A Good Idea Is Of No Use To You Unless You Can Find It
A couple years before he started and went on to become one of the great stand-up comedians of all time, when he was 19, George Carlin was a DJ at a radio station in Shreveport, Louisiana. At the radio station, “I had a boss,” Carlin said, “and my boss told me to write down every idea I get even if I can’t use it at the time…and have a system for filing it away—because a good idea is of no use to you unless you can find it.” Carlin began capturing things—phrases he liked, “voguish words that come into style and remain there,” observations that made him laugh, etc.—on scraps of paper, which he filed in boxes categorized by themes and subjects like “On Humor,” “Oddball Facts,” “The Way We Talk, and “TV-Style Bits.” When he was well into his comedy career, Carlin would disappoint an admirer—who wanted to believe that there was something magical or mysterious about Carlin’s creative process and his (seemingly) ability to come up with novel jokes and ideas— by talking about his capturing and filing system before explaining that a lot of creativity “is discovery. A lot of things are lying around waiting to be discovered and our job is to just notice them and bring them to life.” Noticing, discovering, capturing, filing, and bringing things to life—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
Now We Make What’s Called A Charm Bracelet
Jerry Seinfeld was once thinking about golf announcers whispering. He then found something in his notebook about how people whisper when they talk about tipping. “Now we make what’s called a charm bracelet,” Seinfeld said, explaining his creative process. When you notice a commonality between two or more things, when one thing “reminds you” of another thing, Seinfeld said, “You say, ‘Oh, there’s something there.’ And now we make what’s called a charm bracelet: You take these things and you find a way to associate them.” “So that’s the whole process: I’m thinking about this [one] thing and then remember this [other] thing, and then you go, ‘Oh there’s something there—let me connect those things.’” (You can watch how the “whispering” joke came together here).
If You Have Not Eaten German Bread…
In 1988, while he was a graduate student at Stanford, Amor Towles also worked as an assistant to the curator of the Stanford Library. One day he was down in the stacks looking for a collection of Anton Chekhov’s short stories. Before he got to the collection of short stories, Towles landed on Chekov’s collected letters. Towles pulled the book off the shelf, skimmed through it, and eventually, a letter from 1904 caught his attention. While on a trip in Germany, Chekhov wrote to his sister, and among some details about his time in Germany, Chekhov wrote that the food in Germany was terrific. The bread especially— “if you have not eaten German bread,” Chekhov said, “then you have not eaten bread!.” Attached to the sentence about the bread, there was a number to indicate a footnote, which explained that the Soviets oversaw the first edition of the collected letters, and in that first edition, the line in which Chekhov praised German bread was eliminated from the text. When he read that footnote, Towles said, he was struck by the fact that the Soviet system worked in such a way that, despite all the books published in a given year, “some guy in an office with a pencil found this offending sentence on page like 400 of this guy’s collected letters. That’s quite impressive in its chilling way.” Impressed by the letter and the footnote, Towles said, “I Xeroxed it and stuck it in my files.” Over 30 years go by, and while outlining his second novel, A Gentleman In Moscow (which takes place in Russia between 1922 and 1954),Towles has the idea to include a character named Mishka, who is to be a childhood friend of the novelist’s protagonist, Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov. Among a variety of character traits, Towles knew that Mishka would be an advocate of the Revolution and therefore would somehow come into conflict with the powers that be. “What I didn’t know,” Towles said, “was what was going to be the reason that Mishka goes head to head with the powers that be and gets put in prison.” He later shifted from the outlining to the writing stage of his process, and when he got to the Mishka scene, Towles got stuck. He wrote three different versions that he knew weren’t quite right before he got up from his desk and paced around his office. “Suddenly,” Towles said, “it was like, ‘Oh my God, I know what it is. I know exactly what it is. Mishka’s gonna be the guy who’s asked [and refuses] to remove the sentence from the Chekhov letter.’ So, literally, I open my filing cabinet and there is the Xerox from 30 years ago. And that gets integrated into the story.” “I tell that story,” Towles said, “because I do want you to have that sense that, over the course of your life, it’s these little things that are happening in the periphery and you kind of have to pay attention to them and then forget them, and then you have the opportunity to have them surface and play, hopefully, an important role in your creative work down the road.”
The Golconda Reader Par Excellence
Ralph Waldo Emerson liked to identify four classes of readers: the hourglass, the sponge, the jelly-bag, and the Golconda. The hourglass takes nothing in. The sponge holds on to nothing but a little dirt and sediment. The jelly-bag doesn’t recognize good stuff, but holds on to worthless stuff. And the Golconda (a rich mine) keeps only the pure gems. “Emerson was the Golconda reader par excellence,” one biographer, Robert D. Richardson, writes in a little book on the role of reading in Emerson’s creative process, “or what miners call a ‘high-grader’—a person who goes through a mine and pockets only the richest lumps of ore.” Whenever he came across a rich gem in a book he was reading, Emerson would first add it to one of his notebooks, which he referred to as his “savings bank,” before later methodically copying and filing it somewhere in what he called his “indexes.” “When he came to write,” Richardson says, “he would work through his indexes, making a list of possible passages. He then assembled, ordered, and reordered these into the essay, talk, or lecture.”
Rejecting, Sifting, Transforming, Ordering, and Arranging
Assembling, ordering, and reordering—this, the 19th-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche writes in Human, All-Too-Human (a collection of thoughts he jotted down on walks taken during a period where he was having frequent stomach issues and headaches), is the ultimate skill of the great artist or thinker. “It is to the interest of the artist,” Nietzsche writes, “that there should be a belief in sudden suggestions, so-called inspirations; as if the idea of a work of art, of poetry, the fundamental thought of a philosophy shone down from heaven like a ray of grace. In reality, the imagination of the good artist or thinker constantly produces good, mediocre, and bad, but his judgment, trained and sharpened to a fine point, rejects, selects, and connects…All great artists and thinkers are great workers, indefatigable not only in inventing, but also in rejecting, sifting, transforming, ordering and arranging.”
Creativity Comes To You, But Only After…
I’ve said before that my favorite definition of creativity is Robert Greene’s: “Creativity is a function of the previous work you put in.” I mentioned above that the Carlin admirer was disappointed when Carlin demystified his creativity. I get why one would find that disappointing, but I love stories like those above for the same reason I love Robert’s definition: because it means creativity is not some mysterious form of magic. It’s not something some people simply have and some people simply don’t. It’s something rewarded to those who put the work in. “If,” Robert continues, “you put a lot of hours into thinking and researching and reading, hour after hour—a very tedious process—creativity will come to you…It comes to you, but only after tedious hours of work and process.” If you notice, capture, Xerox, file, sift, reject, order, reorder and arrange…creativity will come to you.