By Joe Ortiz
Editor’s note: This is the third in an ongoing series.
All kinds of people, from teachers to CEOs, have reported “Eureka!” experiences or flashes of creative insight. A plumber once told me he had a revelation about a mysterious bathroom leak when he realized he could access it from the adjacent closet wall, calling it an “Aha! moment.”
And an ER doctor friend related a time when he was baffled by a patient’s symptoms only to have the diagnosis “flash before my mind” while walking down the hall to radiology.
In a 2008 New Yorker article, entitled “The Eureka Hunt,” Jonah Lehrer tells of a firefighter who found himself running up a hill to avoid a rapidly advancing fire.
Instantaneously, he realized that his only hope was to throw down a match in order to create a small, burned area ahead of the blaze. He said that the answer suddenly “came to him” and that it “just seemed right.” Indeed, it saved his life.
Stories like these reveal how inspiration and creative problem-solving can appear in everyday experience as well as in artistic practice.
The firefighter’s revelation illustrates how inspiration comes when we have put ourselves in a tight situation. It’s our human dilemma to find ourselves in any number of life predicaments; evolution has made us good problem solvers under pressure. In fact, any pressurized search for an escape route—in life or art—can be seen as the springboard to our creative fulfillment.
Fortunately, we don’t need to put ourselves in the path of a real-life disaster to prompt an inspirational breakthrough. All we need to do is believe we’re in some kind of crisis to start our creative juices flowing.
Russian stage director Konstantin Stanislavski invited his students to imagine a man with a loaded gun behind a curtain in order to invoke an element of risk and danger while working on a theatrical role. This exaggerated metaphorical example of engaging one’s imagination is explained in more pragmatic terms when the director asks actors to summon up the memory of a past experience to instigate a dramatic reaction on stage.
Artists use dozens of such mental devices every day to focus their minds, lend a sense of urgency to their process, and color their work with immediacy and emotion.
For example, when poets face the complicated rhyme scheme of a son-net or when jazz piano players juggle a dozen musical scales while impro-vising, their minds become overloaded and, in reaction, begin to click and cogitate in search of something new, spontaneous, and in the moment.
Just as the firefighter escaped with his life, many artists have learned to “escape” from artistic limitations through moments of intense creativity.
What You Can Do Now: Whatever your creative challenge might be—a sketch or painting, a short story, or even a list of ideas for some future project—put yourself in a limited framework, a tight word count or time limit. If you pick the latter, set your timer and begin.
Or try an exercise I’ve suggested in student workshops: Write a poem while imagining yourself at the edge of a cliff.
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I’d love to hear your comments and questions. Email me at [email protected].