My life as a guru
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students lining up to ask me questions. They were great!
Last night I had the immense pleasure to be on a Zoom call with Gary Gute and his students at the University of Northern Iowa. Why? Prof. Gute is using Lichtenbergianism: procrastination as a creative strategy as a text in his course, The Creative Experience. (His wife uses it in her section of their course Creativity and the Evolution of Culture.) He wanted me to chat with the students and answer their questions about the creative process.
Well, I mean to say, what?
The students, in Gary’s words, “are studying and experiencing creativity where it is happening in our midst and then building a creativity celebration for the entire community.” Isn’t that amazing? (Even more amazing is that I’ve been lumped in with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi as part of the philosophical framework of the course.)
Y’all, it’s a bit overwhelming to find that there are people out there who have found my book helpful, useful, or even mind-blowing. As I say up front (p. 7), none of what I propose in the book is new or ground-breaking; every book on the creative process says exactly the same things, if framed differently.
So I got to play guru last night as these college kids asked some really good — and really hard — questions. I’ll recap three of them. (Apologies, students: I promised myself I’d take notes on names, etc., but I failed.)
Do you consider any of the Precepts to be the most important one?
I had actually thought of this before, so it was easier than a couple of questions they threw at me: ABORTIVE ATTEMPTS. If you don’t get the thing started, you’re not going to finish it.
I rambled a bit about projects that I had made multiple attempts to start. I talked about my practice, when composing, of plopping something — anything — down, then skipping a couple of measures and starting a new ABORTIVE ATTEMPT. I showed them a printout of a parable I’ve been working on for a couple of weeks now for my personal blog, and how the page was half scratched out and the entire structure of the piece had changed — and how I couldn’t have solved the problem without first getting the thing out of my head.
Have you come across any other ideas since writing the book that you have found helpful in your process?
You can buy this t-shirt. Just click on it.
This one took me aback. Mostly, in the six years since the book was published, I have found confirmation and corroboration of the Precepts. But as luck would have it, I was wearing my REMEMBER TO ROMP t-shirt, so I riffed on the idea that you should be able to derive joy from what you’re working on it. I’m not sure that’s what you get from my blog posts when I’m composing, but it’s true.
(As I am writing this, I am reminded of one concept I’ve come up with and which I should have mentioned: shinyperfect.)
I have a hard time setting aside a project to work on something else. I feel guilty that I’m not working on it.
Such an earnest question, and one that I should have prefaced my answer to with a disclaimer that Lichtenbergianism and its Precepts are not a rigid, prescriptive system. No one says you must set aside a project to work on something else. It’s just a way to give projects a chance to breathe while you figure out the next step.
My actual words of wisdom were that it means the project is still valid and that it’s ready for you to return to it when you can. That’s the whole point of TASK AVOIDANCE.
As I said, the session was great fun. I want to hear more about the projects the students are working on; Gary has promised to send me video links. And to top it all off, he wants to find funding to bring me out to Iowa in the future. Now my mind is blown.
