In Report on Business today, there’s a review of The Innovator’s DNA. I blog on “all things literary” so perhaps you’re surprised I’d comment here on a book published by Harvard Business Review Press. But I’ve added this book to my very long to-read list because I think the creativity of great business minds has relevance to writing.

According to the book’s three authors, really creative people – like Steve Jobs, for example – don’t just have brilliant minds, they often engage in the following behaviors:

• Associating – Innovators rarely invent something entirely new; what they do is recombine ideas in new ways. This reminds me of something Michael Chabon told an audience at a recent AWP conference: writing is all about similes – similes span the distance between writer and reader. Chabon and other skilled writers find new ways of showing us something is like something else.
• Questioning – It probably won’t surprise you that innovators love to ask questions. Why is something done in a certain way, and how might that be challenged? Steve Jobs asked himself why a computer needed a fan and that led to a nice, quiet Macintosh. Fiction writers continually ask themselves questions, and one of the most important ones is What if? What if you woke up one day and you were a giant beetle? (The Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka.)
• Observing – Business innovators are intense observers of customers, products, services and technology. As a journalist writing profiles of business leaders, I would note gestures and any personality quirks of my subjects to help give me (and readers) more insight into what made them successful. Smart writers watch people – everywhere, all the time. Why do writers take their work to cafes? Yeah, sure, I go for the double-fudge-nut-squares, but I also find inspiration in watching the other patrons around me.
• Networking – Innovators search for new ideas by talking to people who may offer a radically different view. Jobs talked to “the crazy guys” at Industrial Light & Magic…and Pixar was born. Smart writers seek out those who can provide an alternative point of view on a subject. This is true with both fiction and nonfiction. Because he takes the time to talk to people in all walks of life, Alain de Botton is one of my favourite writers.
• Experimenting – Innovators visit new places, seek new information, and try new things. Early on, Jobs took a calligraphy class; later, part of the draw of the Macintosh was its beautiful typography. Experimenting works for writers, too. Decades ago, I attended a workshop that espoused an approach to women’s health that turned upside down everything I’d assumed about self-care. That experience led to one of my first magazine articles.

If you have any other behaviors to add, please comment!

photo credit: alles banane

I’ve been thinking about creativity, mainly because I’m teaching a writing course and creativity is the topic of next class and that class is tonight. Actually, what I’ve been thinking about a lot is why did I ever assume teaching would be fun? I’m not having fun and I can think of a million other things I’d rather be doing right now—but my job is to think of something useful to say tonight.

This, by the way, is not to slam teaching*; I have similar vile  thoughts about the writing profession when faced with an impending deadline. And, just as with a writing assignment, the agony of the deadline overhead grows worse than the agony of having to do the deed, and I get back to work.

How do I get myself going again? I grab a book that’s been on my shelf for 25 years, Writing the Natural Way, by Gabriele Rico.  WTNW introduced me to the right-brain theory of creativity. The right brain comes up with ideas and looks for patterns, while the left side, among other things, lets you know when those ideas are wrong or just plain stupid. Of course we need that left side—how else can we self-edit our work?—but to create you need to muzzle that critic. Rico’s book shows you a way to do just that. She calls it “clustering” and here are the basic steps:

• In the middle of blank paper, write one word or phrase (the nucleus)
• Write down whatever pops into your head, radiating from the nucleus, and circle these words
• Draw arrows between connections/and or recurring themes
• Stop when you sense you have a focus
• Write a vignette (short literary sketch)

I think of this technique as “ballooning” and have used it over the years to help me with all kinds of writing, from business journalism to fiction. I try it now with the word “balloon.” After a few minutes, the exercise leads me to ideas I can use for my class but it also takes me back to a child-like pleasure in words. They sprout across the page as if by themselves and while some peter out in the corners, others gather and form a bouquet, a gift, and I sense this bouquet is fleeting and the urge to grasp it, to write it down before it floats away, is irresistible.

I have fun doing this exercise. The clustering/ballooning technique is the best creativity tool I can recommend to my class–and to you. If you have other methods for coming up with new writing ideas, please tell me.

*On the contrary: I love teaching!

A friend who writes short fiction—call her “Wanda”—was bemoaning how quickly her enthusiasm wanes. “I love starting a new story,” she said, over a glass of wine. “I’m really excited with the idea and all the things I can do with it, but then there’s a problem with the setting. Then I realize I don’t like one of the characters. In fact, I’m not that crazy about any of the characters. I start to think the whole premise is stupid. And it hits me: I hate this story!” Wham: writer’s block.

