Will Self: How To Be Creative

[Music] well welcome everyone um i always want to say good evening but it could be good morning or good afternoon depending on where you're tuning in from as we have people joining from all over the world but no matter where you are thank you for being here today we are joined by author professor and artistic polymath will self will is the author of 11 novels including shark and umbrella as well as seven short story collections and seven essay collections this live stream is an open window into the mind of one of the most inventive agile and celebrated creative figures at work today it is my pleasure to welcome will self well good evening one and all i don't know where you are i don't know what time it is for you uh it's early evening for me uh and and i have to say not the the most creative time in my day but i'll get back to that in a minute i'm gonna have to assume if you've tuned in for this talk that you have some interest in my creative methods uh because if you don't i don't quite know what you're doing here i i always find it particularly strange when i come into contact for example with creative writing students that they seem to have little engagement with what their teachers have actually written and you know a lot there are a lot of books and i i'm speaking primarily about creativity in language writing speaking this evening uh there are many different kinds of creativity and and i think i will touch upon some of the thinking and some of what i say will certainly be congruent with how people think about creativity in the plastic arts even how people think about creativity just generally in life or even in relation to technological or scientific fields but i'm primarily going to be concerned with with writing um i think that's fair in the sense that it's kind of difficult to for example sculpt about a novel or paint about a novel and we all know how dreary a lot of in classical music a lot of what is called program music can be so i think there's some it's reasonable that if you've tuned in you must be interested to some extent in my creative method the other point i wanted to make right at the top is that you know i don't want to er too far into the actual business of writing in terms of style or structure i think you know again if you're interested in somebody telling you how to develop a literary style or how to structure your writing or how to structure your works rather than how to find your creative wellspring that there are kind of numerous guides out there for you i mean i'm again i'm always rather slightly perplexed by them i remember doing a broadcast with stephen pinker the neuroscientist when he published a book on you know kind of how to write or how to write well and i thought well yeah quite fond of you stephen even though you're a kind of egregious pollyanna-ish figure but you know i don't really want to write like you you know so why would i read and the same goes for stephen king's famous kind of style guide and and numerous other kind of how to write novel guides which you know really are only going to tell you how to write a novel that might be written by the person who wrote the how to write the novel guide which seems a reductio ad nauseum so let's just talk about creativity because that's in a sense much more interesting and we have all sorts of ideas about what it is to be creative and and in a bit i'm going to talk about the distinction between being creative and being original which i think is a a different thing and there's a kind of bug bear really for anybody sitting down trying to be creative it's almost what gets in the way of creativity is thinking yeah am i going to be original at this or am i just tiredly retreading somebody else's creative formerly creative idea i'm gonna push that idea to one side i'm gonna reserve it as we say on cookery programs and return to it a bit later why be creative does it matter maybe we should just be uh think unreflectively and get on with our lives uh i think that the inception of the coronavirus pandemic of course has interrupted a lot of people's habitual uh uh go around and probably made people a lot more reflective because habit is an unreflective state so that throws us vis-a-vis the question of why be creative again i'm not really interested in addressing people who want to be creative in order to produce a product okay uh in order to produce a specific thing that that's their objective in a way and certainly i don't wish to address the problem of creativity as it were in relation to the creative industries a ghastly phrase that's employed by policy makers here in the uk when they want to you know uh reduce all of bad use categories cultural capital finance into financial capital cultural capital social capital just make it all commoditized and fungible in that way uh i i'm not really interested in that i'm interested you know in in people who want to be creative because they want to be free in essence i i think of creativity as freedom uh first and foremost i think of it as a way into feeling free uh i think you know the i always remember the kind of archetypal early meme which was some uh even before the web existed in some cartoon of somebody on the phone and then the things bubble says you know my body is in chains but my mind is still free and and i think that circumstance applies to us frankly in almost every area of our lives i think that we need creativity in order to exercise the only true liberty we have which is between our two ears and the greater creativity we can exercise the greater and more radical our sense of autonomy in that respect the other reason personally i'm interested in exercising my creativity is because for me it's a form of practice it's a fancy word for practice but a particular kind of