Creative Process and Product: Ten Evolutionary Characteristics—Part II

Part I focused on why and how the Resiliency Rap, “A Generational-Digital Diatribe” (aka “Dinos & Digits”) kept evolving in my mind- and screen-scape, delaying its formal (“kicking & screaming”) entry into the world, to the chagrin of some others.  And not just in my mind was it worth the wait.  (See a reader’s kind words below.)  In review and preparation for Part II, “Characteristics of an Evolving Creative Process and Product,” it became clear that the tools and techniques already outlined had application beyond poetic creation.  (Email stressdoc@aol.com if you missed Part I.)  The first five,

 

1.  Engaging the Forest and Trees

2.  Challenging and Clarifying, Unifying and Lightening the Message

3.  Eyeballing and Ear-calling

4.  Trusting My Creative Discontent

5.  “Going from Good to Great”

 

would enrich or expand all manner of problem-solving procedure, practice, and product development.  The Part I closing verse (predictably, slightly amended ;-) certainly captures this:

 

The search for perfection does not equate

With an intent to go from “good to great”

When you can’t get out of that starting gate.

But if being stuck in that mental muck

Should prove more pluck than mere dumb luck

Then one will stumble and crawl, dream and incubate

So neurons may pursue and whirl, scream and gyrate.

What’s next…Aha!...that creative state?

 

And the Part I essay about that desire and drive to explore as well as patiently-passionately persist and design closure and meaningful completion of the “Resiliency Rap,” inspired at least one reader, a creative entrepreneur in her own right.  AM wrote: Love This. Your midnight oil is burning bright. You kept on going and got it just right!

 

Merci mademoiselle.  And now, without further ado…Part II:  the final five hands on “how to”s (process) for maximizing creative evolution (product):

 

1.  Striving for Visual Metaphors.  To foster message sent equals message absorbed, not just received, especially when dealing with abstract ideas, as a writer and speaker I want to put as much flesh as possible on the conceptual skeleton.  Visual metaphors are a powerful language tool for making ideas visible, understandable, and memorable.  They are especially useful when trying to build a bridge between seemingly different ideas and viewpoints or needing to traverse different assumptions and belief systems.  And, naturally, designing an apt mind-bridging metaphor may take time.

 

Purposes of Metaphor

 

A good metaphor not only helps one walk in another’s shoes but, especially, to feel their bunions.  However, sometimes the purpose of metaphor is to reveal or heighten difference and diversity, that is, to acknowledge or reinforce barriers between divided camps in a “culture” war.  For example, when it comes to our “digital divide,” there are folks who acknowledge if not embrace being symbolic “dinosaurs” as a way of poking fun at themselves and/or preempting criticism.  Conversely, some Boomers and beyond wear the metaphor like a generation-dividing, Purple Heart.

 

A satirist uses metaphor, especially visual metaphor, to poke fun and expose issues or people by making them larger or a bit more “out-rage-ous” than life.  Some metaphors may go beyond the visual; they range from emotional and/or philosophical firecrackers to TNT explosives – definitely meant to startle and surprise if not awe and mesmerize; and sometimes to challenge a worldview and even to browbeat.

 

Defining Metaphor

 

Wikipedia cites Metaphors We Live, by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson.  The authors argue that “metaphors are pervasive not just in language, but also in thought and action.  A common definition of a metaphor is…a comparison that shows how two things that are not alike in most ways are similar in another important way…a metaphor helps you understand and experience one kind of thing in terms of another.”

 

Here are two examples of metaphor followed by an simile-analogy:  a) the ship plowed the sea and b) the security team plowed through the crowd, and c) when you add the words “as” or “like” – e.g., the security team broke up the crowd like a plow through a field; you make explicit the implicit, analogous image of a plow breaking up and tossing soil aside while making furrows in a field.  Getting back to metaphor, the authors have conceived the notion of “conduit metaphor.”  That is, a speaker can put ideas or objects into words or containers, and then send them along a channel, or conduit, to a listener who takes that idea or object out of the container and makes meaning of it.  In other words, communication is something that ideas go into. The container is separate from the ideas.”

 

Provocative Metaphors

 

Of course a container and/or its contents can exaggerate and be quite provocative; as previously mentioned this may emphasize or exaggerate divisions within a culture.  As a Stress and Team Building Consultant, I recall how the work floor at a 6000 person US Postal Service Processing Center was called the “Postal Plantation,” while management was situated in their “Tower.”  The numbing effects of never-ending high-tech letter sorting work, while not back breaking like picking cotton, can make one pay a mind-body (carpal tunnel) toll.  And role-status tension is heightened if you feel spied on by a (literal, metaphoric, or technologic) over-seer in “The Tower.”

