OMMWRITER BLOG

Is there a method to the creative madness, and do we need one? That’s a matter of opinion. However, a basic sense of structure is most definitely helpful.

If you’re a fountain of creativity, then there’s no short-term reason to change what you’re doing. However, if you notice that you’re working a lot harder than you used to, it may be useful to have a look what you did when creativity was flowing easily.

With the basic ideas that there are new combinations waiting to be discovered, and that what we already have may be used in different ways, a few steps start to appear:

1) Research: Research your immediate challenge, and connect it with your general knowledge. Done well, this can be a fun and rewarding learning experience.

2) Puzzle: You’ve gathered lots of pieces. Now it’s time to put them together. Look for combinations and try them for fit, over and over again if needed.

3) Digest: Put your work away, and do whatever inspires you or connects you to your emotional self. That’s where the good stories come from. Intellectual silence, remember?

4) Define: You’re rested and back on the horse thinking about your challenge constantly. All of a sudden the connection drops before you like an apple from a tree. “I got it!”

5) Refine: You’ve found a good connection. Now it’s time make it practical and polish up the chrome to make it shine and serve its purpose well.

These steps may happen more or less subconsciously, and often work together in a non-linear way. The great thing is that increased awareness of and focus on what we do will enable us to hone skills that are pretty sharp already, and also to get better at things we may not even have noticed that we do or don’t do.

A short personal share to illustrate:

This fall a friend asked me to help her find a gift, a purse for her mother, because Americans just love European accessories. (For reasons unnecessary to explain to male readers, I went along shopping for purses only because she’s one of my best friends. That’s it. I swear.)

I’d never really noticed anything specific about purses before. Once we started looking, though, they were everywhere. Even today, purses and hand bags seem to come into my field of vision in all kinds of expected and unexpected places. They have different details in their finish, there are lots of locking mechanisms, some purses are for clutching, other bags can be hung on the lower arm, and some are best worn on the shoulder. The list goes on. It also started occuring to me that people buy hand bags for different reasons. She who buys a purse to hang on her arm may live a different life than a woman who prefers a bag on her shoulder. The same person may also have different types of hand bags depending on what she’s doing. There are all kinds of possible combinations.

The point to this purse ramble is that objects that were never really there before started showing up ready to be connected. Why? Directed attention.

The five steps above are great tools to bring directed attention into the creative process. Even if it does come naturally, there’s a good chance that breaking it down more clearly and putting more attention on the individual parts would be very valuable.

Anyone who’s truly successful at anything challenging does this. They take the time to look at every part or step involved in what they’re doing and decide how well it’s working. If it could be better, they either increase or decrease intensity, or do it differently all together. Rinse and repeat.

Everything is connected, the connection just needs to be found. To tell that story well we have to know how and where to look. This requires training of the brain and the eye.

The brain is a great tool, so train it well!

Yours in creative brawn,

Ivin & The OmmWriter Crew

Our blog has been silent for a long time. We are still live and well, and the creative juices are flowing abundantly. Coming out of blog silence, we had an urge to rant about silence and creativity. True to the Omm concept, we set our keyboard to non-distraction mode and let our fingers run freely over it from beginning to end. So take a deep breath, dive in, and see you back on the surface in a couple of minutes.

Silence means inactivity. Or does it?

One way of looking at silence is exactly that: lack of momentum. It is legitimate to assume that where there is inactivity on the surface, there is little activity below the surface as well. It is legitimate because it is the human condition to look at the surface and take snapshots of it. It helps us navigate, but more often it cheats us and leads us down the wrong path.

One reason why this assumption cheats us is that it disregards process or motivation. In creativity, as in many other areas of life, process and motivation are at the core of our behavior. We see productive creative people and wonder from where they get their inspiration. How do they come up with one idea after another, month after month, all year around?

Finding the connection between silence and creative output can be difficult, but we are likely to discover that it has less to do with moments of inspiration, and more to do with focus and hard work. The question then is: how does silence fit with hard work and focus?

Grandparents often want a nap after dinner. Why? It is good for digestion.

A creative output is often a product of considerable periods of concentration followed by a long silence, compared to the idea of say a strike of inspirational lightning on a day with clear blue skies. When you wake up at four in the morning to find yourself writing out the final version of a piece of copy in two minutes, it has little to do with divine intervention or the like. It is more likely due to the silence you had in your sleep. After hours and days of mulling over a concept or a sentence, your subconscious mind pulls everything together.

This period of concentration and pondering is described by leading professionals in the creative industry as the digestive process. (When you want to digest properly, you need silence. At least that is what grandparents would say before their after-dinner nap back in the old days.)

During this time, we look at everything we have from all angles and put them together for fit. Some pieces fit, some do not fit. Some fit, but not in a way that inspires us. Or maybe they do inspire, but are better fit for a different purpose. Some pieces belong only in one place and stay there. Others are still in the maybe pile. We try them over and over, time and time again, then once again, before the very last time, but then it turns out that the very last time was only the second last time. This is when it all collapses. Silence. Mental silence, at least.

Next we go to bounce a ball against the wall; skateboard around the office; bake five different cakes; scrub our tub (if we are lucky enough to have a tub, not many people do these days after this shower thing took over); hike, or ride our bike; watch our favorite movie maker’s last masterpiece; or dance to our favorite tunes, or to our own tune. Anything to stimulate our imagination and emotions while our subconscious mind works its magic.

Silence can help us see clearly that which is clearly there but that comes across as unclear because something is in the way.

Silence is a space where concentration, clarity, and certainty often arise. Sometimes noise and activity can distract us from creating and digesting. This is why we are fortunate to have OmmWriter. The visual silence on the screen and the sound of silence when we are plugged in with our headphones create a vacuum where our conscious mind has fewer distractions to follow, which in turn allows room for clarity to arise. If we were to be ambitious, and why not, it can be fun at times, we may even say that OmmWriter could create a shortcut into our creative subconscious.

In that sense, OmmWriter is a plug-in-and-write meditation tool for writers and creatives, and others who require a particular focus in their work. We say meditation in the sense that the mind gets to be in an environment where distractions are OK but is given little importance. Consequently, there is more space for what is latent, whether it is a detail that needs to be spotted, or a story that is ready to be unveiled and told.

Using OmmWriter can be a bit like looking into a sink full of bubbly dishwater. All you see is bubbles, and perhaps a hint of something below the surface. When we open the writer and plug in our headphones, we may experience it as if we were pushing one of the plastic food containers from the fridge through the bubbles and down into the water. Now we can see the bottom of our sink and all the dishes more clearly. (Cheesy, yes. This post was written the morning after cleaning out the fridge. It was the first thing that came to mind. :) )

Some of us find that making use of the silence in OmmWriter takes a little practice. We are so used to some form of exterior energy propelling us forward that there is an instant abstinence when we plug in to silence.

The key, though, is to keep from being distracted by the lack of distraction. Give it a few moments, ride off that first wave of need for something to happen. Avoid scratching that itch that tells you that you need to do something else, and simply receive and accept the silence. Once we do, all kinds of things are bound to happen.

If you made it this far, thank you for reading. The next post will be briefer. Promise. Now let us take a nap before we meet next. We have been working hard, and ideas are waiting to appear – after some silence.

Happy writing and creating,

Ivin & The OmmWriter Crew

By the way, if you would like to try the OmmWriter writing environment for Mac, PC or iPad, you know where to find it. :)