Tuesday, October 31, 2017

Madeline L'Engle: Writing from the Unconscious, or the Heart?

2012 was the 50th anniversary of Madeline L’Engle’s best-known children’s book, A Wrinkle in Time. At a panel in honor of the occasion, contemporary children’s author Lois Lowry neatly summed up the book’s impact through an anecdote about her two daughters’ reactions to reading it for the first time. One had a deep emotional connection to the characters, telling her mother, “I loved Charles Wallace...I could see exactly why [Meg] had to risk her life to save [him]. How could she do otherwise?” The other daughter was equally captivated by the role of science in the story, saying “this is the first book, thank god, that finally explained the theory of relativity to somebody my age, so I could understand it.” Lowry then said that forty years later, asking her daughters what they remembered about the book, their reactions were the same ones they’d had as children. As Lowry puts it, “it’s a remarkable book that can speak to so many types of children,” and the fact that its impact stayed with them for forty years is equally remarkable.

Stories like these show the brilliance of Madeline L’Engle as a writer. She was constantly combining elements that are rarely seen together in a story. A Wrinkle in Time throws together wildly fantastic characters with deeply relatable ones, science with religion, a highly technical exploration of time travel and the fourth dimension with themes like family, spirituality, and the triumph of love over hate–and somehow manages to pack all of these things into a story that captivates a young audience. Different people may admire drastically different things about her work, but there always seems to be something about it that stays with them. It seems like L’Engle would be a fascinating study from a psychological point of view. However, she also turns out to be a very challenging one, because she tended to view her own creativity in more spiritual or transcendent terms, more than intellectual ones.

One might think that L’Engle would be a highly meticulous author, who put in hours of conscious effort to create her works. However, she describes the writing process as almost a dissociative experience–perhaps what psychologists would call a state of flow. At any rate, she put far less conscious effort into it than one might expect. As with several of the creative people we discussed during the unit on the unconscious, she believes the creative process is something that transcends her and her abilities. In an interview in 1975, she said that “with each book I write, I become more and more convinced that any work of art ... has a life of its own, quite apart from me, and that a book will come to me and say, ‘here I am. Enflesh me. Write me.’.... I don’t possess the words, the book’s not mine–it’s the other way around, I belong to the work.”

L’Engle expanded on this view when giving advice for new writers at the Veritas forum. She compared the unconscious process that led several scientists to famous discoveries with the writing process, saying “most of the greatest scientific discoveries have been made when the scientist is not thinking ... when I conduct a writer’s workshop, the last I thing I say is ‘when you write, don’t think. Write’ Because if you think you’re in control, you’re in charge, you’ll get in the way.” Thus, it seems that L’Engle’s creative process is an example of van Steenburgh’s theory that unconscious mental processes can lead to moments of insight that seem to spring from nowhere in the mind of a creative. However, it’s unclear if L’Engle herself would agree with this assessment, as she was often highly critical of the limits of the human mind and intellect in generating creative work. For example, when describing how she wrote the villain in A Wrinkle in Time, she explained that by making character a disembodied brain, “what I was saying is that the brain, when it is not informed by the heart, is evil. But I didn’t know this consciously while I was writing. My creative intuition simply told me that that was what it had to be. It wasn’t until after the book was published, and someone else pointed it out to me, that I understood more than I had consciously known. I had been writing with my heart, more than with my mind.”

Thus, it seems that at the very least, L’Engle would likely prefer terminology like “the heart” for “the unconscious” when it comes to explaining her work. She seemed to believe that some ideas were not just lying beneath the surface of one’s thoughts, but truly came outside of one’s self–perhaps from God, or the universe at large. The focus of her Veritas lecture was how fantasy can get at universal or spiritual truths in ways fact cannot. She claimed that “there comes a point when you’ve gone as far as thinking will take you, and then you move into the world that might be called fantasy, which is that world beyond where your mind might take you, and then you stop, you stop short, and you listen. And you may hear some extraordinary things. They will be exciting maybe push you in places don’t want to go, and they may lead you temporarily to anxiety and even despair.”  


