Tharp, Twyla. The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life. Simon & Schuster, 2006. https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Creative-Habit/Twyla-Tharp/9780743235273.
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Wordcraft shined the most as a brainstorming partner and source of inspiration. Writers found it particularly useful for coming up with novel ideas and elaborating on them. AI-powered creative tools seem particularly well suited to sparking creativity and addressing the dreaded writer's block.
Just as using a text for writing generative annotations (having a conversation with a text) is a useful exercise for writers and thinkers, creative writers can stand to have similar textual creativity prompts.
Compare Wordcraft affordances with tools like Nabokov's card index (zettelkasten) method, Twyla Tharp's boxes, MadLibs, cadavre exquis, et al.
The key is to have some sort of creativity catalyst so that one isn't working in a vacuum or facing the dreaded blank page.
Ernest Hemingway was one of the most recognized and influentialnovelists of the twentieth century. He wrote in an economical,understated style that profoundly influenced a generation of writersand led to his winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.
Forte is fairly good at contextualizing people and proving ethos for what he's about to present. Essentially saying, "these people are the smart, well-known geniuses, so let's imitate them".
Humans are already good at imitating. Are they even better at it or more motivated if the subject of imitation is famous?
See also his sections on Twyla Tharp and Taylor Swift...
link to : - lone genius myth: how can there be a lone genius when the majority of human history is littered with imitation?
Twyla Tharp’s box
Having read Chapter 5 of Tharp's book, I'll say that he does a pretty good job of synopsizing the ten pages, but he really does quote the hell out of her.
Tharp calls her approach “the box.”
In The Creative Habit, dancer and choreographer Twyla Tharp has creative inspiration and note taking practice which she calls "the box" in which she organizes “notebooks, news clippings, CDs, videotapes of me working alone in my studio, videos of the dancers rehearsing, books and photographs and pieces of art that may have inspired me”. She also calls her linking of ideas within her box method "the art of scratching" (chapter 6).
related: combinatorial creativity triangle thinking
[[Twyla Tharp]] [[The Creative Habit]] #books/wanttoread
Think about the last time you were the only person in aroom who remembered a salient fact. What did that do for your credibility at thatprecise moment? Memory has that power.
the true value of the box: It contains your inspirations without confiningyour creativity.
Above all, learn to respect your box’s strange and disorderly ways. As arepository of half-baked inspirations and unformed aids, the box can seem to be ahaphazard tool while you’re filling it. But when you want to go back and make senseof your path, every step is there to be found, and the order emerges if only inhindsight. Your box is proof that you have prepared well. If you want to know howany creative project will turn out, your box’s contents are as good a predictor ofsuccess or failure as anything I know.
Just as Luhmann and others discuss the seeming disorder and potential serendipity of their boxes, Tharp notices this same "strange and disorderly way..." of her box method. She remarks that "order emerges if only in hindsight." She also indicates that the contents of one's box "are as good a predictor of success or failure [of a project] as anything I know."
No matter what system you use, I recommend having a goal and putting it inwriting. I read once that people who write down their New Year’s resolutions have agreater chance of achieving them than people who don’t. This is the sort of factoidthat is probably apocryphal but, like many urban legends, sounds as though it shouldbe true.
This quote from Twyla Tharp seems like another instantiation of Napoleon Hill's mantra "Think and Grow Rich", but is more concrete and literate: "Write and Grow Rich" (or successful, at least.)
you should never save for two meetingswhat you can accomplish in one.
I know one magazine editor who hoardsnewspaper and magazine clippings.
Twyla Tharp tells the story of a colleague who is a magazine editor. They keep a pile of clippings of phots, illustrations, and stories in their desk and mine it, often with others, for something that will create story ideas for new work.
This method is highly similar to that of Eminem's "Stacking Ammo" method.
Most important, though, the box means I never have to worry about forgetting.
For Twyla Tharp, the most important feature of her project boxes is the fact that they free her from the worry of forgetting her ideas.
The box makes me feel connected to a project. It is my soil. I feel this evenwhen I’ve back-burnered a project: I may have put the box away on a shelf, but Iknow it’s there. The project name on the box in bold black lettering is a constantreminder that I had an idea once and may come back to it very soon.
Having a physical note taking system also stands as a physical reminder and representation of one's work and focus. It may be somewhat out of the way on a shelf, but it takes up space in a way that digital files and notes do not. This invites one into using and maintaining it.
Link to - tying a string on one's finger as a reminder - method of loci - orality
There are separate boxes for everything I’ve ever done. If you want a glimpseinto how I think and work, you could do worse than to start with my boxes.
Everyone hashis or her own organizational system. Mine is a box, the kind you can buy at OfficeDepot for transferring files.I start every dance with a box. I write the project name on the box, and as thepiece progresses I fill it up with every item that went into the making of the dance.This means notebooks, news clippings, CDs, videotapes of me working alone in mystudio, videos of the dancers rehearsing, books and photographs and pieces of artthat may have inspired me.
While she keeps more than just slips of paper (or index cards) in it, Twyla Tharp definitely falls into the pattern of creative collection related to the zettelkasten tradition.
before you can think out of the box, you have tostart with a box
Can it be?! Twyla Tharp has an entire chapter in her book on creativity that covers a variation of the zettelkasten note taking concept!!!
Does the phrase "thinking outside of the box" make a tacit nod to the idea of using a card index (or the German zettelkasten) for note taking, sense making, and thinking?