 

Generational-Digital Metaphors

 

As final examples, visual metaphors in “A Generational-Digital Diatribe” (see Rap below), purposefully if not playfully spotlight troubling contemporary issues:

 

a) Talk “thumb trash” and bully.  For this younger generation, being “all thumbs” is a compliment to their digital “texterity”; in my era “all thumbs” was an expression for clumsiness.  Today, alas, some are known for hurtful or abusive texting – talking thumb trash as a form of “con-textual”-emotional bullying.

 

b) The stanza on “viral attacks” (itself a classic fear-inducing cyber-metaphor), identity theft, and information leaks concludes with a contemporary, scene-setting (if not stealing) comparison:

 

Even big Uncle Sam cannot safely “hold em”
Playing NSA Poker with one Mr. Snowden!

 

A metaphoric, David vs. Goliath game of cards hides and reveals “data” and weapons as adversaries maintain a façade – from the inscrutable to one of bravado; bluffing and posturing along with making a quick exit (or being run out of town) are all intrinsic to the lore of both poker and spy craft.

2.  Sharing and Soliciting.  For me, a key part of the generative process is letting go of the draft, coming out of that creative cocoon, and allowing my ideas and images to fly in public space. Timing is vital; solicit input when the work is in a “semi-solid state”:  strong enough that you believe in its basic substance and style; fluid enough to move pieces around, to incorporate useful, even challenging, input, to explore novel forms and functions.  If the work is already set in stone, there’s likely to be a wall between message sent and the receiver.  It’s difficult planting a new tree in concrete.  (Or when living in N’Awlins, for good and bad, trends that were flourishing on the east and west coasts had difficulty making local traction when surrounded by an Iron Swamp!

Evolving a Generational-Digital Diatribe

Asking for and being open to feedback definitely enabled “A Generational-Digital Diatribe” to grow.  A friend shared how in the ‘60s she wrote a poem about daily calls home becoming a lifeline and symbiotic cord for an anxious roommate.  This story helped update the concept and spurred these two psychological and paradoxical lines:

With all things wireless, you're always on board
Alas, still tied to that e-umbilical cord?

I also showed my work to a late-20 something at the local coffeehouse.  He agreed with a number of issues often articulated by those on the other side of the digital divide.  This Millennial specifically mentioned recently expressing concern to and for a friend who is always online or on a gadget.  He also said one word – “privacy” – and, immediately sensing a glaring gap, I quickly worked out the opening of this stanza, completed by the above-cited “NSA Poker” metaphor:

It’s “Privacy vs. Piracy”:  we’re under viral attack.
And now identity theft from the neighborhood hack.

 

Finally, I received kindred comments from a newsletter reader who could well relate to this generational-digital divide.  (Talk about a cultural inversion, she was expectantly waiting for her daughter’s “hand me down” Android phone.)  In fact, she signed her email “Dino Gal-Pal.”  And a day later, this innocent prompt spurred major upgrades:  the techno-generational divide phrase “Dinos and Digits” and, as analyzed in Part I of this essay, a recurring hook:

 

Dinos and Digits, both give me the fidgets

Digits and Dinos, they sure can be whinos!

also

Dinos and Digits can be mental widgets

Digits and Dinos, like spoiled bambinos.

 

3.  Letting Go with the Rhyme Scheme.   As I’ve been writing the “Resiliency Raps” these last several months, it’s become clear that in addition to searching for images, a word that beckons for a kindred rhyme may send a mind off in widely divergent or improbable directions.  For example, when sketching my “Privacy vs. Piracy” stanza, I was conscious of literally being in the NSA shadows.  The National Security Administration is located in Columbia, MD, where I live.  I can’t precisely recall if an image of a card game came first or the “hold em” phrase.  But soon thereafter I connected the perfect rhyme with the phrase and had conjured NSA poker between Uncle Sam and Mr. Snowden!

 

With the following couplet, having my teacher in a state of shock, facilitated finding a word to capture my feelings about some of those letter combos that in my mind give acronyms a bad name:  “crock!”

 

Those short cut acronyms…geez, what a crock

My poor English teach…in anaphylactic shock!

 

And in the next to last stanza, wanting to help (with a touch of irony) one afflicted with a cyber-addiction, I invented a video game – “Past Life Regression” ® – with a less violent, “calmer shooter” position.  And after enough rounds of “ear-calling,” the homophone “Kama Sutra” (an ancient Indian text of love-making positions) grabbed me as a preferred (and a tad absurd) game playing position.  It certainly connects through rhyme the Internet’s and the gaming industry’s commercial embrace of sex and violence.

 

So to expand your creative problem-solving possibilities, try free associating to key words and concepts with rhyme – for-“word” to the absurd; turn playtime into the sublime!

