Stargate and Ester Dean, Making Music Hits. On a mild Monday afternoon in mid-January, Ester Dean, a songwriter and vocalist, arrived at Roc the Mic Studios, on West Twenty-seventh Street in Manhattan, for the first of five days of songwriting sessions. Her engineer, Aubry Delaine, whom she calls Big Juice, accompanied her. Dean picked up an iced coffee at a Starbucks on Seventh Avenue, took the elevator up to Roc the Mic, and passed through a lounge that had a pool table covered in taupe-colored felt. Two sets of soundproofed doors led to the control room, a windowless cockpit that might have been the flight deck of a spaceship. Tor Hermansen and Mikkel Eriksen, the team of Norwegian writer-producers professionally known as Stargate, were waiting there for Dean.
Most of the songs played on Top Forty radio are collaborations between producers like Stargate and “top line” writers like Ester Dean. The top-liner is usually a singer, too, and often provides the vocal for the demo, a working draft of the song. How did this happen? The Creative Act: Marcel Duchamp's 1957 Classic, Read by the Artist Himself. John Cleese on the 5 Factors to Make Your Life More Creative. By Maria Popova “Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating.” Much has been said about how creativity works, its secrets, its origins, and what we can do to optimize ourselves for it.
In this excerpt from his fantastic 1991 lecture, John Cleese offers a recipe for creativity, delivered with his signature blend of cultural insight and comedic genius. Space (“You can’t become playful, and therefore creative, if you’re under your usual pressures.”)Time (“It’s not enough to create space; you have to create your space for a specific period of time.”)Time (“Giving your mind as long as possible to come up with something original,” and learning to tolerate the discomfort of pondering time and indecision.)Confidence (“Nothing will stop you being creative so effectively as the fear of making a mistake.”)Humor (“The main evolutionary significance of humor is that it gets us from the closed mode to the open mode quicker than anything else.”)
Creativity is not a talent. Thanks, Simon. Learning on the Edge. One of the first exercises I ask the pre-service and in-service teachers in my Psychology of Learning course to do is define learning. This is not a look-up-in-the-dictionary type of activity. They are asked to do so using their own thoughts, images, body movements, and chants/music. It is a difficult exercise. Actually, I find it quite baffling that educators don’t more often explore the question, “What is learning?” Isn’t learning the ultimate goal, vision, mission of education? If so, why is the implementation of learning, often known as curriculum, done so without a clear, clean, shared knowledge about what learning is? I believe, as Grant Wiggins does: Though we often lose sight of this basic fact, the point of learning is not just to know things but to be a different person – more mature, more wise, more self-disciplined, more effective, and more productive in the broadest sense.
Everything you know about curriculum may be wrong. The Map is Not the Territory Like this: Like Loading... Magic Hours: Tom Bissell on the Secrets of Creators and Creation. By Maria Popova “To create anything… is to believe, if only momentarily, you are capable of magic.” Creativity is a peculiar beast. Its nebulous nature and elusive allure don’t stop us from going after it with stubborn precision, tracing its history, dissecting its neuroscience, flowcharting our way to it and itemizing it into a 5-point plan, all in the hope that, if only we understood its inner workings enough and engineered the right conditions, it would bestow its gifts upon us. But, as any creator would attest, there are factors at play well outside our control.
Take Melville’s Moby-Dick, for instance. Emily Dickinson and William Faulkner suffered a similar fate, their works mere seashells washed ashore the island of literary recognition by the capricious currents of the vast and all-engulfing ocean of chance. What faith, then, can the poet or novelist place in his or her work’s survival? Can writing be taught? Donating = Loving Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter.
On Scientific Taste. By Maria Popova “Our taste derives from the summation of all that we have learnt from others, experienced and thought.” Cambridge University animal pathology professor W. I. B. Beveridge’s 1957 gem The Art of Scientific Investigation (public library; public domain) is the gift that keeps on giving. Taste can perhaps best be described as a sense of beauty or aesthetic sensibility, and it may be reliable or not, depending on the individual. This last bit, speaking to the combinatorial nature of creativity, is something we’ve heard many times before — from artists, designers, and writers, or the loosely defined “creative world.”
Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. Share on Tumblr. Networked Knowledge and Combinatorial Creativity. By Maria Popova Why creativity is like LEGO, or what Richard Dawkins has to do with Susan Sontag and Gandhi. In May, I had the pleasure of speaking at the wonderful Creative Mornings free lecture series masterminded by my studiomate Tina of Swiss Miss fame.
I spoke about Networked Knowledge and Combinatorial Creativity, something at the heart of Brain Pickings and of increasing importance as we face our present information reality. The talk is now available online — full (approximate) transcript below, enhanced with images and links to all materials referenced in the talk. These are pages from the most famous florilegium, completed by Thomas of Ireland in the 14th century. In talking about these medieval manuscripts, Adam Gopnik writes in The New Yorker: Our minds were altered less by books than by index slips.” You may have heard this anecdote. Here’s the same sentiment from iconic designer Paula Scher on the creation of the famous Citi logo: Kind of LEGOs. And I like this last part.
Advice on Living the Creative Life from Neil Gaiman. Remembering Ray Bradbury with 11 Timeless Quotes on Joy, Failure, Writing, Creativity, and Purpose. By Maria Popova The literary hero in his own words. What a tragic season it’s been for literary heroes who defined generations of readers and creators. Last month, we lost Maurice Sendak, and this week, Ray Bradbury — beloved author, champion of curiosity, relentless advocate of libraries — passed way at the age of 91.
To celebrate his life and legacy, here are eleven of his most timeless insights on writing, culture, creativity, failure, happiness, and more. On doing what you love, in this wonderful 2008 video interview from the National Endowment for the Arts: Love what you do and do what you love. On art, in Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You: We have our Arts so we won’t die of Truth. UPDATE: Reader Dr. On reading as a prerequisite for democracy, from the same 2008 NEA interview: If you know how to read, you have a complete education about life, then you know how to vote within a democracy. That’s the great secret of creativity. Donating = Loving. Andrew Zuckerman: Curiosity and Rigor are the Secret to Creativity. Austin Kleon on 10 Things Every Creator Should Remember But We Often Forget. By Maria Popova What T.S. Eliot has to do with genetics and the optimal investment theory for your intellectual life. Much has been said about the secrets of creativity and where good ideas come from, but most of that wisdom can be lost on young minds just dipping their toes in the vast and tumultuous ocean of self-initiated creation.
Some time ago, artist and writer Austin Kleon — one of my favorite thinkers, a keen observer of and participant in the creative economy of the digital age — was invited to give a talk to students, the backbone for which was a list of 10 things he wished he’d heard as a young creator: So widely did the talk resonate that Kleon decided to deepen and enrich its message in Steal Like an Artist — an intelligent and articulate manifesto for the era of combinatorial creativity and remix culture that’s part 344 Questions, part Everything is a Remix, part The Gift, at once borrowed and entirely original. The book opens with a timeless T.S. Donating = Loving. Isaac Asimov on Creativity in Education & The Future of Science. Twilight Zone Creator Rod Serling on Where Good Ideas Come From.