of practice the kind of practice that engages with you with the world outside and indeed makes that world part of you and you part of that world it's a sort of counter-insemination your creativity allows the world to come in and impregnate you with all of its incredible stuff your senses your perceptions the free play of your ideas as provoked by those perceptions and you go out to the world you mix your imagination with the world by imagining things by leaping off from the world as given to the world as it might be the world is a temporal or a spatial counterfactual you start to make a bit of the world your own and again that enhances your sense of autonomy and hope hopefully your sense of liberty the analogy might be with john locke the philosopher's idea of primary accumulation which lies at the background of really uh the foundation of modern states the idea that if you mix the label your labor with the world you you know the farmer tills a patch of ground that patch of ground becomes theirs in some way so creativity is i think a way of being at home in the world as much as being free from the world's claims the claims of the nagging flesh some of us are differently abled some of us may be impaired perceptually and of course all of us have very different life circumstances it's just not comparable uh the state of mind as somebody who's kind of rich and powerful and the state of mind of somebody who is disempowered and poor but i think creativity is a way for one and all to enjoy the only real autonomy that's going okay how do we get to the business of being creative how do we work at being creative and it's been my job now for a very very long time to try and do just that well when i was at a university or if you're watching from the states college as you call it over there or indeed as young folk call it here now uni uh an abbreviation that reached us from australasia about 20 years ago what an attractive word it is when i was at uni uh some 40 years ago i studied the philosopher the scots philosopher david hume and he he makes a point about the imagination that has always stayed with me and that is that the imagination can be conceived of as a combinatorial function so he said hume said there's nothing that extraordinary about the notion of a mountain it's commonplace enough we know what a mountain is it's a you know an uprising of the land into an eminence of some sort often with a peak or rounded into a hill and there's nothing that extraordinary hume says uh about the notion of gold we're familiar with the notion of gold we know what gold is uh some with our gold teeth and that one's gone that one might still be there i sold that one okay put them together and you have a gold mountain and that's a rather extraordinary and miraculous thing and can stand in its own way for the alchemical transformation that comes about simply by the combining and recombining of disparate images ideas and concepts so i challenge you that the first way of thinking about your imagination is to think of it like a series of dials in a fruit machine but huge dials printed with many many different words many many different concepts many many different ideas many many different sense impressions tastes you know things you've heard maybe been printed with many many metaphors let's spin them all let's see how they line up do we get a gold mounted do we get something that's interesting do we get something that we think we can work with i would argue that taking this combinatorial view the job of the creative person or the task of the creative person who wishes to be creative is constantly to seek the combination and the recombination of disparate ideas impressions and concepts to keep them rotating to compete and combining and to keep observing within oneself the free interplay of these ideas and impressions you know we can go back to the romantics we can go back to wordsworth discussing uh you know or coming up with this phrase for the idea of his own artistic process uh emotion recollected in tranquility had to have the emotions to begin with and you might be a little damning about our own age and again i'll return to this in due course and say that the signal uh methods of expression in our own age which are the so-called social media uh uh offer the exact opposite of that if if the writer if the artist the poet even the practitioner of the plastic arts is seeking to recollect feelings ideas impressions that combinations in tranquility then the social media ask us to invent our emotions in spontaneity which is why of course they're full of partisanship bigotry bile knee-jerk reactions and very little poetry um so the combinatorial constantly running in the background of the creative person's mind it becomes a complete habit you are it comes a habit in itself and that's where i'm going to end up of course you've already seen where i'm going the constant habit of combining these things is bolstered bye you guessed it discipline and you knew i'd get there quite quickly the old adage the old tedious saw horse whatever it is 97 perspiration three percent inspiration i'm not really interested in the inspiration at all if i'm frank i'm really not interested the inspiration is always exposed facto it occurs after the fact of having made the unusual combination you can't see the inspiration before you've made the combination and and remember all inspiration is divine so if you're a believer and you think that god or gods is able to communicate with you and give you what they call in french the donae the essence of a work of creative art in that way then all power to you those of us in the uh agnostic fraternity are waiting for that to happen but we're not especially confident that it ever necessarily will so what we do is in lieu of god we have a notebook i