In one way, it’s paradoxical that a person who works advanced physics into her writing would favor the heart and downplay the value of the naked intellect to such a degree. However, in another way it points to what makes L’Engle’s work unique. It is highly intellectual in places, but it is also fantastical, touching, and can draw in readers who might not have had a particular interest in physics when they picked up the book. L’Engle has never been an author who fits into conventional categories. She combines particle physics and quantum mechanics with theology, addresses timeless questions in a book for children, and blurred the lines between so many genres that A Wrinkle in Time was rejected by many baffled publishers before it finally became a success. Yes, it's difficult to pin down L'Engle or her creative process as a person, or categorize her within a particular literary field. This makes her difficult, and sometimes frustrating, to study as a creative individual in psychological terms. Yet in the end, it is perhaps this divergence from expectations and easy explanations that makes her truly a notable creative. She broke away from what had been done before, and the paradoxes that arise in studying her creative process reflect her unconventionality. 

St. Vincent





St. Vincent is the musical project of multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter of Anne "Annie" Clark. Clark is known for creating creative and eclectic music that combines multiple musical genres and incorporates a wide range of influences. Her five currently released albums­­ have all been released to critical acclaim and has often been called the “Female David Bowie”. Her 2014 self-titled album won the Grammy that year for Best Alternative album, making her the first female artist to do so in two decades.
Annie Clark was born in 1982 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, but grew up mostly in Dallas, Texas. She picked up guitar at the age of 12 and received some training some her Uncle who is the famous jazz guitarist Tuck Andress. After Highschool she attended Berklee School of Music for three years before dropping out to pursue her own career. She did work for the Group The Polyphonic Spree before forming St. Vincent in 2007.
St. Vincent employs a wide range of processes to feed her creative processes. For her third album Strange Mercy she holed herself away in Seattle for a month to create it, trying to find art in isolation. She has said in interviews when she is working on new music she keeps working even is she not feeling inspired and that constant production is a key part of the creative process. Additionally, she pulls inspiration from a wide variety of sources, citing things as diverse as the Memphis Design Movement of the 1980s and the works of Director Alejandro Jodorowsky, to the journals of Marilyn Monroe, the latter of which formed the inspiration for her song “Surgeon”.  
Clarke has stated that when she works, she gets into a hyper focused states where nothing else matters, “food becomes perfunctory” she is quoted as saying. This sounds quite similar to the psychological of concept of flow. In which an individual achieves a highly focused state in regards to whatever they are working on.

Sources:
https://www.vogue.com/article/st-vincent-annie-clark-vogue-october-issue-interview-2017
https://www.gq.com/story/st-vincent-luxembourg
https://www.allmusic.com/artist/st-vincent-mn0000574035/biography
https://pitchfork.com/features/interview/8661-st-vincent/



Neil Gaiman and Asking Questions




            Neil Gaiman is an author who uses a wide range of mediums. His works include novels, short stories, films, television episodes, and comic books. He is most well known for his comic series, Sandman, and his novels, including American Gods, Neverwhere, Stardust, and Coraline. He also wrote multiple episodes for popular television show Doctor Who. He has written for many different genres, and many different audiences, young and old. His stories are consistently fresh and interesting, often blending together elements from multiple genres. Throughout his career, he has frequently been asked the question, “Where do your ideas come from?”

He answers this question in his essay, titled, “Where Do You Get Your Ideas?” In this essay, he describes his process. To start, he asks questions. One question leads to another, and a plot is born. The question “what if?” is a good place to start. What if a person’s morning train took them to another world? What is the other world like? How would they get home? From this quick series of questions, a beginning for a story is born. Sometimes, instead of starting with a question, he starts with an image or character, and then uses this process of asking questions to develop a story around the character or image. With this process, any idea can be used as the starting point, as long as there are questions and answers.

            Openmindedness is a necessary trait for this sort of process, as a person must be open to considering many questions and possibilities in order for this to work and produce ideas. Someone must be open to asking interesting questions and finding creative answers. Divergent and convergent thinking also play a role, as Gaiman must be able to connect the many different questions and ideas and combine them to create cohesive stories. Divergent thinking allows him to create many different ideas, but he must edit and form the ideas into something that makes sense.

