Books about creativity
2024-05-02
I have been reading some books about creativity. In this post I will talk about my impressions and what I am learning from them.
Why read books about creativity
I like making music and I want to get better at it. It turns out this is hard. I am struggling with motivitation and procrastination. What better way to procrastinate than reading self-help books about why you are procrastinating?
The books
If memory serves me this is the order in which I read the books. Some overlapped.
Steal Like an Artist
Austin Kleon - Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative.
This book is short and small like Art & Fear but the reading is somehow lighter.
Its main thrust is an attack on the importance of originality. The author drives home the point that new art is informed by prior art. It contains lots of nice quotes such as one that says that if you think something is original, that just means that you don't know the older thing that it is referencing.
This idea made a lot of sense to me because whenever I try to make music that sounds like someone else I fail to sound like them. Somewhere along the way I learned that this failed result is actually what my music sounds like. The works of others we consume come out again in our own work, but different.
I think the book makes it main point well and it was worth reading it for that. I have not finished it though because it veers towards more general self help about productivity towards the end that wasn't bad but also not great.
Art & Fear
David Bayles and Ted Orland - Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking.
This is a small and short book with high information density. They emphasize that art is made by normal people (you don't have to be Mozart) and that it's mostly about showing up and keeping going. The authors dislike the word "creativity" and make a point of not using it once in their book. They also dislike the pretentiousness of "Art" and talk about "artmaking" instead.
The tone of the book is intellectual but it still feels grounded. There is a pleasant lack of loftiness.
I finished this book and my main takeaway is that I have to keep going and prefer quantity over quality.
The Creative Act
Rick Rubin - The Creative Act: A Way of Being.
I liked this book the least and I have not finished it. I can tell that the author knows what he is talking about and I recognize many elements that are also in the other books. It contains spritituality similar to The Artist's Way but even though The Artist's Way is more outspoken about its spirituality, I find it more bothersome in this book. The Artist's Way explains things and is there to help you. The Creative Act pontificates on how the world works.
I wouldn't say this book is bad or that I disagree with a lot of what it says, I just didn't enjoy the tone of it.
Making Music
Dennis DeSantis - Making Music: 74 Creative Strategies for Electronic Music Producers.
This book feels like it was written for me. Whenever I look for information about making music on the internet I end up with information about the technical work that happens after the music is made. How do you record it, mix it, etc. It is assumed someone else ("the band", "the talent") has made music and you are there to make it sound good in a recording. But I am not just recording the music, I am also the band!
Or if it's not technical, the information is not helpful for the kind of music I make. For example "this is the structure of a pop song" or "to write a song, start with the lyrics and some chords on a guitar". I make music without lyrics or vocals and this approach to "song writing" just does not work there.
To give an example, making electronic music has its own challenges around repetitiveness. Repetition is a stylistic ingredient of the music because early electronic music was made with machines with very limited memory. If you want to fill 3 minutes of time with a machine that can store a few seconds worth of notes then you will be repeating those notes a lot. These kinds of limitations have become part of the music, even if the technological limitations aren't there anymore.
I have finished reading this book. There are no easy answers to the questions like how not to make the repetitiveness boring but it is so refreshing to read advice and suggestions that were written with these constraints in mind.
The Artist's Way
Julia Cameron - The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity.
This book is structured as a 12-week course with weekly assignments. This makes it feel very practical. Besides pointing out the challenges of creativity, the author also suggests things you can do to deal with those challenges.
The spiritual stuff (i.e. God wants you to make art) doesn't really work for me but in the introduction the author kindly invites you to interpret the spirituality in whatever way you're comfortable with. In spite of my disconnect with the spiritualism, I find that there is a lot of truth in what the author talks about.
I was avoiding this book because of its spiritual approach. I recently started reading it and I haven't finished it yet. This is my favorite so far and I expect I will finish it. I am even doing some of its exercises.
Themes
Avoidance of creativity
These books paint a picture of the many ways you can get stuck or block yourself from being creative. It's as if being creative is scary, and we get to use all sorts of excuses to not do it. Many of the fears have to do with disapproval. If you don't make something, no-one can disapprove of the thing. The avoidance of artmaking feels safe.
Perfectionism is also an avoidance behavior. Wanting to produce good work is not a problem, but perfectionism can be a convenient excuse to not produce (or finish) anything at all.
Where creativity comes from
Another interesting theme is how being creative is about running with random thoughts that come out of nowhere. Some of the books try to name this "nowhere" where the random thoughts come from ("Source", "The Great Creator", "God"). It is tempting to think of creating as an ego thing (I am creating something) yet these random thoughts seem foreign, like they came from somewhere else. Sometimes they are clearly recognizable as "belonging" to the art of others.
This is where the take-downs of originality come in. When you have one of these random thoughts the creative thing to do is to run with it. If you stop and say, "I can see where this random thought came from, it's from that Beatles song!" then you are standing still and going nowhere. Books like "Steal Like an Artist" teach you not do that and instead accept the random thought in spite of its recognizable source.
Conclusion
I could go on but I don't want to write another book about creativity here. :) Being creative is hard in ways I did not expect and these books taught me that the difficulties come with the territory. It does not mean that creativity is not for me and I should give up. I wish somebody would have told me this when I gave up on making music as a teenager.
Tags: music