Feineigle.com - Creativity

2025-10-19

Tags: Art · Creativity

The key (to anything really) is to stick with it and every day do something that advances your project specifically or your craft generally. Doing this should help to get you into a flow-like state where it becomes habit and you simply "do the work" every day without really thinking about it. The author argues that there is no such writer's block (but this could be applied to any creative endevour) and a lack of daily practice is what keeps people from getting things done; if you don't feel inspired, write anyway, write junk, throw it out, keep writing. "We don't write because we feel like it, we feel like it because we write." With all this practice every day taking up a large chunk of your life, one should recognize that if you are planning to become great at your craft, understand there will be a sacrifice - you can't do everything.

Creative Act

2025-10-09

Tags: Art · Creativity

Apparently Rick Rubin is a music producer, and while he certainly makes use of some art as music examples there are plenty of other media he explores with his examples and musings. Some of the advice given is quite literal in how you might go about whittling your work down or finding ways to see the works (or world) through a different lens. Other advice is more abstract, but useful none-the-less, and helps you find, start, or complete a project when you are stuck. I think his advice on treating every project as nothing more than an experiment, that you can discard at a moment's notice like a child dropping one toy for another, helps to alleviate stress about it being good enough and simultaneously allowing even failures to be seen as experimental stepping stones that will make the next project that much better. Finally another important take-away is the idea that you can train for anything - that obviously means the technical aspect of your craft, but it also means you can train yourself to quiet you mind, to focus on different aspects of whatever you are looking at, or even how you give and receive criticism.

Catching the Big Fish

2025-10-01

Tags: Art · Creativity

Each of the damn near 100 'chapters' is little more than a couple pages that read more like a long form Twitter post than anything resembling an actual book chapter. It feels like it was written by someone who doesn't write for an audience of people that don't read. Overall I generally disliked the whole idea of all these 'random' chapters flowing in no particular order, but I must admit that there are a few gems, particularly on the topic of creativity and film making, hidden among the dross. Lynch's creative process can probably be summed up accurately as: meditate and be happy. With this, I can not disagree.

How to Solve It - A New Aspect of Mathematical Method

2018-08-08

Tags: Creativity · Math

This book is much more than a simple, or complex, math book --it is be a must read for teachers in general. The most important lesson of the book, in my opinion, is that teachers (besides repeating, repeating, repeating) need not 'give it all away.' The student should never be robbed of working out a solution for themselves; slogging thought the difficulties, feeling the thrill of the hunt, and finally experiencing the joy of victory will instill much more than any rote lesson could ever achieve. Other than that broad advice, the book lays out, in mathematical terms (though it could be applied most generally), how to problem solve by planning around what you know and what you want to know; catalog your knows and unknowns, draw a picture, and work from the end towards the beginning (reverse planning). Other ideas concerning how you might tackle a problem are modifying the problem with the addition or subtraction of data to make it similar to a more tractable problem you are familiar with and pointing out that even failing is progress as long as you learn something in your failure.

The Act of Creation

2018-07-12

Tags: Creativity · Psychology

While likely a less-than-reputable person given his influences and acquaintances, it can not be denied that this, like many of his other works, are at a minimum thought provoking. One of the main concepts explored in the book is bisociation; connecting two unrelated frames into a novel concept. These frames can be learned in any traditional manner (rote, etc) or conditioned into a subject a la Pavlov, Skinner, or Watson's experiments. Either way, to move from one frame to another, solving a problem usually, one needs creativity and originality more than genius (though having both is obviously best). Genius, Koestler and other argue, is a mind with general power toward in a particular direction and the ability to make bisociations.

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