Schedule Queen & Mother or Four

Posted on September 12, 2010 by galarzamonsalve

Highly Creative people keep favored routines.  For ten days I’m posting about the routines of individual Creators, historical and current. My previous post: Same Routine for 52 Years & No Teaching Job.

Susan Wise-Bauer

Writer, Historian, English Professor, Founder of Peace Hill Press

Where is your favorite place to write? Time of day?
Last year, my father turned an old chicken shed on our farm into a separate timber-framed office for me. Until then, I’d used a little room in our attic. There were points to being the madwoman in the attic, but I had so many books in piles that there was only a narrow path between the door and my desk. My new office is close to the house, but because it’s a separate building, I can’t hear the children thumping and yelling while I’m working.

As far as time of day—I probably do my best work first thing in the morning, and on mornings when I don’t go running, I enjoy going down before sunrise with a cup of coffee and getting right to work. But this is a job for me; I keep to a pretty strict schedule, and when it’s time for me to write, I sit down and get started.

How do you make time for research and writing when you’re also homeschooling your children, teaching at William and Mary, finishing your doctorate, running a family farm and publishing company, and active in your church community? Do you keep office hours? Burn the midnight oil? Make your kids take 4-hour naps?

No, just two-hour naps.

There are four intersecting answers to this question. First: I enjoy my work, and I work at a naturally quick pace. Everyone’s got a different natural tempo; my parents say I was born on fast-forward.

Second: Although I’ve done all of those things at various times, I don’t think I’ve ever done them all simultaneously. When my children were smaller I taught more and wrote less, and didn’t have a publishing company. Now that I’ve got a publishing company and a busier writing career, I’ve taken a teaching leave from William and Mary (I’m a “research associate” right now, which means I can keep my faculty privileges without teaching—I couldn’t function without my year-long-checkout-no-limit-no-overdue-fees faculty card). I’m still active in my church community, but I’ve limited my involvement to one major volunteer role and I’m getting more ruthless about declining every other opportunity. And as for the doctorate—well, I’m thirty-eight, and I’ve just finished my dissertation defense, which is not exactly fast-track. It takes longer when you’re leading a regular grown-up life.

Third: I have a lot of help. My husband has a flexible schedule and does a good part of the home schooling; we divide our work and family responsibilities between us. We both parent, we both work, I do the cooking and he does the grocery shopping. My mother has taught all of the children how to read and continues to work with the younger two. My father manages the farm and is the CEO of the publishing company—I handle the creative end, and he handles the business end. Plus my mother and I share a housekeeper, and I have a personal assistant who comes in once a week to get me organized and do all the random things (from dry cleaning to library runs) that I haven’t gotten around to. No working wife and mother does it all—she hires help, or else decides what to leave undone.

Fourth: I am the Schedule Queen. I have a master family calendar that I keep both in a Daytimer and on my iCal—the iCal also has all my work deadlines on it, so that I don’t schedule a family vacation and a manuscript delivery for the same week. Our days run on a very regular pattern: the kids always know what they’re supposed to be doing, which parent is on kid duty and which is working, and what the next part of the day holds. Unless I’m on vacation, I’m up by 6 AM, go running, shower, and either get to work or start on my day with the kids by 8 AM. We have lunch, regular afternoon alone time/rest time, regular bedtimes. That may sound a little Von Trappish, but it sure lends itself to peace and order. (Also we have one day a week where we all sit around in our bathrobes and eat popcorn for breakfast if we feel like it.)

(Thanks to Mindy Winthrow).

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Creativity’s Terrain, Part 4: Play Alone

Posted on August 20, 2010 by galarzamonsalve

You have less control over your environment and the environment in which your children grow than you think. The variables are infinite. For two weeks I’m writing about Creativity’s Terrain and the variables you can control. Yesterday I wrote about Fear and the Power of Love.

A creation of importance can only be produced when its author isolates himself, it is a child of solitude. -Goethe

Time to be alone with your thoughts is indispensable to Creation.

