Tag: creativity

4 Lessons on Creativity from Roger in ‘101 Dalmatians’

Originally published at Cinema Sugar.

Roger Radcliffe is ultimately a supporting player in this story of dogs trying to avoid being skinned for their fur (you know, a Disney movie for kids). But as the hero of his own story, he’s an excellent example of an artist at work. 

Here’s what we can learn from this eccentric English musician about a productive and fulfilling creative life. 

Treat it like a job. 

Roger may be a struggling artist, but he still understands the importance of routine and consistency. You can tell he puts in the hours and treats his craft like the job it is—much to his dog Pongo’s chagrin. 

Take a walk.  

Even a pro like Roger knows when it’s quittin’ time. Once 5 pm arrives (thanks to some sneaky time-turning by Pongo), he’s out the door with his canine companion for some fresh air and a chance to unwind.

Find the melody. 

While playing around with the melody that would eventually become his hit song “Cruella de Vil”, Roger uses nonsense songs as placeholders, which his wife Anita playfully teases him for. But he insists: “Melody first, my dear, and then the lyrics.” Of course lyrics can come first in the creative process, but until you have a melody for them you don’t have a song. Whatever the creative art, figure out what you absolutely need before adding layers of complexity. 

Use your life as inspiration. 

Roger’s journey from struggling musician to successful hitmaker can be traced to one key moment: glomming Cruella de Vil’s name onto a half-formed melody. This bit of improvised whimsy occurred only because he was present and observant of the world around him. Same case with his second single “Dalmatian Plantation”, which, despite the problematic name, emerged out of his natural reaction to dozens of sooty dogs destroying his house.

August 9, 2024 Add Comment

How to make time for art

I noticed three writers posted about similar things around the same time, so I thought I ought to pay attention…

Oliver Burkeman:

In the end, the reason actually doing things matters so much isn’t because it’s the right way to raise a successful adult, complete a novel, or achieve some other beneficial future goal. It’s because you’ll be using a bit of your actual time on the planet to live how you want to live.

Mandy Brown:

It turns out, not doing their art was costing them time, was draining it away, little by little, like a slow but steady leak. They had assumed, wrongly, that there wasn’t enough time in the day to do their art, because they assumed (because we’re conditioned to assume) that every thing we do costs time. But that math doesn’t take energy into account, doesn’t grok that doing things that energize you gives you time back. By doing their art, a whole lot of time suddenly returned. Their art didn’t need more time; their time needed their art.

Austin Kleon:

The way I show up for myself, the way I discover who I really am, is to make an appointment every day to show up to the page. If I show up to the page, I show up to myself.

September 11, 2023 Add Comment

5 Okee Dokee Brothers songs I’m envious I didn’t write myself

If you’re an artist of some kind, you’ve probably experienced this before.

You encounter a piece of art and the first feeling it provokes is Awe (“This is amazing”), followed by Envy (“I wish I’d made that”), and then Inspiration (“I want to make something like that”).

Ideally this becomes a virtuous cycle, a continuous process of input and output that leads to artistic fulfillment. But I often find myself somewhere between Awe and Envy: impressed by the work and regretful it’s not mine, but not in a bitter way.

That’s what I often feel while listening to my favorite band, The Okee Dokee Brothers. I heard them described somewhere as the Pixar of kids music, which is apt: they pack an amazing amount of artistry, wisdom, life-giving stories into seemingly simple folk tunes that appeal to all ages.

Here are a few I wish I’d written myself.

“Seasons in a Day” from Songs for Singin’. Using the phases of a day as a synecdoche for the four seasons is a stroke of genius.

“Walking With Spring” from Through the Woods. This song has come up before and, I suspect, will continue to in every stage of life.

“Church of the Woods” from Songs for Singin’. A gorgeous secular hymn for nature lovers.

“Sister Moon and Brother Sun” from Saddle Up. A genesis story told through Americana and indigenous music.

“Thank You” from Songs for Singin’. A beautifully simple tune about gratitude that grows as it goes.

