Category: Epistemology and Method

NO YOU DON”T HAVE WRITER’S BLOCK – HOW TO WRITE

You can’t write from a feeling – you can’t maintain it. You can’t write from inspiration – it will dissipate.

OR….

You can identify a question or a problem, or an argument (persuasion), and write a record of your exploration of it. You can identify a theory, and write your character’s investigation of it. You can identify a strategy given the history of “the technology of storytelling using archetypes, fundamental invariant human experiences, plot combinations, points of view (narrator, first, second), and past present and future contexts, to create a novelty, or an adaptation, revisiting the human experience to make an observation relevant to the day or era.” You can maintain your interests and attention mentally and emotionally.

If you’re just writing from feeling or inspiration, thats why you’re failing yourself and your audience, because since you aren’t learning anything – neither are they. You have have something interesting in your head to write something interesting. The propensity to imagine is a talent, but writing is a craft like any other.

Never confuse writing with therapy, nor work with avoidance, nor art with entertainment, nor sex with masturbation.

Unless you’re being taught writing by the upper .01% you’re wasting your time. Writing is another form of engineering raised to an art. You can’t create an art without learning the science (engineering), the craft (practice) and the art (innovation).

It’s not worth talented people’s time to help you find therapy, entertainment, or self gratification.

My first ‘tough love’ review in art school was the question ‘why are you making art?’ I foolishly said “because it is fun” (meaning therapeutic). The response was “let me know when it’s work. bEcause then you’re learning, then you might have something to say. Until you’re working and working hard, you’re wasting our time, your time, and the audience’s time.”

You can’t get a good education in the arts today. It’s just not possible. Even at Yale. Maybe CCAC. It’s almost impossible to get a good education today. You are a customer whose satisfaction is to be earned with the least conflict, not a student who the teachers and professors bear the burden to transforming into an innovator or aesthete.

So you have to educate yourself, or find a group of mentors for whom your potential is worth their investment.

Writers block doesn’t exist.

A head empty of ideas because it’s not full of opportunities for free association exists.

Creativity is not magic. It’s a discipline.

Fill the shelves of your mind with related material.

Go do something playful that doesn’t require you refill those shelves with something else.

Take a shower. Go for a drive. Go for a walk. Go shopping. Anything that’s pleasingly stimulating for your senses but doesn’t occupy your brain.

The answer will come to you when your bundles of neurons are done with their process of auto association.

The brain accumulates novelties.

So go research something somehow related to the characters or context or plot – and fill the shelves of your mind so it can use free association (auto-association) to identify and create novelties.

If you’re sitting in a chair you’re just wasting your time.

If you’re out and about and engaged in social activities, or any form of entertainment you’re wasting your time.

Gather, observe people (what I do), Listen to people, play, exercise, relax, contemplate, and then try.

If not, then repeat until it works.

If you are exhausted by the topic start another one on a different topic. Doing so will cause you to auto-associate with your last topic or tory.

There is nothing magic to this process.

It’s just training yourself to insulate your five faculties from one another: senses, emotions, intuitions, reason, and actions, so that you use only use the one you need in the moment.

For creativity you need your intuition: free association.

Most memories are time and location dependent. Memories are saved by replaying three or more sequential episodes. When they are replaying (below your conscious threshold) they are auto-associating, and with every replay the breadth of auto association increases because neural connections increase. you are trying to let auto association not THINKING do the work for you until you find an idea. Then you think how to move your character or plot or argument from here to there.

Creativity is just a discipline like meditation or stoicism or studying – a means of training your brain to delivery what your mind wants from it. Creative people just want novelty more than those less creative. They’re novelty junkies. But novelty requires new material to cause auto association. When I teach people anything from storytelling, to argument, to engineering, to web design to system architecture I say the same thing: go do some research on what others have done. you aren’t smarter or more creative than anyone else. You’re either identifying an opportunity to attract audience attention, and filling your mind with tools of auto-association, or you’re living under the illusion that you have some magic talent. You don’t ARt is just the generation of novelty in the craft you are experimenting upon by narrative, composition (aesthetics), materials, or technique. It doesn’t matter what art we talk about.

A brain is a very big but very simple thing that does just one thing: It performs free (auto) associations until something is interesting enough to raise to your attention.

You just have to train your mind to let your brain do its work.

And then think (work) at getting from where you are to where you want to be given that interesting idea.

Cheers

Curt Doolittle