actual human brains in my introduction to psychology class. A brain is surprisingly compact in your hands – five pounds of wrinkled grey tissue that was once a person. Psychologists think that much of creative thought arises from the formation of new associations in the brain. In other words, every novel, short story, vampire, and werewolf began as electric and chemical impulses between brownish specks of matter. The neural processes we use to imagine something mimic those we use to process visual stimuli, so every time you see something in your head, it’s almost as if you’re actually seeing it. When you dream up a fantasy world, you are creating something that really exists – at least as far as your brain is concerned.

Are there techniques you can use to help yourself think more creatively? As it turns out, yes. One of my classes recently took a trip to IDEO, a design firm headquartered in Palo Alto, where we learned eight rules for successful brainstorming. Not all of them translate to literary brainstorming, but many do. The next time you’re searching for a new idea for a story or novel or struggling to tie up a loose plot line, try thinking up as many ideas as you can in a short span of time (“go for quantity”), don’t judge your ideas while you’re brainstorming (“defer judgment”), allow yourself to come up with wild possibilities without worrying about plausibility (“encourage wild ideas”), and draw pictures to flesh out your concepts (“be visual”).

What do you do when your creativity hits a wall? Believe it or not, computer science has a lot to teach writers on this front. The first and most important lesson is not to panic. Almost every writer has found him or herself without inspiration from time to time. Creative droughts don’t mean anything about your abilities – they just mean that you haven’t found the right idea yet. It may be helpful to talk to other people, or to try out ideas systematically by writing a few pages and revising them if they don’t work. Look for “bugs” in your writing – little problems that create big problems in plot or character development later on – and try to remove them in the simplest way possible. Once you have everything worked out, try to break your own writing by looking for plot holes or thinking of questions readers might ask.

Creativity is all around us, and we can learn about the process of generating and testing ideas from things that seem completely unrelated to writing. Just keep your eyes open and your pencil ready!

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