creativity & anxiety

Sue Woolfe's approach to writing a novel is that she writes a whole bunch of fragments. Thousands of them. And then she looks for patterns in them. Themes. Voices. Characters. And then the fragments get assembled. Or rather something emerges. The image she used this evening was of creating a skin of narrative to hold together these myriad pieces. Sue is also into neuroscience as applied to creativity - and she talks about some of this here.

One thing Sue said tonight stuck in my mind: The creative enterprise generates a lot of anxiety. And those who succeed at it find a way of dealing with that anxiety. Now a lot of this boils down to "feeling the fear & doing it anyway". But also living with the fear while you are doing it.

It makes me think about the discussion I had with Johnnie on facilitation recently. One thing about being a facilitator is about managing anxiety - both yours & other people's. One way to manage anxiety is to have an incredibly detailed process (which you may or may not follow). I am not a big fan of those for supposedly "creative" activities - because I think creativity is messy & unpredictable - or experimental if you prefer. Another way is to say participants: "trust yourselves". The myriad pieces will come together into something.

One observation to be made is that people get anxious when they are out of the moment. When they are in the middle of "it", experiencing flow, everything's cool. The moment I start thinking "where will this end?" "what is the future?" "will the outcomes be acceptable?" - panic sets in.

So the question becomes: how do you keep people in the moment?