November 3, 2022 Add Comment

The long and winding genius of the Pauls (McCartney and Simon)

While trolling for something to read on Hoopla, I came upon Malcolm Gladwell’s new book Miracle and Wonder: Conversations with Paul Simon. It’s only available as an audiobook (or “audio biography”), and wisely so since so much of it depends on hearing Simon play his songs amidst his conversations with Gladwell. In that way it’s more like a limited podcast series than a book.

Whatever you call it, Gladwell’s intention was to interrogate the phenomenon of creative genius, and pinpoint how and why it applied to Simon, whose long and wide-ranging musical career set him in contrast to other contemporary artists who may have had higher peaks (The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan) but didn’t produce at the same level of quality over decades as Simon has.

As Gladwell writes:​

We tend to be much more caught in the peaks of an artist’s career. But why? The true definition of creative genius—to my mind, at least—is someone who is capable of creating something sublime and then, when that moment passes, capable of reconfiguring their imagination and returning to the table with something wholly different and equally sublime.​

Whether Simon meets this criteria is debatable, though Gladwell makes a good case for it.

The other Paul

Regardless, the book found me at a propitious time since I just finished watching and listening to the other famous ’60s singer-songwriter Paul in the documentary The Beatles: Get Back. The film captures McCartney in his first sublime period, which coincided with the transition between The Beatles and his solo work.

His career as a whole is eerily similar to Simon’s: incredible creative and commercial success within a popular group throughout the 1960s, followed by an acrimonious breakup in 1970 and then decades of steady solo output of variable quality.

(Conan O’Brien even had a bit involving Lorne Michaels called “Which Paul is he talking about?” since Lorne is friends with both.)

Per Gladwell’s formulation, both men created something sublime within a relatively condensed cultural moment, then reconfigured their output after that moment passed. Whether those later albums were “wholly different and equally sublime” depends on where you look.

If it’s a choice between The Beatles and Simon & Garfunkel, I choose the Fab Four all the way. (My cheeky Better The Beatles series notwithstanding.)

But solo-wise, I think Simon’s exceptional ‘70s work combined with the highlights of Graceland (1986), The Rhythm of the Saints (1992), and So Beautiful or So What (2011) give him the edge over McCartney, whose early solo work was definitely the best of all the ex-Beatles (though not perfect), but didn’t approach the sublime until Chaos and Creation in the Backyard (2005) and Memory Almost Full (2007).

Seeing Paul McCartney at Wrigley Field just over 10 years ago remains an all-time life highlight. (By seeing I mean standing outside Wrigley listening and singing along and barely catching a glimpse of him on the Jumbotron. But still.) I regret not being able to see Paul Simon live, as I imagine it would have been just as good but delightfully different. Which, perhaps, is what Gladwell would consider it too.

December 21, 2021 1 Comment

10 Commandments of Creative Work

Not sure where I found this Code of Ethics for Engineers on the interwebs, but I immediately fell in love with it—not for the engineering and robotics aspect, but for how it can be used for any creative work:

Let’s call these the 10 Commandments of Creative Work. Just replace “robot” with your art of choice:

1. Be industrious. Build, test, repeat.

2. Follow Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics.

3. Ask questions. Always.

4. Try things you’ve never tried before. There are many solutions to one problem.

5. Don’t fall apart if your robot does. It’s a chance to begin again.

6. Keep tinkering even if you’ve run out of ideas. Building will bring you more ideas.

7. Save your best ideas in secret notebooks.

8. Read lots of books about other things. Things that are not robots.

9. Pay attention to dreams.

10. Remember: the best robots are the ones you haven’t thought of yet.

September 8, 2018 1 Comment

Creativity is the long way

Reading Brene Brown’s Rising Strong, this quote surprised me:

Creativity embeds knowledge so that it can become practice. We move what we’re learning from our heads to our hearts through our hands. We are born makers, and creativity is the ultimate act of integration—it is how we fold our experiences into our being.

Fully agree. But I expected the first sentence to end with wisdom, not practice. Probably because my bias, whether I like it or not, is toward matters of the head. This is a blessing that can become a curse when I fail to externalize ideas and knowledge through some kind of outward expression.

