SO WHAT DO YOU DO WITH THE IDEAS THAT DON'T QUITE WORK?

(And have a sneaky look at the final piece and meet Bertha here!)

So how does the creative process work?

Of course if there was one quick answer to that, there wouldn't be any point in being artists, or writers, or scientists. We could just programme the computer and let it go. But there's no doubt it's addictive to keep trying to uncover our own creative processes.

Several times on this blog, I've written about how I sabotage myself with trying to do too many things at once. One of the exercises in Barbara Sher's book, Refuse to Choose has been useful beyond belief in helping me address this.

So to show how it works for me, I'm going to explore the process involved in one particular project, a collaboration between four writers and four artists for an upcoming exhibition at the Tunbridge Wells art gallery based on objects held in the basement there. I wrote here about how I decided to use a collection of dolls patterns, some cut out of old newspapers, as the object I was going to work with.



But what was I going to do with them?

I carried the idea of the dolls patterns in my head, the photographs on my phone, my notes in my daily journal. I thought about poems. About stories. About short plays. The best way to describe what was going on in my mind was chaos. It wasn't pretty to live with.

But I stuck with it, using what Twyla Tharp calls scratching. It is absolutely astonishing to me, every time, how if you can hold an idea in your head then you pick up more and more ideas and images that make it more substantial. It is a form of magnetism. And when you start to attract the right metals, there is that same buzz like an electric shock. Ping!

My final itch came when I visited the V&A's Quilt exhibition and read the beautiful story about a quilt still retaining its mosiac of paper templates cut out of love letters.

But what should I do with all the other ideas. The ones I've been convinced at separate times that they were RIGHT.

Cue Barbara Sher, and her journal idea.



Barbara Sher suggests that rather than just dismissing the idea, or following each new lead like a headless chicken, we can write it down in our journal. Play with it there, write exactly what we liked about the idea, the sources that drew us to it, and to dream too. Write about it as the bestselling, Turner or Booker Prize winning, world changing idea we thought it was for even jsut one minute.

So here - presented rather nervously, I must admit - are three ideas I've recorded in my journal but have dismissed for this particular project. I would dearly love to do something with them one day though, so having them outlined so clearly really helps. It's not something I've tried before reading Barbara's work, trusting on the invisible compost approach but running in danger, if I'm honest, of filling up with so many ideas I couldn't get any space to breathe. Here, at least, I get them OUT!



Above is one of a series of paper cut out dolls I was thinking about. Each dress made from a different newsmedia - financial, cooking, travel, interior, fashion - and with an apt caption.



And this comes from the idea of erasure poetry, something I've been playing with a lot recently. Instead of particular words, I was thinking about inserting different versions of the word 'doll'. Changing 'facts' so they mean something quite different.



Those first two ideas I spent a bit of time on, cutting and sticking like a demented playschooler, but just to show it doesn't have to be so complicated, here's my scribble for taking the concept of patterns being sent in an envelope - sometimes across the world - and what those patterns could mean to the receiver. Here I was thinking of stories, in the form of instructions, for making worlds, or lives, or even stories.

And what idea did I choose?

Hah, you'll just have to come to the exhibition when it opens!

20 Things Writing Exercise

Twyla Tharp's The Creative Habit is one of my books of the year already, but I've been re-reading it this week for a course I'm facilitating in October. It's even better than I remembered. Underscored already on nearly every page, with stars at the top of pages I think are particularly exciting. If this goes on, I'm going to have to invest in another copy. Today, I took myself off to one of my favourite coffee shops to do this exercise from the book:

Pick a couple and write down everything they do until you get to twenty things. Then study the list and come up with a story about the couple.

I picked two teenage girls who were sitting opposite me - one had kept doing these strange karate chops over her coffee cup and I decided in my storytelling that she was nervous. She knew something about the other girl's boyfriend and she wasn't sure whether to tell or not.

But then Twyla Tharp suggests doing the same exercise with another couple but this time you note only the things you find interesting, 'that please you aesthetically or emotionally'.

As she warns, this took a lot longer. The couple I chose this time looked like a married couple. I noticed he kept touching her, but she kept flicking his hands off. She stared at him though. And laughed loudly at his jokes. When he picked up a paper, she looked over his arm to see what he was reading. He made a meal of reading the paper, of turning over each page slowly and carefully, as if he knew what she was doing.

Twyla Tharp says that when you observe this way 'You might need all day. That's what happens when you apply judgment to your powers of observation. You become selective. You edit. You filter the world through your particular prism.'

What was clear was that I had already started the storytelling procedure as I watched and made notes the second time. I was looking for movements that would fit in with my view. And also that I had picked one person - the man - to tell my story. The first time round, either girl could have been the narrator. It was only when I came to look at my list of their movements, that the one gesture - the chopping hands - sparked the story.

Twyla Tharp says to study the two lists you make this way and look at what appeals to you in the second list.

It was definitely the difference in communication that I saw between the second couple that hooked me. The way they were so close and yet didn't seem to be able to get through the barriers between them. She was trying to reading him almost from inside, while he was feeling her outline. Almost patting her to check she was still there. Was he interested in her, or in what she saw of him? I wasn't sure and that sparked some interest in me.

In the first list when I just wrote down individual movements, I didn't look at how the two girls communicated at all.

TT goes on to say: 'What caught your fancy is not as important as the difference between the two lists. What you included and what you left out speaks volumes about how you see the world. If you do this exercise enough times, patterns will emerge. The world will not be revealed to you. YOU will be revealed.'

My books of the year...

Of course it's daft making such predictions in February because who knows what the next ten months will bring, but I can't imagine much beating the very different books I have on the go at the moment.



Twyla Tharp is one of the great choreographers in America, and her book, The Creative Habit discusses the lessons she's learnt about creativity. Even the design of the book seems to let the light in - it feels inspiring just to look at. I've been thinking about space and writing a lot at the moment. I keep wanting to cut open up my sentences and breathe. In The Creative Habit, there are so many paragraphs and sentences I've underlined and marked throughout that it's obvious it deserves a post of its own soon. I always scribble on my favourite books, I treat it as a compliment to the writer - (provided they are my own books, of course) but it made me laugh when about half way through the book, Twyla Tharp said: 'you have written on this book, haven't you?' It summed up the feel of the book for me, like having a conversation with the kind of wise mentor you dream of.

My second book is All We Know by Ciaran Carson, which is not just a 'novelistic' sequence of poems, it is one which - and I'll take this from the blurb - gestures 'towards a conventional sonnet sequence - the poems consist of fourteen lines, or multiples therof, in lines of fourteen syllables.' And if that wasn't enough, it references film noir, Cold War thriller, fairy story, and the art of the fugue. Best of all, you can forget all of the above when you're reading it and just enjoy it. This is one of the best books I've read recently about everything to do with love. Trust me.

And of course, there is this one, which just keeps getting better and better and more frightening and funnier as I read on.