“Wanda,” I told her, “you’re like those people who have trouble committing to a relationship. You know, those women who fall in love with the idea of a new love as opposed to the living, wheezing guy across the table who suddenly has nose hairs.”

There’s no such thing as a Perfect Man, and there is no Perfect Story. The man/woman/idea for a novel you thought was the best you’ve ever run into turns out to be a dud. Sometimes you roll up your sleeves and work at it and eventually realize it was worth it, that you have something worthwhile here, something that is—yes!—beautiful!

Other times, you plug away at your project until your friends finally take you out and buy you lots of wine and tell you you’re  barking up the wrong tree and you aren’t getting any younger.

If a tale just doesn’t seem to work, maybe it is better to cut your losses and spend your valuable time on something new.

But if this disillusionment with your writing projects is happening a lot, it could be the problem isn’t the story you’ve just torn up in frustration. Could be it’s you.

Just as the woman who realizes her new guy isn’t Mister Perfect but works at the relationship anyway can find herself in something truly meaningful, if you keep at your fledging story—if you realize that, yeah, okay, it’s not going to be the brilliant satire you’d  imagined but, hey, it has a important point and an engaging protagonist and you’re going to stick with it to The End, dammit!—you could have something you’re proud to put your name on. And the experience you gain from completing it will enrich your next
relationship. Er, story.

Wishy-Washy-Wanda (who, by the way, doesn’t have a problem committing to a man; she’s been happily married for 15 years) told me the other day she’s completed the draft of a novel. It’s going to need a lot of work to get it to the point where she can submit it to publishers, but she did it, she worked at it, and now she and her novel have potential for a lasting future.

Of course, any of the other 97 story ideas she abandoned over the past year might also have made a publishable novel; we’ll never know.

It’s tough to decide whether to stick with your once-perfect story idea after it’s begun to grow warts, but here’s something you might ask yourself: Are things so bad I couldn’t possibly explain to anyone what it was I ever saw in it? Is all the magic gone?

If the answer isn’t an emphatic yes, I say you should work at it.

(Hey, Wanda, Full disclosure: I have 11 abandoned ideas in my 2010 mental drawer.)

When writers get together and talk about writer’s block, suggestions for remedies are almost endless. In fact, for people claiming to suffer from a creativity deficit, it’s amazing how many ideas writers contemplating writer’s block can come up with. There are wholesome routes to more words—working out, long walks, listening to music, maybe playing with the dog/cat. Reading someone else’s great writing can work. These are all what I call WB 101 strategies. When these fail, try WB 102 tactics–hands-on research.

There’s basic research, such as reading about the topic you’re writing about and interviewing experts in the field. But there’s also another—easier—kind of research writers often don’t think of, and it’s what I call Walk on the Beach.

Awhile back, I was drafting a story and got to a scene where two main characters meet at a beach, a beach I have been to about a thousand times, and they have a conversation that (hopefully) moves the plot forward. One character is concealing information from the other, and during their conversation, the other’s suspicions are aroused. The problem was, the whole scene—no matter how much I worked at it—was dull, dull, dull.

In terms of physical action, my characters were doing little. In fact, they weren’t doing much more than sitting on a log. I tweaked. One character picked up a stone and threw it into the water. Yawn. The other commented on a passerby. Yawn. The scene could as easily have taken place in a parked car.

So, I went to the beach.

And when I actually went to this beach I’d been to a thousand times before, I meandered along listening to the surf, smelling the salty air—and then I slid and fell. This beach is not flat, and in places walking along it is like traversing the side of a steep hill, and I saw, in a flash, my characters strolling side by side and then one sliding into the other, a collision that resulted in the thing one  character wanted to conceal literally falling into the open. And that may not sound like much, but that one idea led to almost a thousand new words.  Now we, my characters and I, were getting somewhere.

It won’t always be the case that your characters are frolicking (or not) on a beach/street/park that happens, in real life, to be a five-minute drive from your home. But if they are, for example, stir-frying shrimp, you, too, can haul out the wok. You may have cooked the recipe a thousand times before, but now you’re doing it through the eyes of your character(s). Your fictional cook may just come up with something new to feed your story.

If this doesn’t cure your writer’s block, at least you’ve got yourself some exercise, and maybe a shrimp stir-fry to enjoy.