don't like to sort of lean on modish arguments from neuroscience but this is one that i do like quite a lot you basically have three minutes of short-term memory and you'll know this intuitively to be true if you think about it for a minute you're all interested in creativity so you've all had this experience already you've thought up a little apesu a metaphor image an idea line a gag and you've thought to yourself that's great i must note that down and for one reason or another the phone rings your bath needs to be the taps need to be stopped or whatever it is the kettle boils you don't do it and then it's gone it's gone forever as well you have that awful sense of security that you have when you see a new building in the city and realize you can no longer remember what was there before you know that you have irretrievably lost a little idea that certainly was creative and might well have been original so every creative person should have one of these and every creative person or person who wants to be creative should have it with them all the time and i mean all the time waking or sleeping or whenever so we're already on to the tedious business of perspiration and you may well be thinking to yourself this isn't what i necessarily tuned in for but in a way you did if you want to be creative this is the way that i've done it and just to give you an example you know i went through the pages of this my latest notebook uh this afternoon that's the last page i did before speaking to you and i've also rootled in my boxes to show you what's gone before my uh literary papers are actually held in the british library and i make regular deposits to them every two or three years so these are the notebooks since my last deposit at the british library so you can see this is about three years worth of notebooks during that period i've written uh two books i'd say and probably anything between up to a quarter of a million words of journalism uh short fiction essays etc so the notebooks have to fuel all of that for myself i think there's a weird kind of promiscuity that actually happens on the page that you can actually get these ideas to kind of talk to each other if you put them down you think well this is something that relates to an idea for a ceramic design on a plate but this is a joke that i want to tell to one of my children and this is a couplet that might go in a poem uh i even you know i used to to work as a cartoonist to some extent so i can't think of any in this particular notebook but i sometimes draw cartoons in the notebook as well and i think that there's a kind of miscegenation between these forms and ideas that occurs on the page just going over this notebook i came across these notes in the last couple of pages i also use it of course as a commonplace book and i'll return to that i note down quotations from stuff i've been reading and stuff that interests me so here are some of the things in the last couple of pages i've noted down a quote from james lovelock's book gaia very important and significant in the light of the current climate emergency i'm particularly interested that he uses the pronoun uh the plural pronoun there to refer to the biota so he thinks the biota is a there uh he wrote that book originally in the early 1970s so i'm thinking is this a forerunner of the idea of as it were impersonal personal pronouns or at any rate non-gendered non-binary gendered personal pronouns does it go back to the gaia hypothesis underneath that uh i've got a quote from something else that reminds me uh she's also from lovelock he's got a little bit about how uh wallpaper in the 19th century was treated with arsenic to give it a particular greenish color the people are actually poisoned by their own wallpaper and i related that in my notebook to walter benjamin's observation in a piece he wrote about how the middle class interior of the 19th century came into being at the same time as detective fiction so you know if you think some of the one of the first detective stories was edgar allan poe's the purloined letter or the murders in the room org the pearline letter of course hinges on furniture middle class furniture the letter is purloined from an escritoir and benjamin makes the point the middle class interior shivers into being as the site of a murder and of course there's the arsenical wallpaper could be used to commit the ultimate benjaminian murder in the interior i've got an idea for a short story uh i was thinking about a friend of mine a writer i won't tell you who it is who always goes on at me about the asperity of his own prose style that it uses very few adjectives let alone you know adverbs of metaphors god forbid and i was thinking of writing a short story about how he pairs his prose style down and down and down and down in a rather sort of baketian way until he's only able to produce one perfectly lucid word and again maybe hearkening back to thinking about edgar allan poe wrote a story called the man of the crowd i was thinking of calling this story the man with one word i've got a quote from so sure the founding father of linguist about how voices vary on the telephone but you can identify despite the the kind of queered problematics for phone call you can identify people by voice very quickly so i've got a note about that you

Channel: How To Academy

Views: 14,652

Keywords: will self, willself, creative, creativity, creation, writing, artistic, art, tutorial, inspiration, create, write, literature, novels, artistry, imagination, imagine, creative journey, inspiring, artistic inspiration, writer's block, writersblock, writers block, short story, dedication, how to write, dialogue, howtowrite, creative masterclass, writing masterclass

Id: MbR_b0DZnh4

Length: 20min 56sec (1256 seconds)

Published: Fri May 14 2021