Continued from an earlier post: Doodling Inspiration (Part 1)

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?

As I start out to wrap my head around the roots and purposes of creativity inside this little site I could not help but look back to the very beginning of the individual journey we each take. After all, by training I am a biologist and walking in perpetual lockstep with the core idea that development and childhood is intrinsically linked to both developmental purpose and evolutionary advantage. I don’t have the research chops or educational bonafides to dig into this in any scientific way, but it certainly seems to shade my approach to how I think about the play-like creativity that paints and colours the life of many (if not most) modern children in the western world. 

Was it something about the opportunity youth presents or maybe the lack of structured limitations yet to be learned until later in life? Perhaps the notion of the creativity of youth is entangled with the lack of social expectations to be productive, make money, or have a formal role in this consumer-driven society. Maybe there really is an evolutionary and developmental aspect to kid seeming to be more creative (if generally less skilled at those creative pursuits) that has already been studied and I can unravel with deeper thinking and reading about it. Or it simply may be that my bias is glaring through the window of western privilege and the notion that kids are creative at all is wrapped around a generous interpretation of personal observation. 

Who can say?

Under the category of Toys & Tots, I’lll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.

I am far from a breakthrough, but after two full evenings of creative musical play following the so-called completion of my musical set up, I have learned the rawest of basics about my tools.

A looper pedal, an effects pedal, a synth, and a recorder.

Creative play is never meant to be shared, but as with many of my other creative endeavours in art, fiction, photography, and beyond, I enjoy the act of documenting progress no matter how unpolished.

The final step of creativity after all is performance and exhibition of the effort, and to fear such things is not a failing, no, but it is a shame.

Here is what I created on my first two nights of kitted synth exploration. It is a mess, but it is interesting.

MP3: Zero One Zero

…a soundscape

See you in February.

Call it practice.

Call it production.

Whatever it is, it was me attempting to create something from a skill that has never really been in my wheelhouse: reading aloud.

Like any new-ish or re-visited skill that needs polishing, I have found that the best thing to do is just to do it… and be open to self-reflecting on the effort.

Asking yourself: How can I make this better?

Fighting the urge to doubt that progress is being made or to quit outright.

I felt both, but I persevered and gave myself an impromptu reading lesson, all while building the pieces of a project that I’m excited to move incrementally forward.

I drove the kid to the community recreation centre this evening and, if only because I pulled a muscle in my back and need to rest it, I brought my computer instead of my own gym gear.

Usually I come to this building to literally work out my body. I run on the track or do some cycling training on the bike, or do a few sets on the weight machines. I’m not claiming to be a gym nut of any kind, but I do a lot of thinking (and even writing) about the work it takes to keep your body—lungs, heart, muscles, and all of it—in shape.

Tonight, I’m sitting here with my computer doing some writing.

I just dropped another five hundred words into my work-in-progress novel.

Now I’m writing this little ditty. 

I’m working out my creativity tonight, doing reps on the keyboard, which is arguably an important part of keeping that kind-of but-not-really a muscle in shape.

I won’t claim to be breaking much of a sweat, but it’s hard work and dedication just the same.

I want to make an audio story.

Back as far a my university days I had it in my mind to try to make an audio drama in the style of H2G2^[1] or Ruby^[2].  

I went about it completely backwards, of course, trying to improv a script while learning all the audio tools. I would get five minutes of groovy sound effects wrapped around a nothing script and then quit because I had never done any planning. I was using borrowed sounds and music in free software I had very little knowledge of how to use and making up a science fiction story on the fly. It was a recipe to accomplish nothing—except maybe learn from my mistakes.

So I’ve been working on a story first.

But also…

In the last couple years I have built on the knowledge I had around music theory and audio software and have started to learn the basics of music production. I have been acquiring the tools—mics, synths, mixers, recorders, and recently an effects pedal—to produce my own soundscapes. 

And? This week I actually wrote a song. Well… actually the technical term is called a leitmotif. It is the basic building block of a recurring musical theme tied to a character, place, group, or whatever. And… I wrote one.

Branched · Part 1 Continued in Doodling Inspiration (Part 2)

A huge part of my creative process as I work on a new novel has been sketching.

I assume lots of authors, the kind who are also meticulous planners, make notes. I make notes, too, but I have also been using a form of visual note taking. 

It works like this.

I open up the next blank spread in my sketchbook, I write the chapter name somewhere central on the page, and then I start sketching out something that is a cross between a vision board and an idea chart on that page. I include sketches of characters introduced in that chapter. I sketch out objects that make appearances in the scene. I sketch the facade of the building or the stuff hanging on the walls or the grove of trees that I think I might want to mention somewhere in the story. 

The result is that as I then go to write the chapter itself, I have not just my plan and the words that describe what I plan to write about, but I also have this rough collection of doodles and drawings that spark more connections and drive my writing forward.

I can’t tell you how well it will ultimately work for me because it is a new thing I am trying, but so far it seems to be inking out strong inspiration every day.

I broke out a fresh sketch book, I gave myself a few basic constraints, and I drew one sketch for each day in October.

Can you guess how many of those sketches were amazing?

Basically none.

Sure, there were a few solid works and I even shared a half dozen of them. But if I was seeking perfectionism—or worse, waiting for it to even get started on my artist journey—I would have drawn one thing on October first …and then very likely given up.

Instead, I embraced it as an incremental effort of modest improvement.  The goal wasn’t to create thirty-one great sketches, no, the goal was to sketch thirty-one times.

The goal wasn’t fame or a viral drawing or something I could sell. The goal was creating on a routine.

It’s easy to aim too high. It’s easy to think that anything and everything we create should be a final, salable product to hold up to the whole world for judgement.

It’s actually pretty tough to recognize that almost everything we make should start off as something just for our own selves and maybe never become more than that.