Do you know what’s going on in your mind, when you’re doing something creative?  Of course not, like, biologically speaking what’s going on in there is so complex that the best experts on the topic have kind of a glimmer about it, and the rest of us not even that.  But what’s it feel like?  That’s information.  Sometimes we can have a pretty good idea of how our minds are operating.  It’s a kind of data, if one that is inherently very subjective, and can be essential.

Marcus asked, what do you think is going on in your mind, when you’re being creative?  To get at that, we need at least a workable placeholder definition for creativity.  Narrow things down a lot, so we don’t have to write a five hundred page tome on the subject.  In his examples, he was not looking at art.  He was talking about problem solving.  One could look at any human task as a place where creativity can be applied.  Let’s say, it’s generating an idea for how to perform a task, that is at least new to you, in that moment.  You might piece it together from things long ago learned and forgotten, or you might just use observation and reason as a springboard to a novel approach.  The novel approach in that example is the creative act.

Going by this definition, creativity must involve something like originality.  It doesn’t have to be “pure” originality, just new to you at the time you’re resolving your task.  A huge reason this discussion is happening is the advent of “generative AI,” which has motivated a lot of humans to draw lines around what, if anything, could only be achieved by human beings.  I don’t have that emotional motive.

I have a different one, which is to defend humans that want to work with AI from abuse, but I’m going to leave that aside here, just to answer the question.  Because it is a question that has some interest when stripped of that particular argument.  I recently said that I am “throwing myself into creativity” as a way of coping with grim realities, but what does that mean?

I’m writing, doing writing exercises, and using AI art to illustrate ideas.  Some of these things are idle as games, some of them are chasing lofty ambitions.  To keep the controversy out of this post, we’ll ignore the AI art and focus on the writing.  And because the AI art has influenced my process for writing MonsterHearts and Spooktobers, I’m going to ignore those too.  Let’s just contemplate the long form prose.

When you’re writing a work of prose, there are many cognitive tasks involved, some disparate and some very intertwined.  How they are performed can vary a lot with the task, so I pretty much have to try and separate and simplify these.  Let’s restrict the scope of my analysis to “Coming up with the Concept,” which a lot of people seem to regard as the “most creative” part of the act.

Coming up with the concept can be that bolt of lightning that hits you out of nowhere, but that’s very unusual.  Most of the time, I’m starting from a desire to write a story, deciding what my goals are, and spitballing how I’m going to achieve them.  Some examples:

A long time ago, I randomly watched a cheap-ass 1970s anime and thought, in a fit of hubris, “I could do that!”  Not having to hand-paint celluloid and use film, animation has gotten a lot more achievable, but no, of course I cannot, as an individual, make a cartoon series.  Not without devoting my life to it, and having a lot more resources.  But in response to this dubious inspiration, I outlined a single season of an anime show, a parody of Star Blazers, Gundam, Macross – that kind of shit.  It was very fun and I haven’t forgotten the idea.  I still poke at it, from time to time.

Cognitively, what was going on there?  See a thing, feel “I could do that,” and then take the first direction with it that popped into my head.  In this case it was parody, which is deceptively easy to write.  Good parody is probably a lot more difficult.  I don’t think Weird Al bats a thousand with it, and he’s the expert.  But parody, like other types of art, is reactive.  I look at what somebody else did, do the same thing, but throw my own flavor on it – in this case, just highlighting whatever I regarded as absurd from those shows.  Plotwise, it was Space Battleship Yamato (1974) but transplanted into American culture in the ’90s – and what I remembered of being a teenager, since all anime characters have to be snot-nosed kids.

So I was consciously crafting a pastiche of previous art I’d consumed, and transforming it by using related experiences and ideas from my own life and culture.

Let’s look at Centennial Hills.  That was conceived when my husband and I first challenged ourselves to do a turbo writing event.  At that time we were aiming for fifty thousand words in three days, which I still have not achieved.  He did make the score, but doesn’t want to hurt his hands like that anymore, and we only turbo when we can line up four days in a row now.

I can no longer remember which of us came up with the idea to both use stereotypical UFO pilots in our stories, but we did.  Mine were grey and his were green.  His greenliens were amusing monsters.  My greyliens were inspired by a very sketchy and legendary youtube short called “E.T. 2,” in which a Communion-type alien comes to earth and gets wasted on alcohol and drugs.

That was classic dudebro humor – take something innocent and make it into the “adult” version, like making cartoons fuck.  I thought, what if I show both sides of that, to express my views about people, the way we really are?  Hence two aliens get split up, one having innocent misadventures with a little girl, and one falling in with crappy scumbags.

Creatively speaking, what was I doing here?  Um…  consciously crafting a pastiche of previous art I’d consumed, and transforming it by using related experiences and ideas from my own life and culture.  Much more elaborately than the anime, but still…  Is this all there is for me?

Let’s take a third idea, one I have not written yet.  In response to the unfortunate passing of David Lynch, and my husband’s aeternal lament that there is no new art for him anymore – that he long ago consumed all the art he was ever going to be interested in and now there’s nothing left – I decided to write “The Best Novel That Ever Existed” for this particular audience of one.  To do this, I’ve been looking at all the things he likes and dislikes about his favorite narrative art ever, seeing if I could derive unifying themes that could be deployed in an original way by yours truly.

But that’s kinda consciously crafting a pastiche of previous art I’d consumed, and transforming it by using related experiences and ideas from my own life and culture, isn’t it?  It’s going to be much more original than the other two, I think, but still… It exists in reaction.

But then, Marcus’s problem-solving creativity existed in reaction to the problem, yes?  Same thing?

I don’t know.  I’d like to bring in one of those “bolt of lightning” stories for comparison, but I easily forget the actual experience of those moments, and could not tell you what I was thinking during any of them.  The only one that comes to mind from recent years is when I wrote the lines, “This rhyme has no composure like a whack-ass thesis, Your boyfriend’s on macaque like a monkey rhesus,” and again, the moment literally happened when I was on the john, leaving no trace of its fundamental path in my memory.

Make of that what you will!  I’m done.

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