I mean, Cleese. Four points on creativity with John Cleese. Make that five–five points on creativity… Look, I’ll leave and start again in a minute.
See a post on this video and the rest of Cleese’s lecture here.
(via Alton Brown)
I mean, Cleese. Four points on creativity with John Cleese. Make that five–five points on creativity… Look, I’ll leave and start again in a minute.
See a post on this video and the rest of Cleese’s lecture here.
(via Alton Brown)
There’s much to approve here, but I’ve often read of writers who found themselves with only an hour, or a half-hour free in a day, but forced themselves to write in the time they had, and made it work.
Danish subtitles.
Thanks for the post.
Good stuff!
His story about his Python colleague reminds me not to focus too much on talent. How one applies his talent has a much more significant impact on the outcome than the quality or quantity of raw talent.
This is mostly good advice, but he makes a claim at about 10:25 that is highly problematic:
“You can’t be spontaneous within reason.”
The truth is probably exactly the opposite: you can only be spontaneous within reason. The difference between a spontaneous act and an act driven by instinct or simple reaction to physical forces is that the spontaneous act comes from a concept: you decide to do a thing not out of a reaction to events or forces, but as the result of a decision. Having the ability to think through a problem and come to a decision is a process of reason.
Thus if you try to be spontaneous outside of reason, you will in fact be quite predictable: you will do what your instinctive or trained reaction happens to be, and that means anyone can predict your action who knows your nature and habits. It is only by thinking things through that you can do something unexpected and new.
That actually is the point of his ‘being comfortable with the problem’ and allowing maximal time for pondering the problem. He’s very much right about that; but the consequence is that he is wrong about the other.
That reminds me of the comment Spock offered about an enemy in one of the Star Trek movies,
“He is intelligent, but not experienced. His pattern indicates two-dimensional thinking.”
Grim – I think you’re over-thinking it and missing the point.
“You can’t be spontaneous within reason.”
This makes complete sense to me. Imagine that you want to make a spontaneous action, but then you think “Hhmmm… what spontaneous action to undertake? I’ll think about that for a second…” Your action won’t be spontaneous, but rather it will be planned and calculated by virtue of the fact that it was actually thought about.
Also, if you do set limits or define some actions that are acceptable and within reason, those actions won’t be spontaneous at all. By definition, those actions will be limited.
If you tell someone “I spontaneously went to see a movie last night”, but in fact had considered the movie as one of several options – it’s not actually spontaneous.