Left Brain Creativity and/or Right Brain Editing
This topic is very, very personal. I hope it will be a comfort to others who have the same dynamics.
This is a topic that is rarely, if ever discussed. I always knew, based on what everyone around me said, that I was ‘creative’ in some way, perhaps even hyper-creative, if there is such a thing. My need to create is so pervasive in my life, and I attribute it at least partially to being an appropriate response to severe and inappropriate abuse/neglect.
It shows up in so many ways in my life. When most people run out of money, they think “I need to go get a job”. When I run out of money, I think “I need to go create a business”.
Once when I was living in the Chicago area I saw an ad in the paper, for a collection of books on creativity. The person wanted, I think, $150. for about 35 books on every possible aspect of creativity. Naturally I bought them, and over several years, read them all.
But what I am about to write about was NOT in that collection. It was a small book, and I don’t remember the title or the authors’ name, it was a woman. It was set very strongly in a business setting. If anyone knows the title or author, please contact me. She had a huge impact, in a very positive way on my life, and I’d like to say Thanks…
Even tho I had been accused of being creative by everybody around be, I didn’t fit the typical definition, and so for many years, I felt like a fraud of some kind, till I read her book.
Most of us when we hear the term creativity, think of what I now call right-brain creativity. The painter starts with a blank canvas and draws a picture. The writer starts with a blank piece of paper and creates a novel. The musician, and I’m guessing here, starts with blank music paper. But while I wanted to do that, at least the writer part, I couldn’t!
She introduced the notion of Re-Arrangement as a form of creativity. Moving the existing parts around to create a new pattern! Wow! It clicked with me immediately. In business, several times I had been hired to take over a failing department, turn it around, and make it successful. A ground rule was always, I could NOT fire everyone and hire a whole new staff, I had to do it with the existing staff! I did it, I did it very well, and more importantly, I loved it! Reflecting back, I was Re-Arranging!
Looking more broadly at my whole life, I wanted since my youth to create, there’s that word again, a better system of psychology. A better way of thinking about people that would help eliminate, or significantly reduce, personal violence. I wanted both to provide recovery for those who had already been severely broken and a way to prevent future generations of individuals from becoming broken.
Over the last 45+ years I have studied over 140 ’systems’ of psychology. Some, I read a few articles or books, many I took direct trainings, workshops, seminars etc. Each of them had some good ‘nuggets’ of truth or help. Where, in my opinion, they mostly went astray is that they tried to generalize their excellent solution of a specific problem into a generic solution for all human problems.
So now at 65+ I am left with a few hundred jigsaw puzzle pieces, to assemble into a picture, but I don’t have that picture! I must create it. And how I do that is a massive Re-arrangement of all those nuggets!
Right Brain Editing
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Another thing I haven’t read much about, even tho I’ve been reading “The Writer” magazine for over 50 years, is what I call “Right Brain Editing”.
When I start creating an article, book, workshop etc., I start with a lot of small pieces, very often not organized well at all. Then occasionally, more often now that I recognize it as a solid process, I get into a mode, a frame of mind, where I don’t touch any of the pieces or chunks, but simply re-arrange the big chunks. This chunk needs to come before that chunk… This has worked well for me, and I hope it will be helpful to others as well.
Recently, I was totally stymied with a whole bucket full of my ideas and no clear way forward. What finally worked was this: I made, totally for myself, a PowerPoint presentation of all my ideas. This forced me to concentrate on my main ideas, keeping the What’s, but dropping How’s, and it forced me to create some organization or sequence! In other words, I had to Re-Arrange the chunks!