 

4.  Resisting the Urge to “Just Be Finished.”  In a TNT-3 D – Time-Numbers-Technology — Driven-Distracted-Disrupted – World, one feels compelled to get into or react to the next big, hot (or cool), thing(s)…right now!   In the interactive and “multi-taneous moment,” (a Stress Doc invention), “when instant gratification seems a delay” and linear thinking and storylines are passé, we’re all jumping from one (or a dozen) sensations or experiences to the next.  (For example, consider your TV watching habits before remote control or your current driving-interactive media routine – smart phone, GPS, music, perhaps web/TV, hopefully not texting – routine.)  According to media theorist Douglas Rushkoff, much of our society is abandoning a cause-effect timeline and mindset; “planning for the future” skills are diminishing, for both individuals and corporations.  With this desire or ADHD-like need to be in multiple places and spaces at the same time, often absorbed in “crisis mode,” we are struggling with Rushkoff’s “Present Shock” (Present Shock:  When Everything Happens Now, 2013).  In such a climate, survival appears to depend on clicking to and rushing through (or putting aside) one task or event as another seductive or mind-numbing stimulus pops up on your mental and physical web-screen.

 

The Critical Question

 

The critical question:  How to elevate “Mindful Focus” over “Multi-taneous Choices/Chaos” and “Just Be Finished?”  When I think back to my “Big Easy” daze, taking a break from my doctoral studies to engage in three times/week psychoanalysis for a year with a Tulane Medical School psychiatry resident (for $10/session; the starving grad student rate), it truly seems a bygone era.  Lying on the couch, eyes closed, brain-body dreamily drifting, my awareness wandering and concentrating at both a conscious and subterranean level, suddenly seizing on fleeting or fiery emotional images and memories, converting these to cathartic expression, tears flowing, tales of family illness and angst, shame and grief.  From this echo-system evolved an “ivory couch” process for accessing and focusing the deepest and broadest recesses of mind.  (In fact, it was during this period that I first started dabbling in poetry, purposefully playing with and ultimately synthesizing rhythms and rhymes, imaginings and ideas.)

 

Bottom Line Recommendations

 

The bottom-line:  We need time for a meditative and integrative present, not only an interactive multi-media NOW.  I don’t mean a never-ending blissful state; as we’ve seen, ongoing creativity also requires tension (personal and/or interpersonal), if not some torment.  I’ve previously referred to Dr. Richard Rabkin’s concept of “thrustration” – when you’re torn between thrusting ahead with direct action and frustration as you cannot yet put together the pieces of your puzzle.  At an implicit level, this smoldering if not agitated state is percolating, comparing, and connecting ideas and images often necessary for that unexpected Aha!

 

Three specific recommendations:  a) sleep on the problem to find that missing piece or to regain fresh sensory antennae b) if exhausted or experiencing brain freeze, put the work aside for a period of time; walk away for an hour, a day, perhaps an extended stay (a period of hibernation), and c) allow that state of “thrustration” to discover new internal and external information through psychic eruption or by allowing the simmering tension to evolve into a quiet phase-covert process of organic gestation, that is, take an “incubation vacation” to hatch a new perspective.

 

5.  Recognizing “You Can Go Home Again.”  In the “screwball comedy” film, “His Girl Friday,” Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant are forever verbally sparring.  Recently divorced, they still work for the same newspaper.  However, Russell is planning to ride into the sunset with her new beau (and his mother!!).  Despite the still obvious chemistry, Grant’s attempts to have the two reconcile is repeatedly and always cleverly rebuffed.  Exasperated, Grant finally blurts out, “My dear, you have an old-fashion notion of divorce…You think it will last forever!”

 

So too with a creative process and product.  Misguided by thoughts of final perfection or, perhaps, itching-impatient to move on to the next project, we may lose sight of the bigger picture:  closure is not necessarily forever!  As William Faulkner observed, the past is never finished…it’s not even past!  Not only are our hard-earned efforts a continuous source of motivation if not inspiration – whether self-satisfied pride or constructive discontent; hopefully, not frequent humiliation, though, if courageous, this too is potential creative fuel – but we can literally return and construct new and enriched variations on a theme.  During this interim, we have changed; and, of course, times have changed, even if the original work has remained untouched.  In looking back, we find a meaningful foundation, or a conceptual tree pattern, to build upon.  Once again we are ready to move forward, to alter the landscape…to introduce an expanded or streamlined mindscape, to modernize or redesign a vision while still maintaining a connection, still being nurtured by our tree-forest roots.

 

Closing Summary

 

So explore these five evolutionary characteristics:

 

1.  Striving for Visual Metaphors

2.  Sharing and Soliciting

3.  Letting Go with the Rhyme Scheme

4.  Resisting the Urge to “Just Be Finished”

5.  Recognizing “You Can Go Home Again”

 

Strengthen your creative process and product and also…Practice Safe Stress!