Inventor Nikola Tesla said,

The mind is sharper and keener in seclusion and uninterrupted solitude. Originality thrives in seclusion free of outside influences beating upon us to cripple the creative mind.  Be alone—that is the secret of invention: be alone, that is when ideas are born.

Highly Creative people are either comfortable with solitude, or fight the loneliness and play alone anyway. The point of alone-time is to let your mind wander without intrusion.  You don’t need a lonely prairie or monastery to achieve a quiet mind.  Every day, thousands sit alone with their thoughts, at Starbucks. Coffee shops aren’t exactly temples of peace and quiet.

Solitude, is a state of mind.

Literary critic Daphne Merkin felt deep loneliness as a child.  The laughing and crying and general chaos of living with five siblings seemed only to exacerbate her neurosis. She began a lifelong attachment to psychotherapy, at ten. Merkin writes,

All those years, all that money, all that unrequited love. It began way back when I was a child, an anxiety-riddled 10-year-old who didn’t want to go to school in the morning and had difficulty falling asleep at night.

What I do know, aside from the fact that the unconscious plays strange tricks and that the past stalks the present in ways we can’t begin to imagine, is a certain language, a certain style of thinking that, in its capacity for reframing your life story, becomes — how should I put this? — addictive.

As an adult, Merkin had time to work alone, but her mind still would not let her.  Entropy stood at the gates of each thought and so she sought a hand to pull her through, three times each week,  even into her 50′s. Painful though her fight against loneliness has been, Merkin found a way to achieve a peaceful mind long enough to think and write Creatively.

Find a way, a space and a time, to play alone happily.  Give your children the gift of being alone, not as a punishment, but as a lifelong treasure.

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Creativity’s Terrain, Part 1: Throw Out The Trash

Posted on August 17, 2010 by galarzamonsalve

You have less control over your environment and the environment in which your children grow than you think. The variables are infinite. For two weeks I’m writing about Creativity’s Terrain and the variables you can control. Yesterday I wrote the Introduction to this series.

Creativity dies in a bed of apathy.

Trash is whatever breeds apathy for Creative work.  Highly Creative people live, breathe, love and hate over their work. The good and bad breathe passion into the task at hand.

Albert Einstein, ended his days hating Quantum Theory and fighting  fellow physicist and friend Neils Bohr to throw it out of the academe.

Apathy-breeding trash is highly individual. What is trash for you, is not trash for me.  An idea, object, task or anything else that takes up time or space must be worthy of your Creative work. If not, throw it out.  For architect Sarah Susanka, trash came as small, urgent tasks. Susanka says,

I’ve been conditioned to believe, since childhood, that an effective person takes care of problems, as soon as they arise.

That doesn’t sound like a bad thing…But, until I recognized this pattern in myself, I never understood why the part of being an architect that I enjoyed most–the design part, where you sit down and develop the shape and the character of the house or addition you are working on–would always be the last thing I’d get around to during my day…

I’d take the design work home with me, and do it late at night,  when there was nothing to interrupt me.

To reverse the trend, Susanka began cultivating apathy for trash, rather than allowing trash to belittle Creativity in her life.

A few years ago, I noticed my daughter’s time at the piano rose and fell with the seasons. Our mid-November days seemed thickest of all, with her music. But, Summer Solstice seemed bare of even one 5 minute interlude of live music. The cause: her teacher took the summer off to hang with her children. The result: I cut this pattern toward piano apathy by switching to a year-round teacher.

For me, a social group turned out to be trash I had to let go of.  Good people all, they gathered at a park to open vapid minds and share nothing deep, true or controversial with each other while watching their children play. I came along hoping a child of mine would make a friend. But soon realized the cost of regular attendance was quite high.

Plato said,

People are like dirt. They can either nourish you and help you grow as a person or they can stunt your growth and make you wilt and die.

Eventually, I gave up on the group and sighed in relief to be done with that social experiment that left my children and I a little sadder and a little duller every time.

For my children, high action kid’s movies seem to leave them limp and less able to dream of possibilities.

