12. Creation Is Embarrassing
And I Intend to Prove It!
(Music composed by Philip Glass)
At the beginning, people didn’t think I knew anything. —Philip Glass
When people say they are blocked, what do they mean? It’s a metaphorical concept. Something is in the way, some logjam, stopping them from writing or from writing effectively. It’s a catch-all statement, a non-answer standing in for the various vaguely defined causes of the problem. You could feel uninspired, anxious, or traumatized, maybe because of a past drill sergeant teacher armed with a bright, red pen. It could be because of a million other things at home, in school, or at work, places where you may have acquired an anxiety-related aversion to risk and a fear of embarrassment. Being creative is full of very real risks. The problem is, to do creative things, you have to be willing to take those risks. You have to be willing to sound stupid.
This is one of the main tools in my skill set! I made peace with that long ago.
Isaac Asimov says creativity is “the same in all its branches and varieties.” I’ve noticed this since the days when I decided to search “far away horizontally or at great vertical height or depth” while trying to find insights that might help me understand writing and teaching more clearly. Whether in the arts or sciences, similar language and principles keep resurfacing, including the idea that how creative things are accomplished is hard to define. However, there are overlapping approaches and mindsets that seem to bear fruit. Echoing what we saw from Lang about origami designers and Adams in Conceptual Blockbusting, Asimov says that the “method of generation is never clear even to the ‘generators’ themselves”—maybe especially to them—but he identified some qualities to help guide us.
Asimov gave a talk* to MIT scientists who wanted to find ways to be more innovative. The ability to make comparisons between unlike things is key, says Asimov. We need “people making a connection between item 1 and item 2 which might not ordinarily seem connected.” (Maybe my two-year-old was onto something!) This kind of “cross-connection” leads to outside-the-dots, trees-like-broccoli moments. And like with the 9-Dot problem, something that may have eluded you now makes you smack your head and wonder how you missed it. Says Asimov, “Once the cross-connection has been made, it becomes obvious.”
For instance, look at the obvious puzzle pieces of Africa and South America from the world map staring everyone in the face for centuries before anyone asked if continents could move. “It requires a certain daring,” says Asimov, to say such things out loud. The same applies to heliocentrism, glacial theory, and so many other superseding ideas. But geocentrism and catastrophism make so much sense, everyone thought. Asimov says, “It is only afterwards that a new idea seems reasonable.”
We don’t want to be perceived as stupid, foolish, or unreasonable, but those with creative aspirations have to learn to let that go. I do my best with this, and though I have developed calluses in this department, I confess that every time I press the publish button here, it stresses me out. That one’s a little too out there, I think. No one will get it. It’s probably stupid. I also fear I might miss typos (almost always) or other mistakes or want to change something important after the fact. As Asimov stresses, “Creation is embarrassing,” so, in a way, that reassures me because the essential nature of this principle is now a part of me, a Lang-like pathway that I’ve developed through taking risks over time. This is not to say that everything I’ve put out there over the years stands up. Far from it. But sometimes I’m like, Damn, where did that come from? Such moments could not have happened without the existence of the other kind. In my mind, that’s a fair deal, one well worth the risks.
Being unconventional is not something society values, yet according to Asimov, that’s what we should be looking for and cultivating. The “person who is most likely to get new ideas,” he says, “is a person of good background in the field of interest and one who is unconventional in his habits.”
It’s not enough, though, to be unconventional and to be able to make cross-connections; you need collaboration, too. Asimov says,
No two people exactly duplicate each other’s mental stores of items. One person may know A and not B, another may know B and not A, and either knowing A and B, both may get the idea—though not necessarily at once or even soon.
Furthermore, the information may not only be of individual items A and B, but even of combinations such as A-B, which in themselves are not significant. However, if one person mentions the unusual combination of A-B and another the unusual combination A-C, it may well be that the combination A-B-C, which neither has thought of separately, may yield an answer.
Not just any kind of collaboration will do. With the risks involved, for groups to function like this and be productive, it needs to be safe to be unreasonable, “There must be ease, relaxation, a general sense of permissiveness,” Asimov says, so those involved will “have the feeling that others won’t object.” There can be no oneupmanship, no online commenter-like takedowns, and no mansplaining. I imagine it more like walks in the woods with Mr. Feynman.
Asimov says that since great ideas usually come from “people who weren’t paid to have great ideas, but were paid to be teachers or patent clerks or petty officials, or weren’t paid at all,” many great ideas “came as side issues” arising from bull sessions and cross-connections and accidents. For this to work in groups, not only does there need to be Feynman’s “no pressure, just lovely, interesting discussions” where you’re free to make wild speculations, but there needs to be a Mr. Feynman-like facilitator or someone like my teacher in that long-ago seminar who asks “the right questions” and otherwise interferes “as little as possible.”
Writers need to be willing to sound foolish but to go along with this, they also need others who recognize this enough to be willing to allow the benefit of the doubt. If you’ve experienced the opposite in school, at work, or elsewhere (and haven’t we all?), a healthy hesitancy about offering up anything outside the dots is understandable and tends to linger. This fear of embarrassment may be one reason you might feel blocked or uninspired. It takes practice, but sometimes you must cultivate your inner badass. Put on your IDGAF sweatshirt, as some of the 9-dot puzzle solvers did, and go wild. Try to find others who will cheer this on.
Asimov’s principles for generating new ideas were at the heart of every course I taught even before I read his talk because I’d encountered similar things with Feynman and others. Asimov shows there are identifiable moves that creative people make. Such innovators hold similar mindsets no matter their discipline. Wouldn’t such approaches apply to teaching writing? What are we trying to do when we write if we are not hoping to find ways to break new ground? If we are not teaching that, then what exactly are we teaching?
Using this approach with my students accomplished several things, including breaking down their preconceived notions about what writing is and how it’s done. When ideas about writing change, writing changes. Also, through teaching one of writing’s most alluring qualities—its ability to surprise you—we are offering students an opportunity to like it, not just endure it. At the same time, when I saw what my students wrote and how they responded to these principles, it taught me more about writing than I ever learned in a writing class.
Okay, I’m going to press that button now. Wish me luck.
Philip Glass, “a person of good background in the field of interest and one who is unconventional in his habits.”
Notes
Next, we’ll look at a student whose wrong and “embarrassing” answer Asimov would surely admire because it changed the experts’ minds. Later, we will examine many more unreasonable yet great ideas.
*Asimov, “How Do People Get New Ideas?”