The Creative Brain - Train your Brain like a Dog to Respond to Creativity

One from the Archives

Photo by Robina Weermeijer on Unsplash

I’m reposting one from the archives today, with the paywall removed. Especially handy information for anyone doing the prompt a day course with me!

The Brain as a Creative Muscle

Whilst there are definitely areas of the brain associated with creativity, creativity is a process rather than a single brain section.

In the same way that lifting an apple uses many different parts of the body, starting with an initial imaginative process (you picture lifting the apple) followed by a response from the brain’s neural pathways and a specific response from the nervous system followed by muscle contraction, hand eye coordination…until the apple is picked up, so the creative practice is more than just thinking about writing and then writing.

By practicing creativity regularly, we essentially train the brain to be creative and to take the creative potential from our normal thought patterns. The brain is pretty amazing, it will develop new neural pathways if those parts of the brain are activated regularly, which allow a person to be more creative more quickly. A daily practice will train the brain until, like Pavlov's Dog , it will be ready and waiting to work as soon as you pick up your pen.

What does a daily practice look like?

You have to work with what is best for you. Work with the time you have, not the time you’d like to have. This might be ten minutes on a morning or evening, keeping your creative brain active until you can find that precious hour or two to expand on what you want to work on.

You don’t have to write a poem a day, or a certain word count a day, you don’t have to write something presentable or publishable, you just have to train your brain to recognise that when you open your notebook, or light your writing candle, or use a particular font etc that this is now the time to be creative.

Abandon preconceptions about what writing is and do your own thing.

Preconceptions around what writing is, what a writer is and does and what an achievement in writing is, are at the heart of procrastination, guilt and writer’s block. Although there are lots of writer’s guides out there, no one can tell you how YOU will write and the things that will work for you. The only thing that is a certainty is that if you don’t write, nothing will get written.

When you open your notebook to write, cast off any and all comparisons to other poets, other writers and write without fear. Do not fear that you are getting it wrong, or that you’ll produce a rubbish piece of writing or that you aren’t a ‘trained writer’ or that you don’t know what you are doing, just put pen to paper and write.

You will be amazed at the sudden freedom you feel without the imposter syndrome draped over you like chain mail. I am terrible for comparing myself to other people. But, I can only write in the way that I write, and accepting that has been the key to enjoying my work. After all, we don’t write so we can feel bad, we write because we enjoy it, it’s part of our make-up, it’s an expression of ourselves.

In the same way that you can train your brain to react positively to creative prompting, you can train it to think negatively to it by thinking negatively about your work. If you tell your brain that what you want to do is painful, rubbish, useless, then that is what it is going to take on board and deal with. It’s going to try to protect you from that by telling you not to do that. Treat your brain to positivity, take away pre judgement and just enjoy it. Enjoy the creativity for itself.

When you make your five or ten minutes of writing time, make sure you actively kick the imposter syndrome thoughts and the preconceptions about being a writer out of your head and just write. Do not think in terms of a finished piece, just write. In time, your regular practice of getting pen to paper will become less like learning something new and more like making your first cup of tea or coffee in the morning. And remember that every writer whose work you enjoy started out not knowing how to write and most (all) have felt that they don’t know what they are doing (at least once a day).

Photo by Milad Fakurian on Unsplash

Three Daily Writing Exercises to Train your Brain

So you’ve abandoned your preconceptions, you’ve got yourself a notebook and pen, you have made your ten minutes to write, but yet when you open the notebook there is the blank page and the blank page fear is upon you. This is the biggest hurdle, knowing where to start. Below are three exercises that you can use as a daily practice. Choose one or another on a daily basis and you will find that you are naturally falling into a routine of daily writing. All three have their merits just as writing practices, but they can also be used further down the line to extract inspiration from.

1.    The Daily Haiku

Haiku are a traditional Japanese short form poem which actually translates quite badly to English because we don’t have the same language roots. This causes all sorts of arguments in the poetry world about what does and doesn’t constitute a haiku and whether the English variant, which uses syllables, is an accurate representation of the form. You do not need to worry about any of that, I’m using the word ‘haiku’ as a label to represent an English version of the form. Haiku come in many styles, but they are always very short and they always capture a moment. I think of them like polaroid photographs. Traditionally they are nature based and have a circular theme with the image in the first line being re-imagined in the third. I don’t want you to worry too much about any of that until you have gotten going with the haiku as a daily writing aid. All you should really worry about at his point is creating a three-line poem, with 5 syllables in the first line, 7 in the second and 5 in the third line.

I love a daily haiku, I use them to free myself from being blocked. They are easy, quick and fun. Here’s one I did earlier:

No birds sing today

but light creeps quietly in

with spring on its breath

As well as being a lovely short form in their own right, haiku can be used to ‘put a pin’ in an idea that you might have had, ready to be expanded on later. The act of writing a haiku itself is also a short meditation on a moment, it’s very good as a peaceful start to the day if you choose to write in the morning, and it allows you to see the details in the everyday, all things that will help you to extract inspiration and get to that first draft.

2.    Free Writing

This is another one of my favourites because it is so good at helping one to break through the imposter syndrome and get something down. The idea is not to produce anything finished, the idea is to just pour writing out and onto the page. Do not worry about spelling, grammar, sentence structure, or even making sense, just set a timer for five, seven or ten minutes and start writing. I sometimes give myself a starter line such as ‘once upon a time’ or ‘yesterday I…’ or ‘my favourite colour is’ and then begin writing, allowing the thoughts and words to go wherever they do, without any worry about controlling it. As an example, here’s a mini free write:

My favourite colour is green because it is the colour of the grass and the trees and makes me think of long summer days spent lying on an old blanket which smelled of rain and looking up at the sky, why was the sky so much bluer when I was a child? I can’t actually remember the last time I looked up at the clouds, I remember thinking that the clouds moved round the earth and the earth stood still, or was it the other way around. I love the smell of grass and the sound of the bees and I remember having a green cord skirt which my mum had made me and I wore it with a matching waistcoat and a brown and white flowery frilled shirt and could feel the bristle of it on the back of my neck but the skirt had a soft feel. I wore brown court shoes and went to a wedding and scattered confetti at the bride and it must have been the early eighties because everyone wore their hair big and I remember the bride stepping out of the stone arch of the church and thinking she was lady Diana.

3.    Description

If you’ve ever read Sylvia Plath’s journals, you’ll know that she used description as a writing exercise. It is very effective. Just set your timer for five, seven or ten minutes and, like free writing, allow the words and associations to come, but in this case you describe an object or a person. Choose whatever is to hand or, if you are starting the process of writing something specific, choose something that relates to your subject. For the purposes of this exercise, which is to build the creative practice, I just want you to describe what is at hand. As an example, I have described a vase that is on my windowsill:

This vase has a short neck and long lines. It is the colour of cornflowers, though it has dried flowers depicted on its side. It is gold trimmed and looks like it would fit well in a country house, or on the shelf of some well to do lady. It shines like water, like the potter was thinking about lakes or rivers when he or she glazed it. It has no chips or cracks, it is entirely whole and inhabits its space entirely.

happy writing!