Blogger: Janet Kobobel Grant
Location: Books & Such Main Office, Santa Rosa, Calif.
On the PBS News Hour, I recently saw a report on jazz legend Herbie Hancock, who talked about an especially memorable time he performed with his mentor Miles Davis. Herbie hit a wrong note–flat out wrong. He momentarily was devastated.
But then he realized that Miles had improvised on his instrument in a riff that made Herbie’s wrong note sound right. The notes Miles produced put the note in a context that suited what Herbie had played.
Herbie, in the interview, commented that Miles didn’t pass judgment on that note or think of it as wrong. Instead, he thought of it as an unusual choice and then improvised his way in a direction he wasn’t expected to go.
We’ve all heard about how debilitating it is to pass judgment on our own work, but how do we alter our thinking when we set aside our ideas of what’s right and what’s wrong? Is it wrong to write a novel in second person? Is it wrong to start your nonfiction book at the end rather than the beginning?
Okay, those are pretty crazy ideas, but maybe there’s a kernel of an idea in those questions that leads to a new way of seeing what you’re writing. Let’s not limit ourselves by right and wrong. We can always pull back from limitless thinking, but if we never venture there, we’ll not see anew.
I challenge my law students to ask “why not” as they work with clients to evaluate options for settlement. It’s an approach that works in many other areas of life- especially with children!
It may take me a while to fully wrap my mind around this post, but I already know I’ll be the better for it. 🙂 What a healthy perspective!
My brainstorming partner and I follow something we learned from the creative people at Disney. While brainstorming, there are no “bad” ideas. Everything thing is on the table. You can never tell when an idea, no matter how ridiculous, may jump start a great idea in a totally new direction.
We often use a cube with alphabet letters to jump start random ideas. Every idea has to begin with the letter we roll. It’s amazing how it gets the mind out of a rut.
The other thing that helps us is to insist on a lot of ideas. If ten ideas come quickly, then we force ourselves to go on to twenty. Forcing ourselves to come up with more, makes us venture into uncharted territory.
Such fun!
I love this. Amen.
(Travis Thrasher authored one of the few novels written in second person: Blinded. Fascinating and well done.)
This is beautiful. In the book Blink, Malcom Gladwell describes a corollary in acting… specificially in improv. He calls it the Principle of Agreement. In improvised drama, no matter what your partner throws at you, go with it. If she suggests surgery to add a second head, then figure out what’s next. Don’t argue. Don’t disagree, because that immediately stops the drama.
Maybe life works best that way.
Janet, I’m combining your comments from both yesterday and today to respond, because whether we are looking for the possibilities brought to the surface by a wrong note, or the strengths brought to the surface by the loss of a previous ability, both provide something similar to pressing in the clutch pedal before we can change gears. We cannot move into the new until see have lifted the drive train out of the old. When I was running long distances in high school, the coach taught us to drop our hands and let them dangle at our sides when we were ready to start our kick at the end of the race, because he said it was too difficult to bring both hands and feet up to a new speed at the same time. In the same way, we have to drop (or suffer being dropped) from our old patterns of doing things before we can see the possibilities in the new. The most interesting periods in the lives of Abraham Lincoln or Jimmy Carter might be the periods after they lost a congressional seat or a governor’s mansion. For each, it looked like the end of a political career. But something happened in those transition periods that turned them into stepping stones to the presidency. I’m glad I took the years to earn my MFA in creative writing, but as I move on from that, I find one of the benefits is that I can examine what I learned with the freedom to reject it. When Miles Davis followed the wrong note and made it right, he could do that because he had the training to understand what it meant, or could mean. Creativity is lived in the tension between the rules and the possibilities. I’m especially enjoying this series of posts, as I did last week’s with Etta.
Thanks to each of you for your input on how to press forward with creativity. What fascinating ideas!
Brian, I’m going to contemplate the visual of dropping my hands so my feet can move to a new speed. And ask myself what I could drop that would pick up the pace for me.
“Creativity is lived in the tension between the rules and the possibilities.”
Brian, I think you just authored a very quotable quotation. 🙂
Fascinating post, and liberating. I’m going to give this more thought. Thanks.