Existential Psychologist Rollo May said,

Hate is not the opposite of love; apathy is.

The amount of trash you allow in your Creative Terrain is something you can control.  Beware of apathy.


Filed under: Creativity Killer, Creativity's Terrain, Passion | Tagged: , , , , , | 9 Comments »

Defining Creativity, Part 6: Creativity can be Supressed by Culture

Posted on August 2, 2010 by galarzamonsalve

Every day, for a week,  I’m writing about the definitions of Creativity thinkers have offered throughout history and why each one cannot be the final definition. Yesterday I wrote about Renaissance Women with Self-Control and True Believers.

China’s High Creativity first peaked while Europe wallowed in bloody Dark Age wars and then again during Europe’s bubonic plagued Middle Ages.

But Creativity in art, music, writing, medicine and global exploration came to a halt in China just as Europe emerged weak, but hungry-for-life, for the Renaissance.

Economist Diego Cumin says a region’s creativity and technology in A.D. 1500 is an extraordinarily reliable predictor of wealth today, across the globe, with the exception of China.

The great halt of Creation in China, as real as its Great Wall, could have been limited to just decades. But China’s  future Creative potential keep declining. Chinese culture grew more rigid and more impenetrable. Eventually extreme cultural convergence took hold to the exclusion of the individual growth. Trade with other nations closed and stagnation set in.

Creativity is not a Lone-Ranger process.  Creativity is fostered or suppressed by cultural milieus and economic opportunities.

Individuals today are breaking free from the culture of conformity in China, but the cultural redirection towards openness will be slow.  Creative output in China is still tiny relative to the size of its population.



Filed under: Creativity's Terrain, Creativity: Historical Perspective, Defining Creativity, Uncategorized, What is Creativity | Tagged: , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

White: Fad? Or Creativity’s Favorite Color?

Posted on July 22, 2010 by galarzamonsalve

Walls move around easily inside Stanford University’s new d. School Design building.

We’re into modularity and adaptability. Most things around here are on casters so they can be readily repositioned.

But d.School’s moving walls, slightly uncomfortable stools and adaptable tables don’t catch your eye first. The white does.  Walls are white, floors are white, sunlight streams through high-set windows looking white.

White is in. You can even buy Idea Paint to turn any room, like the walls at d.School, into a giant whiteboard.

Writer Ambrose Bierce wrote,

Eloquence is the art of orally persuading fools that white is the color it appears to be.

If white is the color of malleability and flexibility of thought, no wonder it’s so popular with designers.  Professional artists seem to agree. The color white:

* aids mental clarity
* encourages us to clear clutter or obstacles
* evokes purification of thoughts or actions
* enables fresh beginnings

My foodie sister, who’s been diligently replacing her Venetian-style plates with simpler white ones, says,

All the world’s best chefs use white plates . Ferran Andria does. Gabrielle Hamilton does.  They all use white plates.  It showcases the food.

White is also popular with super-star bloggers. The most fabulous personal blogs on the web, think Zen Habits and Happiness Project, have white backgrounds.

Places where Creativity happens are often well-chosen and designed for flow.

Creativity Scholar Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi says

Creative individuals may seem to disregard their environment and work happily in even the most dismal surroundings…But in reality, the spatio-temporal context in which creative persons live has consequences that often go unnoticed. The right milieu…can affect the production of novelty…

In a recent interview, architect Richard Meir said,

The whiteness reflects all the colors around us. In my office here, there is so much color I can barely stand it. Thank God the walls are white so I can see the color in a painting, and in the books on the shelves.

White is possibilities.  White showcases the important.

The house I live in came with walls so white, they clashed with my teeth.  I could not stand it.  I had to fill it with color and books and neat stuff. But now nothing is really highlighted as super- important. I don’t seem to have a designated white area-of-possibilities.  I have two huge black chalkboards hanging in my dining room. I draw trees on them, or write other people’s poems in schoolgirl script.  I use white chalk.

But, if white is the color of possibilities, what should I do about the lack of white in my home?  Is this white-love just a fad?

I’m feeling the pressure.

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