Have you ever wonder a new fact is flying over the world
that is the dreaming increases creativity. Don’t we need to keep practicing,
keep learning, keep busy to be creatively productive?
A number of psychologists and artists say daydreaming or
otherwise “wasting time” is actually a way to enhance creativity.
For example, author Barbara Abercrombie writes about
working on an essay about her divorce, but not having created an outline or
idea for its themes after a day of reading her old journals.
She comments, “I felt I had wasted most of the day
because I wasn’t actually writing.
“This can be one of the trickiest parts of being a
writer, this need to fool around to be creative, and to be okay with that.”
From her book A Year of Writing Dangerously.
In his post In Praise of Goofing Off, psychologist Dennis
Palumbo notes, “Some people call it puttering, or screwing around, or just
plain goofing off. Others, of a more kindly bent, call it day-dreaming. Kurt
Vonnegut used the quaint old term ‘skylarking.’
“What I’m referring to, of course, is that well-known, rarely
discussed but absolutely essential component of a successful creative person’s
life — the down-time, when you’re seemingly not doing anything of consequence.
Certainly not doing anything that pertains to that deadline you’re facing: the
pitch meeting set for next week, the screenplay you’ve been toiling over, the
important audition that’s pending.”
But, he explains, “there’s a very subtle difference
between procrastination and creative, productive, process-nourishing goofing
off. Procrastination, as I see in my therapy practice every day, is a product
of an artist’s inner conflicts around his or her creative gifts. Fears about
failure, questions about one’s sense of entitlement, doubts about competence,
concern about the potential for shameful exposure.”
Dennis Palumbo, MFT, is a former screenwriter, now
licensed psychotherapist specializing in creative issues. His book is Writing
from the Inside Out: Transforming Your Psychological Blocks to Release the
Writer Within.
Creativity coach Eric Maisel, PhD asks in his book
Mastering Creative Anxiety, “Are you creating less often than you would like?
Are you avoiding your creative work altogether? Do you procrastinate?. That’s
anxiety.”
Are
You Procrastinating? (See about procrastinating here)
It may not be so easy for some of us to goof off.
What’s the rush?, coach Jenna Avery, who works with
creative and highly sensitive people, writes, “Internally, many of us feel
driven to perform, excel, and succeed. We want to do good work… We feel flawed
for being highly sensitive and try to prove that we are not. We feel behind on
life’s accomplishments. We over-schedule because we don’t want to miss
anything… We are filled with passions, visions, and projects that compel us
forward, taking on more and more.”
But – as I have experienced on a number of occasions –
that drivenness can have a dark side, as I wrote about in my post Multiple
Talents, Multiple Passions, Burnout.
Joyce Carol Oates, who certainly knows something about
creative accomplishment, comments in her book The Faith of a Writer: Life,
Craft, Art: “It’s bizarre to me that people think that I am ‘prolific’ and that
I must use every spare minute of my time when in fact, as my intimates have
always known, I spend most of my time looking out the window”.
Post a Comment