Words are like cockroaches…

It’s day one of the Festival and we’re all about to meet in the University Theatre. One of the things that usually comes up in the first lecture is the broad field of ‘creativity’ as it relates to songwriting. We’ll be discussing this, but in a happy coincidence (surely an omen for a successful Festival!) I notice this morning that Charlie Brooker’s column in today’s Guardian deals with the ‘blank sheet of paper’ mentality in journalistic writing.

Here are a few quotes that caught my eye;

“When you’re consciously trying to write, the words just don’t come out. Every sentence is a creaking struggle, and staring out the window with a vague sense of desperation rapidly becomes a coping strategy. To function efficiently as a writer, 95% of your brain has to teleport off into nowhere, taking its neuroses with it, leaving the confident, playful 5% alone to operate the controls. To put it another way: words are like cockroaches; only once the lights are off do they feel free to scuttle around on the kitchen floor.”

[...]

Anyway the trick (which I routinely fail to pull off) is to teleport yourself into that productive trance-state as quickly as possible, thereby minimising procrastination and maximising output.”

For those who are interested in the study of creativity (what some psychologists call ‘flow’) take a look at the works of Mihály Csíkszentmihályi.