Post-It notes are my best friends.
We like to make things complicated.
Remember your first story or artistic masterpiece?
You made things complicated.
Big multi-syllabic words, multi-layered plots with more characters than the cups of coffee you drained at 2 AM when the Best Idea Ever nuzzled your brain. Lots of sketch work in non-photo blue, scraped because the design was supposed to be “just so” and currently they were 0.75 mm off the Epicentre Of Perfection.
Roald Dahl, the British author best known for Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, wrote down his ideas as questions no longer than a single line. One-liners like “How about a story where a boy finds a golden ticket?” became bestsellers due to Mr. Dahl’s inventive genius and commitment to his projects.
But we know all that.
What most don’t know is that Mr. Dahl didn’t record down all his Best Idea Evers. With a mind that sparks and somersaults, versatile in its depiction of the macabre and humorous and the ordinary and fantastical, the man must have gone through a spectrum of Eureka! moments before most people sat down for lunch.
Roald Dahl did not write down every idea, but the ideas he did write down stuck with him over the years.
“The ones I can’t forget,” he would say.
There is a lot of creative noise in our heads. How do we actively winnow out the bad noise from the good?
We don’t.
We set the pencil down, tuck away the blueprint, and be still.
If anyone has a time machine, please contact me yesterday.
I’m givin’ you a yay on this entry. I mean, very sensible. And I’m crazy about stick-on-notes. It’s my bestfriend too.
Aren’t post-it notes awesome? I often think I’m responsible for 50% of their sales.
Very thought provoking…
Thanks Millie!
Very welcome!
Awesome blog, full of insight! And I love the Roald Dahl references, very appropriate (and inspiring)! :)
Happy you enjoyed the Dahl references (give his Collected Stories a read if you get a chance), and thank you!
read them recently. they’re a hoot!
Reblogged this on perubahan10.
Sure!
I really enjoyed this post! Although, I do think it’s okay to follow some of the bad ideas. Especially when we’re first starting out, we have so much room to grow! It’s important for us to develop our skills by exploring the best of ideas and the worst of ideas. In that way we can better understand what makes a good story and characters.
Absolutely, Aly. Trial and error: without the bad ideas how can we recognize the good?
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Reblogged this on artfulhelix and commented:
Millie Ho has a very good point here. I have done this very thing on several projects. As creative minds we want things to be perfect, rather we are painting, writing, singing, designing, ext. But things don’t always turn out the way we intend, but that doesn’t mean its bad. Remember we are our own worst critics, and we tend to over complicate things.
great topic millie!
superb reminder to “be still.”
Thanks, Steven!
Yey for post-its! :D
Good one. Let me try.
Great!
Post it’s are really my best friends, they remind me of things and never talk back to me. But, wow! you took it to a whole new level LOL! :D
Interesting post, Millie!
I’ve long been a proponent of daily free writing (stream of consciousness) exercises as a part of the overall writing process.
Writing down EVERY idea doesn’t mean that you USE every idea in the projects you’re working on.
I think of free writing as something similar to Buddhist meditation. Through the practice of allowing that “creative noise” to flow without judgment or attachment, we eventually become better able to quiet the noise and focus on the present moment and the project at hand, tapping into the noise as a resource when, and only when, we choose to.
I think it was J.K Rowling who created 100+ pages of character background notes she would never put in her series, but just to get a sense of where everything was going.
I haven’t thought of it as a meditative process until you brought it up. Interesting, I’ll have to meditate on that.
Good post. Everybody needs their own creative process (for me, running is a big help), but I agree my best moments are achieved in mental stillness.
Running does help! A good quotation by Nikola Tesla: “No big laboratory is needed in which to think.”
Reblogged this on helensadornmentsblog and commented:
Thank you Millie for giving me permission to not attend to every idea spinning around in my head. I love the idea of letting stillness be our creative guide. Very Zen.
You’re welcome, Helen!
yay!
Some of my best moments have come when walking around. Which is why I bought a tiny notepad. Some of (what I would consider) my best things have come from 2 – 3 line poems madly scrambled down.
Still, lots of stuff in that little pad won’t see any development. But they are there, which is nice cause they could turn into something else.
I hope you continue to carry around your notepad!
A great post. Not the least since Roald Dahl is one of my favourite writers. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is awesome, but for me, it’s still his macabre short stories that gets me all excited. Anyway, I think you are so right, more is indeed less. And I tend to forget it all the time – I want to go more complicated thinking that it’s better. But it requires a genius to pull it out… Funny enough, I hardly ever use post-it, and I guess I forget a lot…
“Skin” and “Lamb To The Slaughter” from Roald Dahl’s short story anthology are indicative of that “certain genius”.
loved this…and I do ballooning thoughts…one huge balloon and then steam off with smaller balloons…excellent blog and work….Bev B
Thank you, Bev–I hope those balloons continue to bring works that “take off”!
This is so true – and true of design too. In my work (as a designer), it takes some considerable skill to pare things down, to achieve a satisfying simplicity. So much easier to make things complicated!
Thanks for your comment, Kasia! Seems like the current trend is simplicity, or a very “bare-bones” approach to functionality.
This article on the design of vases explains it better: http://www.fastcodesign.com/1669066/4-vases-reduced-to-their-barest-essentials
That’s it exactly! Great link.
I’m not sure we need to strip it down that much in writing, but sometimes it becomes unnecessarily complicated.
you’ve been nominated for the Versitile Blogger award (~_~)
http://zendictive.wordpress.com/2012/02/28/aesops-ass-versitile-sunshine/
You are kinda sort of a little remarkable.
As are you!
good advice..The ones I can’t forget; seems very true