Using these questions as a place to begin, Neil Gaiman finds ways to answer them in unconventional ways, and combine all of those ideas into a cohesive plot.


http://www.neilgaiman.com/Cool_Stuff/Essays/Essays_By_Neil/Where_do_you_get_your_ideas%3F

Trapped in the Creative

Born Robert Sylvester Kelly, is a singer, songwriter, producer, and even a former semi-professional basketball player popularly known as R. Kelly. He has come out with 17 albums so far in his ongoing career. His written an autobiography and even wrote his own “hip-hopera” Trapped in a Closet. Now aside from releasing timeless hits: “Bump n’ Grind”, “Ignition (Remix)”, “I Believe I Can Fly”, or “I’m a Flirt” I believe one of R. Kelly’s greatest gift to this planet is Trapped in the Closet. Now if you are a human being who has never experienced watching it on MTV or BET when it came out almost ten years ago, then I am greatly saddened. It is revolutionary in the way that R. Kelly literally does everything in Trapped in the Closet. If you have never seen it, no word is spoken. All the dialogue is sung by R. Kelly. The plot revolves around R. Kelly going through an insanely dramatic and outrageously ludicrous life.

            Now, R. Kelly has won multiple Grammy awards, BET awards, Billboard awards, and NAACP awards, but the most astounding thing about his success is he is barely literate. He says “The only reason I graduated from grammar school is because I had a great jump shot.” R. Kelly gave his notebook to GQ and on the inside were mainly doodles. He says he is a victim of a beautiful disease, where even before he can finish one song, another one is knocking in his head. R. Kelly's production process starts with an album title then he will go into a studio with a song name and mainly improvise the lyrics of his songs. R. Kelly explains,

Going in the studio, I say okay I'm gonna do a Black Panties album. So I gotta have some nice titles to play with. What would excite the people the most, or get the people talking, like 'Man, have you heard that song "Marry the Pussy?"' Now that I got those titles, all I got to do is put the lyrics to it and the melody to it and the beat to it. And once that's done and everything marries each other, I feel like it's completed. (Rolling Stones Interview)
R. Kelly is completely dedicated to his work. After having vocal cord surgery to remove an abscess, Kelly was told he should not sing for at least four weeks. However, immediately after being discharged from the hospital, he went straight to the studio and began singing and working on his next piece. I simply cannot cover the breadth of work R. Kelly has done in his career but if you want to see him at his best the watch his Trapped in the Closet “hip-hopera.” If you have not graced yourself by viewing it, then you must! I cannot describe the hilarity, the constant plot twists, or the plain desire of wanting more Trapped in the Closet has left me.

            Lastly, I know R. Kelly has had numerous sexual assault and child pornography cases brought against him. In no way, am I supporting or condoning his actions. However, creatively speaking he is quite intriguing.

Sources: 

Time is measured not by clocks, but by momentary confusion that will be resolved in a mind-bending, earth-shattering way in approximately 120 minutes

Imagine you're eight years old. You're filming your Star Wars toys with the camcorder your dad bought to film your family opening Christmas presents every year as you unfold the most intricate story anyone in the greater Chicagoland area has ever seen. Now flash forward 36 years. You're on the set of your 12th feature-length film directing a similar, albeit more scientifically developed, tale of the trials and tribulations of futuristic space travel. The only major difference? This time you're working with a $165 million budget. 

As is the case with many celebrated creatives, Christopher Nolan had dreamt of being a filmmaker since he was a child. Now one of the most revered directors not only in modern film, but in all of film history, his work behind the camera is unparalleled and unprecedented. A perfect example of Gardner's "the relationship between the child and the adult creative", Christopher Nolan is fulfilling a fantasy of a life of filmmaking he's had since he was creating Star Wars remakes with his father's Super 8 camera. I also find it interesting that Nolan's interests regarding themes has changed relatively little not only since the beginning of his filmmaking career, but since he was a child. Always interested in space travel, warping time, and exploring ethics and philosophies among unique and individual characters, Nolan has gifted us with films such as Memento, Interstellar, and his latest work, Dunkirk

Like any truly great director, his unique talents as a screenwriter and storyteller have separated him from other filmmakers, creating a sort of science-meets-ethics brand for himself. What separates him most from other storytellers, however, is the multitude of ways in which is plays with time. Few people have such a intricate understanding of time and the ways in which it can be bent, reversed, and shaped. Even fewer have the creative insights to be able to turn these ideas surrounding time into complex and distinctive feature-length screenplays that are digestible enough for the layman to stumble out of a theatre with an earth-shatteringly clear understanding of what he's just witnessed. For this reason, I find Christopher Nolan to be a perfect example of the originality and newness that is required in order for something to be truly creative. 