 

Mark Gorkin, MSW, LICSW, "The Stress Doc" ™, a Licensed Clinical Social Worker, is a national keynote and webinar speaker and "Motivational Humorist & Team Communication Catalyst" known for his interactive, inspiring and FUN programs for both government agencies and major corporations.  A training and Critical Incident/Grief Intervention Consultant for the National EAP/Wellness Company, Business Health Services in Baltimore, MD, the Doc has also led “Stress, Team Building and Humor” programs for various branches of the Armed Services.  Mark, a former Stress and Violence Prevention Consultant for the US Postal Service, is the author of Practice Safe Stress and of The Four Faces of Anger.  See his award-winning, USA Today Online "HotSite" -- www.stressdoc.com -- called a "workplace resource" by National Public Radio (NPR).  For more info on the Doc's programs or to receive his free e-newsletter, email stressdoc@aol.com.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

A Generational-Digital Diatribe:

Still, Don’t Be Afraid to Pet the Dinosaur  (aka “Dinos & Digits”)

 

Why does the digital world spin so fast?
Why can't I simply hold on to the past?
Facebook, tweeting, smart apps...oh what's next?
It’s no longer “Safe Stress” ™…now it’s “Practice Safe Text”!!

I am the turtle; the Gens are the hare

They’re always racing, but why…and to where?
Those short cut acronyms…geez, what a crock

My poor English teach…in anaphylactic shock!

 

And do you use email to settle a score

With that mortal colleague residing next door?

The “e” in email – your Face-to-Face “escape”

Go blast that e-rocket fueled by sour grapes.

 

Okay, three hundred messages that for you await

May have something to do with a volatile state.

Does always being wired make you real tired?

Or are you real tired of always being so wired?

 

Don’t blame the company; they’re just doing their best

In getting the troops to “Do More with Less.”

It’s not PTSD but PTDS –

Post-Technological Deluge Stress!

 

Dinos and Digits, both give me the fidgets

Digits and Dinos, they sure can be whinos!

 

Smoldering anger, the anonymous stranger

Why not live large on the edge of danger:

Talk “thumb trash” and bully; “be happy, don’t worry”…

Having an avatar means never being sorry.

 

Hey, it’s just a multi-tasking age

Where ADHD is all of the rage.

When instant gratification seems a delay…

BOREDOM!  ASAP:  Start texting away.
 

With all things wireless, you're always on board

Alas, still tied to that e-umbilical cord?

Oh, no…can't use your phone or get online...

Blood pressure PANIC  surges most every time.
 

It’s “Privacy vs. Piracy”:  we’re under viral attack.

And now identity theft from the neighborhood hack.

Even big Uncle Sam cannot safely “hold em”

Playing NSA Poker with one Mr. Snowden!
 

Why do these young guns keep talking so fast?

And spelling, of course, now a thing of the past.

Or when presenting – a web session or on a Skype phone

Please, an occasional pause…don’t just drone on an on.
 

Dinos and Digits can be mental widgets

Digits and Dinos, like spoiled bambinos.
 

Younger folks say “inclusion,” a trophy for all

Forming an identity that’s off the Facebook Wall.

When grizzled gens want winners not mere pretenders

One must divide Alphas from “those bleeding heart losers.”
 

Of course, many leaders don’t have a clue

For an e-conference, just what do you do?

Without live eyes and warm bodies keeping safe solid ground

“Little Napoleons” start throwing their own head-weight around.
 

And for those folks who both drive and talk

As if life is but one stroll in the park.

Or sleepwalk and text…and what do they expect?

Either I clear a path or I’m the pain in the neck.
 

Believe me; it wouldn’t take much of a dare

To shove that damn phone right up their…hot air!

Man, I’m sounding more and more like a grouch

Maybe what’s needed is another approach.
 

Dinos and Digits, there’s got to be limits

Digits and Dinos…the fate of White Rhinos?
 

A crusade:  “Save the Analog Whales” ™…Is it asking too much?

But first, lure digital hare-brains from their wired world hutch.

Pull heads out of smart phones; break FOMO ** media habits.

(Though “Get a Life” Coaching is for “Dinos,” not just “Digits.”)

Of course, do not go cold turkey with a cyber-addiction…

Play “Past Life Regression” ®; the “calmer shooter” or Kama Sutra *** position.

Find a virtual guru, one who’s no techno slouch…now

Plug-and-play (if not hug-and-pay) on that 3-D “smart couch.”

Well, let me reach closure, before I “break bad”

On those always bragging about their iPad.

Consider my words, they are pretty rad:

I truly don’t mean to sound unkind…

Keep your iPad; I prefer an I-Mind!

 

**  FOMO:  Fear of Missing Out

 

*** (sexual positions illustrated by the ancient Indian text; personal preference)

 

© Mark Gorkin  2013

Shrink Rap Productions