It is counterintuitive that sending knowledge from the head to the heart is not the direct route it appears. To become truly meaningful, it must take the long way. Perhaps that’s why creativity is so challenging yet so rewarding.

Then again, there’s the Ron Swanson perspective:

July 27, 2018 1 Comment

Three Oatmeal Truths

Today at the library, I read Matthew “The Oatmeal” Inman’s The Terrible and Wonderful Reasons Why I Run Long Distances, an extended version of his original web comic about ultra-running. It’s of a piece with his usual ardent and absurdist takes on varying topics. In the book he illustrates a few tips for becoming a runner, which I have decided to paraphrase into three core principles for life:

1. Shut up and run.
2. Running sucks.
3. Suck in the present.

(The first one is a direct quote from the book, but the latter two are my own condensations, which also happen to create a delightful anadiplosis.)

I am not much of a runner—though I’m certainly inspired to be after reading this book—but I quickly saw the wide-ranging value of these aphorisms. Replace “running” with any activity, but especially an arduous or creative one, and the phrases still work. For me, it’s writing.

The first step is the hardest, but everything hinges on it. Ignoring the compelling excuses our inner demons conjure is key to achieving even a modicum of success. Just doing the thing, whatever it is, is the beginning and end of it. It’s the permission-to-play value, the minimum qualification for entry.

If we accomplish the first step, then the second one gets real on the quick. The initial burst of enthusiasm fades and we’re left with the undeniable notion that we’ve made a mistake in starting at all, that our muscles ache and that life would be easier if we stopped. But this, damn those pesky demons, is a lie. On the contrary: “Life is difficult,” writes M. Scott Peck in The Road Less Traveled. “This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult—once we truly understand and accept it—then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.”

Running/writing/painting/cobbling/[insert activity here] sucks. It’s beautiful, and we love it, but it sucks to do. It definitely doesn’t suck to have done something, but getting to that point means getting through the suck.

Which brings us to the third great Oatmeal Truth™: be present in the suck. Whatever we’re doing we’re doing it for a reason, and that probably is because we want to, or even need to. It might feel terrible or wonderful, as the book’s title asserts, or somewhere in-between. Either way, it’s something important to us. To honor that, then, we need to give it our attention. We need to live with it as it lives in us, even when it sucks. Even if we just want to get it over with to make the pain or frustration stop.

I think I’ll put these up on my wall.

November 14, 2014

The Ballad Of X

Francis Spufford, Unapologetic:

“It would be nice if people were to understand that science is a special exercise in perceiving the world without metaphor, and that, powerful though it is, it doesn’t function as a guide to those very large aspects of experience that can’t be perceived except through metaphor.”

Wendell Berry, Life Is A Miracle:

“If modern science is a religion, then one of its presiding deities must be Sherlock Holmes. To the modern scientist as to the great detective, every mystery is a problem, and every problem can be solved. A mystery can exist only because of human ignorance, and human ignorance is always remediable. The appropriate response is not deference or respect, let alone reverence, but pursuit of ‘the answer.’ This pursuit, however, is properly scientific only so long as the mystery is empirically or rationally solvable. When a scientist denies or belittles a mystery that cannot be solved, then he or she is no longer within the bounds of science.”

N.D. Wilson, Notes from the Tilt-A-Whirl:

“My father uses a blue highlighter to remind him of the good bits he reads, but it has trouble sticking to sunsets or thunderstorms or the cries of the meadowlark in the spring. His guitar is more helpful.”

Sometimes, solving for x requires writing a song.

April 14, 2014

Art for art’s sake

“We make in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made; and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker.” -J.R.R. Tolkien

Art for art’s sake. What a concept. So what if the song I’m listening to doesn’t mention Jesus or discuss Christian philosophy? It’s still a song, a piece of art. Why can’t it be appreciated as so?

In the latest issue of Relevant magazine, Aaron Marsh, the lead singer of Copeland, says that “inspiration is too abstract to pin down. There are a lot of things that influence the lyrics or melodies.” You don’t have to be listening to a worship song or writing lyrics based on Scripture to be inspired.

“In the end,” the article concludes, “it’s all just music–good music–but just music, all the same.”

Amen.

September 7, 2007 Add Comment