By Joe Frey

I love movies depicting scenes when an artist or, especially, a writer is working. Inevitably, the creative type is staring blankly out into a void, often with a pained and tortured expression. Then suddenly, as if overcome by an indigestion relief-inducing belch, the aspect brightens, the head lowers and the masterpiece is propelled outwards as effortlessly as foul, trapped air escaping the esophagus. Creativity, however, is not a function of reverse peristalsis.

In any endeavor – from the invention of the wheel to the painting of [insert the name of your favorite masterpiece here] to banging out ad copy to mapping a shortcut home from your uncle’s lake cabin – creativity is, as I define it, nothing more than the deceptively complicated act of establishing relationships between things or ideas that up to that point have yet to be perceived. For a writer, that act involves putting in unique order twenty-six characters to express these relationships. A photographer limits our vision in a confined frame, juxtaposing elements in the corporeal world to reveal the relationships he or she sees, feels and creates. And a mime endeavors to, well…Okay. Every theory has its gaps, from evolution to the unified field theory to letting the pitcher swing away with two strikes, one out and a man on first. Regardless, creativity ain’t, as they say, rocket science.

So that’s what creativity is. How it happens, that’s another kettle of fish entirely.

Inspiration is the easy answer, a kind of Sir Edmund Hillary “Because it’s there” compulsion. I’ve experienced such unmitigated, unbridled drive myself. In a five-year frenzy of not-since experienced productivity, I wrote three novels of over 100,000 words each. (The fact that the agent who then represented me couldn’t find a publisher is beside the point.) It was a sickness. I couldn’t not write. It was something I had to do, an addiction that took precedence over every other aspect of my life, a mental illness. You think I’m kidding?

Findings in a Stanford University study showed “that creative people tend to share more personality traits with the mentally ill than they do with the middle-of-the-road masses,” according to a 2002 Reuters article about the study (http://www.namiscc.org/Research/2002/Creativity.htm). This just confirmed what my wife had long suspected after years of living with me. Connie M. Strong, who co-authored the study with Dr. Terence A. Ketter, was quoted as saying, “Both bipolar disorder and creativity probably are genetically driven, and may be related to the same set of genetic predispositions.” If this is indeed so, Strong takes the next leap of logic: “It makes sense that they are two potential outcomes of a shared predisposition.” (For a frightening firsthand account of this duality, pick up Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness by William Styron.)

In an attempt to put a pretty face on such torture, the ancient Greeks cooked up the Muses, an act that surely must have revealed the absurdity of attributing creativity to a coven of comely tarts hanging on the arms of poets, historians, mathematicians, dramatists, dancers, musicians and astronomers, all of whom had to know better. Monkeys on the back would have been a more credible myth.

So obviously, “inspiration” is not a practical and predictable system for generating creativity reliably, especially for those working and freelancing in creative fields, those whose very livelihoods depend on producing on demand. Yet it takes not just a modicum of madness to willingly confront the scariest thing in all the world, that being a blank sheet of paper, an empty canvas. They are infinite voids, and it is impossible to create something out of nothing. Something has to be introduced into the void to result in anything, good or bad. Inspiration like that described above is a kind of chaos theory of creativity. Sure it can work, but you can’t count on it. More reliable is, with apologies to George Orwell, a sort of freedom through slavery system. It’s not as bad as it sounds.

All it means is that defining the limits of what is to be produced suddenly provides an object for the creativity. And once those limits have been delineated, the possibilities are infinite, in a Zeno’s Paradox kind of way. (Take a distance between any two fixed points. There are an infinite number of points between them. Now half that distance. There are an infinite number of points between them, too. Then half that distance, then half that…) It’s analogous to a painting’s composition, which is essentially the artist imposing the same freedom through slavery on the viewer. How a painting is composed is the artist’s way of saying “Hey, dummy. Look over here.” To create the painting, the artist of course had to first to tell himself that – or have had someone else tell him. And just as there are infinite possibilities for the painter once the limits of the creation have been defined, there are, in great works, infinite possibilities in the piece for the viewer as well.

Now, the something brought into this nothing can certainly be self-imposed. To prepare to write my novels, I would pick out people on the bus home from work and write vignettes about them. (Creepy, I admit.) I don’t, however, call this inspiration. It was an assignment I gave myself. Examine what most people call inspiration and you will discover that the source was external. (Artists who understand this aren’t any less artistic than those who don’t; they’re just more honest.)

Still don’t get it? Here’s a mundane, everyday example. When someone innocuously greets you with “How are you?” you more than likely respond with an inane “Fine.” If, on the other hand, the same person in exactly the same circumstances greets you then asks a direct question, say “Can you believe Paris Hilton gets more news coverage than the war in Iraq?” then you have something to talk about. Freedom through slavery is just like that. Q.E.D.

But there’s a second, just as important element to this pragmatic system, explained succinctly by something Count Basie said: “I don’t need time. What I need is a deadline.” No, there’s nothing like a looming deadline to get those creative juices flowing. Ask any procrastinating college student, any reporter trying to make the next edition, any freelancer facing the prospect of an unpaid invoice.
In a way, these two things combine to create a practical, virtual patron of the arts, like the Medicis. Lorenzo de Medici told Michelangelo what to paint, paid him handsomely for it and called him every other week to see how he was coming along – until he felt Mike was slacking off, then the contacts became increasingly frequent “Aren’t you done yet?” badgering. (These scenes were cut from The Agony and the Ecstasy. But then the patron was the Pope.)

Alas, few artists are so lucky to have patrons today; they have clients instead. So while my patented S & D SystemTM may be less refined, it is at least a reliable way to generate creativity on demand, and for profit. This short piece is a perfect example.

I wasn’t staring blankly at my monitor like a scene-eating Charlton Heston on his back atop a scaffold in the Sistine Chapel until I thought, “That’s it! I’ll write about creativity.” No. My muse/patron/client was the producer of this website, who called and said, as perfunctorily as if he were ordering a Big Mac at the drive-thru, “I want around a thousand words about generating creativity, and I need it in two weeks.” That was it. I had been given my slave duty and my deadline; creativity ensued.