In a previous post, I committed to sharing the ideas and advice about fostering creativity that I happen upon in my readings. Here are some of the gems uncovered while reading Catching The Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity by David Lynch.
If you don’t know who David Lynch is by name alone, you may be familiar with some of his more popular films and TV series: Eraserhead, Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive, The Elephant Man.
Let’s see what he has to say.
What’s one element of storytelling that some of the most popular and critically-acclaimed TV shows – e.g. Game of Thrones, The Wire, The Sopranos, Westworld, Fargo, Stranger Things, The West Wing, Lost – all have in common?
In his book, Everything Bad Is Good For You, Steven Johnson presents an interesting and instructive analysis of modern television programing, and argues that – contrary to popular belief – these shows are actually improving our minds.
How? In large part through increased narrative complexity and “multithreading”.
Creative problem solving is needed now more than ever because the world is facing challenges bigger and more daunting that ever before: big, nasty, complicated problems like climate change, ecological collapse, social fragility from globalization, the disruptive effects of technology, and so on. But if you ask someone what we – humanity – should do about these challenges, more often than not, you’ll get some vaguely-optimistic variant of this: “Someone will think of something.”
In a way, it’s a valid response. After all, we have overcome some major hurdles in the past. We’re still here.
But if “someone will think of something” is our strategy, it seems only prudent that we should support the someones and encourage the thinking of creative somethings. Unfortunately, we do neither – and it starts in the schools.
Recently, I’ve been reading a lot of books on 1) the craft of writing and 2) comedy. [If you’re curious about what I’ve been reading, you can see a list of books and reviews here.] It seems to me that non-humor writers could benefit greatly from a careful study of how successful comedians operate. In this post, I’ll highlight three -perhaps unexpected- areas where comedians shine.
Darn Ecology 