collect, smash, reforge
“Your job is to collect good ideas. The more good ideas you collect, the more you can choose from to be influenced by”
I wrote my book at the beginning of last year. It was thrilling to have a sense of mission and I throughly enjoyed the writing process. I felt like my mind was on fire and I could write for hours, new ideas, memories and fragments would come to me at all hours and I'd note them before they'd disappear. Then fleshing each of them out was easy as I had so much choice and so much to say. If one didn't speak to me that day, I'd pick another.
Paul Jun says, 'To go to bed with a parade of ideas dancing through my brain was better than dreaming' and I felt similarly. I felt like I should have been writing for years before.
Part of what stopped me from starting in the first place was the fear of having nothing original to say. I've come to believe that this is relatively common - we all want to do something creative 'when we have a good idea'.
Writing my book taught me that your idea, the overall concept, your guiding theme, will emerge from your creative rubbish - tossed off experiments and half thought through noodlings. Your idea will not emerge fully formed, from a dream, a drug induced haze (well it might do but I've never tried) or some other flash of inspiration. You need to allow yourself the time and space to make without pressure. Then something of interest will emerge.
The other big thing is the desire to create something original. Again, and I did know this before in theory, there really is nothing new under the sun. One of the most powerful creators in the world right now Virgil Abloh, a man whose endeavours cross clothing, furniture, accessories, shoes, music, art and more in his role as Creative Director at Louis Vuitton, aims for 3% originality in his work.
Take something that exists and make it 3% different.
This sounds antithetical to creation - Ezra Pound, a modernist cried,
“Make it new!”
I always took this as an exhortation for complete creation. Forming man out of clay etc. I've realised that this is all wrong.
We are mimetic creatures - we copy other people. Our art is all a copy of a copy of a copy but it's too early to get Baudrillardian about it. Pound is really telling us to take something that exists and make it new, as Abloh does. By telling you to make 'IT' new, he's evidently talking about something that exists, not something that doesn't.
I actually met someone last year who talked about writing their own book. When I asked them how they planned to go about it, they repeated these exact points back to me, saying,
There's no point doing something that's been done. I only want to do it if I can do something completely new.
I tried to tell them about my earned perspective but they were having none of it. There's someone who like many of us are initially, is scared to make something bad, the gap between their capability and their taste will be too great for them to overcome and they likely will never even start.
What I realised about my book was that what made it prosaic - it's about an unexceptional sporting career - was what made it interesting. There are only books about exceptional sporting careers. By virtue of my book being about something that seems unworthy of comment, it becomes something that's more original or is at least different to 97% of what's out there.
Many artists exist in the space between things - the liminal state. I first understood liminal in a Keatsian way, the space between waking and sleeping, the juncture between one world and another. I've come to see it as the Venn diagram where different perspectives or influences meet. So many of my favourite creatives do this, making connections between disparate places. This is where you curate influences and references to create something 3% different.
As usual, sports is a great window into this approach and you see combinational creativity from coaches widely considered blinkered and dictatorial inviting coaches from other sports to watch sessions, picking up techniques, concepts and man management advice from each other. The England football World Cup squad utilised NBA style movement to lose their markers at corners, leading to several goals throughout the tournament. Rugby codes invite judo practitioners, Olympic sprinters and the like to impart technical pointers that transfer to different parts of the game. These are obvious examples of looking just outside your lane to find that 3% new.
“Creativity does not have to be tied to one discipline”
I always felt that I was creative and imaginative on a rugby field, looking to play quickly and for small ways to gain an advantage. I never previously thought to apply this creativity away from the field where I'm definitely guilty of overconsumption, happy to read for hours rather than write for 10 minutes.
The book I wrote was about something very familiar and I based it on a couple of books that spoke to me. What made it different was by crashing it into what differentiated me from the other people in the genre. Everything that was different I played up and made a virtue of.
In this respect I'm most pleased about the cover. Rather than the usual portrait photo, I wanted it to be art. I considered what I wanted it to say, I had an idea of the constituent elements it would contain and then I found someone who could make it happen. Even they were not from the book world, they design packaging for craft drinks but in this, I saw principles that could apply across domains. They knew and were well-versed in what the function of the cover was, in how to design with essentials not fripperies in mind. I just had to direct them.
According to Yale professor Ainissa Ramirez, there are two schools of thought on defining creativity:
Divergent thinking - the formation of a creative idea resulting from generating lots of ideas. Here let's look to Rick Rubin:
You’re much more likely to spot surprising relationships and to see fresh connections among ideas, if your mind is constantly humming with issues related to your work. When I’m deep in a project, everything I experience seems to relate to it in a way that’s absolutely exhilarating. The entire world becomes more interesting. That’s critical, because I have a voracious need for material, and as I become hyperaware of potential fodder, ideas pour in.
Rubin has worked with many of the biggest recording artists on the planet, but his methods divide opinion. Some love him and go back to him, some detest it. Part of being creative is that you won't be for everyone and there's no one size fits all approach. For me though, this is how I like to work. I love finding new things, new people and inspirations and I don't much care where they come from. I tried to include this sense of divergent interest in my own writing and draw from different places. Rubin also says that bands are 'better off drawing inspiration from the world’s greatest museums than finding it in the current Billboard charts.' Rather than compare yourself to something existing, find something else that speaks to you, that shares your themes and view from another perspective.
Janusian approach - the act of making links between two remote ideas
The two-faced Roman god of beginnings Janus was associated with doorways and the idea of looking forward and backward at the same time. It was also the codename for 006 in Goldeneye, given that he was a double agent but that's really neither here nor there. Janusian creativity hinges on the belief that the best ideas come from linking things that did not seem linkable. To create new from the wildly different.
These two approaches don't seem too different from each other but while one is generative, read and explore widely and accrue loads of material, the other is more deliberate, go and find something far away from your starting point and try to forge a path between them. They each require exploration, an open mind and the possibility of discomfort. One is the discomfort of always wanting more, the other is the stress of finding something outside of your experience. One looks for commonalities while the other looks for difference.
To be creative, to make something your own, here’s my suggestion:
Think about what makes you different from what currently exists, search out influences along the lines of that difference and smash them in to each other. Then like the Japanese art of kintsugi, pick up the pieces and forge them together with the gold of your experience and perspective. In the end, the difference will be yourself and how you navigate through your own influences and experience. So really, double down on that.
Be more yourself.