Scratching - Creativity

Theme:

Where does a creative idea begin? What do you do when faced with a blank page, canvas or a lump of clay? After reading Twyla Tharp’s impressive book The Creative Habit Glenn Capelli discovers that to put on your creative Thinking Cap you might need a good old scratch to get your creative mind to come up to scratch.

Scratching

There was once a man who got into a London cab and in casual conversation asked the driver ‘How’ve you been?’ The driver responded that he was ‘Working hard, in fact it felt like he was working eight days a week’. The passenger had never heard this phrase before and etched it in his mind. When he arrived at his friend’s place – the destination of his lift – he shared the phrase. ‘Right’ said his mate and then the two pals sat down together and started writing ‘Ooh I need your lovin’… eight days a week.

That is one story of how the Beatles got to write and record Eight Days a Week in October of 1964. Another story says that the phrase Eight Days A Week was a Ringoism – a phrase used by Ringo Star to complain about the Beatles workload.

Whether it was a shooting Star quote or a caught phrase in a cab, Paul McCartney had an ear for melody as well as an ear for a phrase. He picked up on a line from ordinary conversation and then he and John Lennon turned it into magic.

Another song writing bloke was in need of a good idea because the operettas he and his writing partner were creating had started to lose favour. To clear his mind and kick-start it in a different way, he went to a London exhibition of Japanese Culture. The man was W.S. Gilbert and the exhibition inspired an idea that became The Mikado. An idea that then inspired his writing partner Arthur Sullivan to compose arguably his greatest musical score.

The American choreographer Twyla Tharp in her book The Creative Habit describes the process of finding an idea as scratching. She believes most creative folk are not simply hit by a thunderbolt of an idea (or an apple falling from a tree) but that most creative folk are scratchers – the thing you do when you can’t wait for the thunderbolt to come and hit you. Scratching is digging through everything in order to find something.

Imagine a woman splashing hot black wax onto panes of glass then looking for possibilities in the way the wax forms patterns. That’s how leading Australian contemporary artist Lindy Lee scratches. In the ABC series Artscape – Artists at Work she describes the patterns as a splat and that the splat is unique. It gives birth to a design on glass or silk or panels.

Imagine a man screwing up a piece of paper and tossing the paper on a table then examining and re-examining the paper before hitting upon an idea of what shape the roof of a Museum could be. The man is architect Frank Gehry and the paper becomes the pattern for the roof of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao though it could have also been inspirational in the design of the Dancing House in Prague or the Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown LA.

Lindy Lee scratched with wax, Frank Gehry with paper, Twyla Tharp scratches with anything, anywhere to get a starting point to something, somewhere that eventually becomes one of her 130 plus original dance choreographies.

Some creative folk change their scenery in order to scratch. A trip to Firenze, Kathmandu or Timbuktu might be just the thing to fire the creative fingernails. After a failed album in 1983 (Hearts & Bones), and a failed second marriage to actress Carrie Fisher, singer songwriter Paul Simon cured his supposed Writer’s Block with a journey to the musical sounds of South Africa. In 1986 he released the ground breaking Graceland album inspired by what he heard as he scratched his way around South Africa.

Some folk travel the world and scratch the sounds, sights and tastes of diverse cultures others stay in their bedroom and scratch their bum in memory of things past. French writer and philosopher Marcel Proust, spend most of his time living in his bedroom at his parents’ house rarely straying from his cork-lined room. (Cork lined? Can anyone explain?) Yet, he still scratched his way to bucket loads of ideas that ended up in huge books that influenced many thousands of great minds.

So, whether you stay in and scratch your own posterior or go out and scratch the world, when you need a creative idea, scratch.

Scratch until you find the inkling for the ink, the baby steps for the dance, the hint of the angel within the marble, the cabby’s sentence that unravels the song. Creativity requires a tangible idea to get it going. So, where do YOU scratch?

Do you:

• Collect interesting newspaper clippings
• Listen to music that is not usually on your playlist
• Read competitively (Twyla Tharp says she reads competitively in memory of Mark Twain’s line that ‘the man who does not read has no advantage over the man who can not’)
• Read broadly and randomly
• Visit galleries and art websites
• Listen to the everyday talk of everyday folk in everyday lives full of everyday miracles

Get into the creative habit of scratching; get into the creative habit of a singing nun – how do you solve a problem like Maria? – Scratch.

Then turn the ideas into other ideas; brew them, chumbawamba them, mix them into an everyday creativity – a surprise for your kids, a gift for your partner, a new concept for your work… perpetual scratcher Helen Keller, blind, deaf and speechless wrote ‘Make your life itself a creative work of art’.

Start scratching!

Glenn Capelli

Where to from here?

• Where do you go to get an idea – do you take a trip, go for a walk, have a shower? Consider your own mechanisms of scratching
• Can any writers, artists, sculptors, songwriters… pinpoint where their idea for a particular work started? Was it a thunderbolt or a scratching process or a bit of both?
• I recently ran a series of workshops for scientists and researchers at the Western Australian institute of Medical Research – one of the things we explored is that often science breakthroughs (and Nobel Prizes) have not occurred from a Eureka moment but more from looking at something and thinking ‘that’s odd’. Consider