8 Clicks from Nowhere ䷀

Dispatches ⌂

Category: [14] Past & Present

Reclaiming tradition and making your own, randomness and ritual at the heart of creativity.

Chapter List

  • Rolling Randomness

    Back before AI could gurgle out a list of spit-polished ideas replete with some sycophantic grovelling towards our imminent greatness, I was in love with random idea generators.

    Don’t confuse one with the other.

    AI makes ideas by stringing together patterns that make sense.

    Idea generators are the Frankenstein-esque cobbling together of digital randomizers and curious arrays of word-bytes that when triggered result in a mad-lib-style shuffling of the input data towards an often nonsensical list of results. There is no intention. Only chance.

    “Write A ROMANTIC DRAMA about A FISH set in HISTORICAL ROME.”

    “Write A SCIENCE FANTASY about A BARISTA set in A SANATORIUM.”

    “Write AN EPIC POEM about LOST KEYS set in A FAST FOOD KITCHEN.”

    I wrote my fair share of these generators.  The code behind them was simple: a couple data arrays chock full of verbs and nouns and settings and styles, a random number generator, and some user interface bits. It was all coding spare change compared to the corporate-billion budgets of modern AI systems that barf out polished gems of inspiration that could never match the lightweight brilliance of a digital dice roll.

    Creativity, I think, often emerges from serendipity. Something amazing and unique can tumble out of our brains when we trigger those brains with curious nonsense.

    I have asked AI for ideas, nudged it to brainstorm, and it comes back with clever concepts, sure. But none of it stacks as a trigger for the weirdest flights of my imagination compared to the raw random indulgence of a simple idea generator.

    I think maybe the more we extract ourselves, remove our humanity, from the process the more boring the final result—and rolling dice, digital or otherwise, is just random enough to preserve our involvement in the loop.

    Try my randomizer:

    A search-and-rescue volunteer is certain the forgotten mountain research lab holds the answer, until the encrypted pick up truck reveals it already happened, and everything since has been the cover-up.

  • Past Present

    Over and over I stumble across advice for creativity.  Heck, it’s the basis of this writing project, isn’t it? Here’s what has worked for me, for others, for everyone else in the past, present and certainly will do in the future, too.

    Right?

    And the smart money, the guy who wants this site to be successful and to captivate you and to hold your attention would tell you that there are answers buried inside if you read deeply enough.

    The honest guy would tell you that creativity is just like any other job. You get out what you put in, and the effort pays off when you do the work.

    The fuzzy spaces between, though, are filled with an endless doubting void that slurps up every bit of advice, superstition, ritual, inspiration, and randomness distilled from the universe as possible.

    I’m just the guy sitting here telling you to embrace that uncertainty.

    Look at the advice.

    But also find your own way.

    Do the work.

    But embrace the chaos.

    Dig into ideas that shift your mind, body, and soul to new perspectives.

    But ride the efforts of a billion people who have gone this way before you.

    Under the category of Past & Present, I’ll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.

  • Green Echoes

    I went to the park to sketch the other day. It was a whim. I wasn’t planning it, but the moment arose and I grabbed onto it. 

    I got there, set up, and pulled my collection of pens from my bag.

    All but one pen was dry.

    And the only pen that was not dry was a thick, green-inked brush pen.

    Let me add to this tale of artistic frustration that my pen of choice is usually a black ink fine-liner. This is pretty much the opposite of that is a clunky green ink shading pen—a pen that I really only brought along because I thought I might get bold enough to add a splash of colour to my spring-inspired sketch, whatever that might have been.

    Yet there I was, sitting in the park having added a few lines of black to the page before the blank ink fully failed and, well, I needed to finish the sketch.

    Art, I truly believe, is as much story as it is product. The best art, the best photos, the best music, and the best anything is threaded through with an artistic narrative that gives it meaning beyond the final product. Polishing a perfect piece of art that has no story behind it may work for adding commercial value, but artistic value?

    Less so. Arguably.

    Admittedly, the story of my dried up pen collection is not the best story, and my minor inconvenience is hardly a tale of hardship worthy of the ages… but the story of why I now have a clunky sketch made with a green-hued felt brush in my sketchbook is arguably better than the sketch itself. 

    That alone is worth it.

  • Doodling Inspiration Branch · Part 2

    Once I get past the idea of seeking quality in my art, I often find that doodling is a kind of meditative randomness that drives me creatively.

    Doodling is different than drawing, of course. Drawing and sketching in my mind implies an external subject, and turning what one sees into lines and colour on the page. Sketching is the act of replacing a camera with a bit of ink or pencil lead. 

    Doodling, on the other hand, is the freedom of the pen on paper to explore shapes and express notions that are mere thoughts in our own heads. It is generative. It is creation from ideation into shape and form upon a blank canvas. It is something from the intangible and ineffable. It is an outlet for our deepest minds to express themselves. 

    I have been re-reading The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes[1], a controversial book of pop psychological theory that speculates that consciousness arose from the conversation that happens inside our own minds between the two lobes our our brain. 

    Whether you buy it or not, its central premise of Jaynes’ book relies on the notion of two plus two equalling five: or that is to say, that the union of two things is often more than the sum of its parts. 

    In as much as my doodles combine with my fiction writing to make more than the sum of their parts, a mental creative union of something perhaps just as curious and interesting as consciousness itself, no?

  • No Dice

    Among the first question I assume you have asked (or wanted to ask) of anyone attempting to write a daily mini-essay (like this) is where do all the ideas come from?

    It’s no easy thing to think of something reasonably new and at least a little interesting to write about every day.  I will admit that, sure, I only post five days a week, Monday to Friday, but still: that is about twenty posts per month, and at least four thousand words spread across around five entries uploaded like clockwork each weekday.

    Brainstorming is key.

    I have written in the past about going for walks with a notepad, or sitting at the window in the cafe pondering the world while I wait for the sparks of imagination to ignite.  This month I tried something new: story dice[1].

    If you are a creative writer no doubt you’ve seen these, maybe even own these. Dice with pictograms on the side that are meant to help authors come up with fictional story plots.  But here’s the thing: I have found, strangely enough, that the little icons on each face of each die is abstract enough that rolling three or four fresh cubes gives just the right boost to my imagination, primed by the topics of this project, to spark a few solid ‘X meets Y in the context of Z’ points into my digital brainstorming notebook.

    In fact, at least a dozen of the posts you’ll likely read in April spawned out of this random rolling of inspirational fate. So I suppose then that ideas, with the right tool and mindset, can come from pretty much anywhere.