Unlike many of his peers in the big-budget film industry, Nolan prefers to be right up in the action rather than shouting directions from a tent three miles away from the set. A variety of actors he's worked with often publicly commend this quality, and many believe this plays a tremendous part in how he is able to create films so seemingly perfect in every aspect from acting to set and costume design to sound. Truly imaginative and unlike any other before him, Christopher Nolan is one of the most creative filmmaking visionaries of our time.

CT Scan: Godfrey Hounsfield and Allan Cormack

Godfrey Hounsfield  and Allan Cormack, both who are well known physicists, are the inventors of the CT scan which is also known as the CAT scan. A CT scan is a computed tomography scan. This is a tool that allows physicians to take cross-sectional images of the bones as well as organs inside the body. This invention was a break from the conventional x-ray scan that only outlines the bones of the human body.



By being able to see the vital organs of the patient, it allows to doctors to see for any wounding of the vital organs, tumors and metastatic conditions. Therefore doctors have a detailed idea of how the patient is injured as well as how to go about to fix the patient. 

Mr. Hounsfield's process for inventing the CT scan was by looking at the x-ray scanning system.  He thought if he took an x-ray scanning of an object inside a box, he could determine what was in the box. He then took this idea and began by creating a computer that would allow him to accomplish x-ray readings from all angles. This idea applied to the field of medicine is what was the start of what is known today as the CAT scan. For this accomplishment, he, as well as Mr. Cormack, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1979. For Mr. Hounsfield, it was solely intrinsic motivation that triggered the start of this invention.

For Mr. Cormack the process was quite different. He was a part of the hospital environment to begin with, working in the radiology department at a local hospital as a part-time replacement. The hospital at which he was working at was concerned with the precision of the x-ray scanning's and presented Mr. Cormack with the assignment of figuring out a way to differentiate x-ray absorption to the various parts of the body. For Mr. Cormack much of the x-ray absorption issue was solved by the man who invented x-ray scans. Therefore from there Mr. Cormack came up with the idea that of triangulation of the x-ray scanning from multiple angles of the body would allow the scan to depict a detailed mapping of the inside of the body. He spent countless hours deriving a mathematical equation that would result in a perfect compilation of the x-ray scanning. Unlike Mr. Hounsfield, Mr. Cormack's start was an extrinsic motivation that was preserved through his intrinsic motivation to go beyond in solving the problem at hand.

https://www.decodedscience.org/ct-scan-computed-axial-tomography-cat-scan/772
http://www.imaginis.com/ct-scan/brief-history-of-ct
http://www.nytimes.com/1998/05/09/us/allan-cormack-74-nobelist-who-helped-invent-cat-scan.html
http://www.nndb.com/people/498/000131105/allan-m-cormack.jpg
https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1979/hounsfield-bio.html

https://www.providianmedical.com/blog/choose-the-best-ct-scanner-for-your-needs/

Kazuo Ishiguro: "Crashing" into Writing

“I apologize to Margaret Atwood that it's not her getting this prize.” British-Japanese author Kazuo Ishiguro told reporters after the announcement of his winning the 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature. Ishiguro, or Ish as he insists even strangers call him, is one of the most well acclaimed contemporary authors. His work has spanned genre and time from Remains of the Day the musings of a mid-century butler to Never Let Me Go a speculative science fiction piece to Buried Giant a fantasy work set in Arthurian Britain. Readers may be asking themselves what drives an author to create such varied work? They may wonder what is the process that goes into creating so many divergent worlds. Ishiguro explains his early process saying “I’d failed to make it as a musician. I’d had lots of appointments with A&R people. After two seconds, they’d say, It’s not going to happen, man. So I thought I’d have a go at a radio play.” For Ishiguro, a lot of his writing process comes from his experience with music, he to this day plays the guitar. He compares his writing intuition to music saying
Photograph by Francesco Guidicini/The Times/NI Syndication/Redux
A lot of decisions I make as a novelist have to be made intuitively. If you ask a jazz musician why Take One of the tenor sax solo is better than Take Two or Three, they’ll say, ‘Well, it sounds better.’ Because novelists use words, and words are also used for polemic and arguments, there’s a temptation to think we need to be able to justify everything intellectually.But I often rely on an intuition close to one musicians,composers, and painters use. The honest answer to why I do things a certain way is sometimes just that it sounds better. It can’t necessarily be backed up intellectually.” 
For Ishiguro the creative process and inspiration cannot be summed up simply, rather he draws cross medium analogies to help give a sense of what he is doing when he writes. This ability to draw connections across genres is a common aspect of creative individuals and is often cited in their process.

