Over the past five years or so, my work has been culminating and really starting to take on form for me. To put it another way, it’s been synthesizing and crystallizing into clarity. As I’ve noted in my last post though, while this clarity has been emerging for me, it’s been difficult and a struggle to relay it to others though.
Articulating The Unknown
Particularly I remember one conversation with someone, where I expressed my desire to write my research all out into a cohesive form but how difficult it was to do so. This person had written some of his own fictional work already and said to me, “What’s the problem? You just need to write it out now.” The problem I think people like this are missing is that I’m not writing a fictional story, where I can just make up elements to make the narrative work, nor am I writing about something fully known, like writing a technical manual for some software. I’m writing about something that is unknown, yet struggling to be known.
The closest comparison I can give to trying to understand creativity is trying to understand quantum physics. You can’t just easily write out what you know and are observing because what you know and are observing often goes against everything conventionally know. As it was noted in an article I found the other day, this is because creativity destroys paradigms. So it’s like trying to explain something to someone in which you can’t use a basis of knowledge (i.e. an existing paradigm) to describe it. This is why people often have to use metaphors instead, saying at best it is similar to this or that.
Metaphors Bridge The Unknown
For myself, I’ve used metaphors existensively over the past years to try to encapsulate what creativity is like, yet I find trying to find and use just one metaphor often doesn’t fully encapsulate all of creativity. Thus I’m continually going in this loop, using different metaphors to describe it, yet unable to find a metaphor that encompasses it all. Because of this, I’ve been quite hard on myself, saying things like “What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I figure this out?” But that all changed recently.
A few weeks back, I came across a new book entitled The Storm of Creativity by Kyna Leski and John Antonelli which I’m currently in the process of reading now. What pulled me to the book was the metaphor of creativity as a storm, as I’ve used similar metaphors describing creativity like a maelstrom, tempest, tornado, and hurricane which has chaos on its outside, yet a calm stability within its core. What really excited me was the book structure though. In effect, while the storm metaphor was the overarching theme, each chapter tried to give a different perspective of creativity, thus helping you truly understand creativity only by synthesizing all of these diverse perspectives into one.
Why this is remarkable is that I’ve used this same metaphor to describe the creative process as well. In effect, the creative process is like virtually walking around something unknown, seeing it from different perspectives, and then synthesizing those differing, almost contradictory, perspectives into one integrated perspective which helps you understand it as a whole (which mirrors the often told Blind Men and The Elephant parable).
Being Comfortable With Ambiguity
So today, I now feel much more relaxed with my work and with my struggle to articulate it. In effect, if some of the leading people on creativity research are having difficulty articulating what it is, I shouldn’t be so hard on myself for my struggle in articulating it as well. To put it another way, this struggle is a normal part of the creative process itself. So while it may feel like you’re doing something wrong and failing, it’s actually a normal part of the process. Best of all, I’m excited because many of the metaphors I’ve used to try to articulate creativity are similarly being used by others to try to describe it as well. Thus collectively our differing perspectives are merging and finding a commonality with one another, helping creativity to take shape with even more clarity.