Aside from his early work, Ishiguro has spoken and written most extensively about the process in crafting his most famous work, Remains of the Day. The creation of Remains of the Day is notable because of Ishiguro’s utilization of a process which he calls “Crash”. Ishiguro describes this process in an article he published in the Guardian writing
I would do nothing but write from 9am to 10.30pm, Monday through Saturday. I’d get one hour off for lunch and two for dinner. I’d not see, let alone answer, any mail, and would not go near the phone…In this way, so we hoped, I’d not only complete more work quantitively, but reach a mental state in which my fictional world was more real to me than the actual one…Throughout the Crash, I wrote free-hand, not caring about the style or if something I wrote in the afternoon contradicted something I’d established in the story that morning. The priority was simply to get the ideas surfacing and growing. Awful sentences, hideous dialogue, scenes that went nowhere – I let them remain and ploughed on.” 
For Ishiguro, this “drastic approach” worked. He recalled that his most imaginative breakthroughs happened during “Crash”. He retrospectively notes that “I got lucky: the Crash came just at the right point, when I knew just enough.” Ishiguro’s “Crash” technique is a good example of what Csikszentmihalyi describes as creative flow. Flow is essentially the state of being colloquially “in the groove” it is when a creative person is swept up into the creative process. Creatives experiencing flow state do not consider outside distractions but only work on creation. Ishiguro’s “Crash” is an example of this because throughout this process he just wrote. He let the ideas just pour out of him and flow onto the page. During “Crash” Ishiguro committed himself wholly to uninhibitedly writing, he let his creativity flow.

Another one of his novels that Ishiguro has describes the writing process of is Buried Giant. Unlike Remains of the Day, Ishiguro did not sit for four-weeks and bang out a draft of this work. Rather there was a 6-year gap in the creation of this novel. He recalls showing his wife, and trusted critic and confidant, Lorna an early draft of the novel which she critiqued saying “This will not do, I don't mean you need to tweak it; you need to start from scratch. None of this can be seen by anybody.” This negative response caused Ishiguro to put down his work for more than half a decade. After his return to writing this novel, the final piece he produced was well received. Although this time around he did not show Lorna a draft until he had finished the novel. Ishiguro describes his own drafting process as “The first one is awful—really, really dull. I would not in a million years think this person had a future as a writer. Then there’s a second one, and that one is written more carefully, which makes it more embarrassing.” In describing the initial rejection that he experienced Ishiguro reveals the effect that the field has on his writing. Although he is clearly writing because he loves to do it, sometimes what he writes or when he writes is influenced by the field.

In creating all of his novels Ishiguro will work a space which he describes as
“just a small study, … It’s a bit like I imagine the Orient Express is; I’ve never been on it, but people say it’s quite comfy. You reach right around you and there’s everything you need. So I have my coffee here, within reach, and then two desks. One with a computer and one with the writing slope. I do a lot of work at the writing slope with a pen, and the other desk is mostly clerical.” 
Fiendish Faber (@FaberBooks). "Photo in Tweet".
10/5/2017, 6:17 am. Tweet.
He says that he keeps close track of the time he spends writing with “a little notepad with columns on it and I write down when I check in and when I check out of the study.” He keeps this time to work only roughly three hours per day on first drafts as he thinks working longer will detract from the quality. However, when editing Ishiguro will allow himself about six hours to work. Despite the stereotype of the hair-brained genius, his unique and highly disciplined work style is not unheard of for other creatives. Many other highly creative people are highly disciplined in the way they go about crafting their works.


Ishiguro’s work has received well deserved critical acclaim and it has even been made into several successful movies. As he continues to write readers will wait with baited breath to see which genre he will dabble in next. A truly an enigmatic creative of our time readers cannot wait to see where his creativity will take them. 

Bibliography 
Alter, Alexandra. "For Kazuo Ishiguro, 'The Buried Giant' is a Departure." The New York Times,

Hunnewell, Susannah. "Kazuo Ishiguro, The Art of Fiction No. 196." The Paris Review, 2008,

Ishiguro, Kazuo. "Kazuo Ishiguro: how I wrote The Remains of the Day in four weeks." The

Romero, Nick. "‘Call Me Ish’: How Kazuo Ishiguro Earned His Nobel Prize." Daily Beast, 5

Wood, Gaby. "Kazuo Ishiguro: 'There is a slightly chilly aspect to writing fiction'." The