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                   This is the third of nine chapters of
                   THINK THUNDER! AND UNLEASH YOUR CREATIVITY
                   Copyright (c) 1989 by Thomas A. Easton
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                        CHAPTER 3: CREATIVITY BLOCKS

        In Chapter 2, we discussed the nature of the creative mind. We said
   that it is the kind of mind that constantly recombines words, ideas, and
   images, and from which new words, ideas, and images flow in a constant
   stream, like popcorn from a popper. We also indicated that the "popcorn
   mind" is somehow retained from childhood. Its complement, the critical
   mind that winnows the few good ideas from the multitude tossed into
   view by the popcorn mind, is developed in adulthood.
        Psychologists and others who study creativity do not use our
   "popcorn mind" term. They do, however, agree that childhood is the time
   of raw creativity, when everything is new, questions abound, and children
   are constantly inventing new combinations of what they know, see, and
   are told and testing them for sense and value. They bubble with
   questions, suggestions, and verbal novelties. The pattern is so universal
   that children who do not fit it are generally--and rightly--suspected
   of mental or emotional disturbance and referred to child psychologists.
        If the pattern is so universal, an important question is why
   similarly vigorous creativity is so rare in adults. The creativity of
   children seems to fade out, to die. Often it is gone before they reach
   the age of ten. If it survives until then, it dies in adolescence. Very
   rarely does it last longer still, to make an artist, scientist, inventor
   or other creative adult. And still more rarely does it both last and
   remain strong enough to give the world its few giants of creativity.
        Why does the popcorn mind stop popping? There are many possible
   answers. The simplest is that after a few years the creative child has,
   by creating numerous combinations or patterns and testing them against
   the world, discovered a reliable framework for knowledge about the world
   and can then get on with filling in the details. Creativity has served
   its purpose.
        This answer may even have some truth to it. We know that in rhesus
   monkeys it is the young who are inquisitive, who test new foods and
   methods of getting it. If they are not poisoned by the new food, their
   mothers may try it, and then other adults. If they are poisoned, well,
   the young are expendable. It only takes a year or two to grow a new
   one, while it may take a decade or more to grow a new adult.
        This answer may even apply to some people. But most humans seem to
   remain more creative than rhesus monkeys as adults, and they do not
   consider their children expendable. With them, the decline of creativity
   may be due more to:
        "What are you, stupid? Of course giraffes don't eat hot-dogs!"
        "Why don't you draw things the way they REALLY are?"
        "Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!"
        "Joey wears an earring. He's weird!"
        "No, no, no! Horses are never blue!"
        "You have to be careful around Aunt Mary, you know. She's an
   inventor/ poet/ writer/ painter/ dancer/ musician!"
        "Don't play with April. She has weird ideas, and you never know...."
        "You don't want to grow up like Uncle Mike, do you? Poets/ Painters/
   Novelists/ Musicians never make any money."
        "Don't be silly!" That is, it gets stepped on by parents, friends,
   teachers, relatives, and neighbors. Originality is strange, foreign,
   alien, abnormal. It is a threat to the established order, and therefore
   something to be discouraged in the natural process of growing up.
   Certainly, it is not something that will ever do you any good. It might
   even grow hair on your palms!
        By the time most people have escaped from childhood, they have
   been thoroughly brainwashed against having new ideas, except about such
   trivial matters as whether to add a touch of oregano to the salad. They
   have been programmed to think that creativity is dangerous, or a behavior
   that can earn only disapproval. They have been taught to fear the
   murderous laughter of ridicule. And they have been taught that
   creativity, which makes you weird, is as sure a magnet for that laughter
   as honey is for flies.
        It is so easy to block the flow of creativity that it is no wonder
   that the popcorn mind of childhood so often stops popping. It is no
   wonder that the child's eagerness to learn new things and think new
   thoughts is so scarce in adults.
        The wonder is that creativity and inquisitiveness ever survive at
   all. But they do, and not even the more rational discouragements of
   adults can stop them. Throughout history, those who have proposed novel,
   nontraditional ways of doing or seeing things, in religion, politics,
   science, art, and literature, have met with discouragement, persecution,
   and even death. And still we have heretics, revolutionaries, and
   visionaries, as well as painters, sculptors, writers, and so on.
        The most important question in the natural history of creativity
   is why or how some people manage to remain creative despite all the
   inhibiting influences that surround them. Are they perhaps a little
   crazy--or loose--from the start? Do they have minds that just won't
   quit? Is it in their genes? Or do they enjoy the advantages of parents
   who encourage and even demonstrate creativity?
        Research has indeed shown that creative minds tend to run in
   families, but this does not tell us whether creativity is a product of
   heredity or of parental encouragement and demonstration. Both influences
   can produce the pattern. I, as a biologist by training, am inclined to
   think that heredity plays an important role, but that the family
   environment is also crucial, and that with suitable encouragement most
   children could retain much more of their native creativity into
   adulthood.
        This encouragement must begin with stopping the too-common practice
   of squashing childhood creativity by ridiculing or otherwise rejecting
   nonconventional ideas, dismissing creative role models, and saying that
   only conventional goals (such as money) have value. Then, perhaps, we
   could move on to programs that explicitly encourage and strengthen
   creativity by:

        --openly admiring and supporting people who are creative;
        --allowing children to think that nonstandard values can be
        legitimate;
   and

        --giving free rein to children's attempts at painting, poetry,
   sculpture, invention, music, and so on.

        We see such efforts now in schools that offer special attention to
   the gifted and talented, and in other schools that can afford
   "enrichment" programs for all their students. Unfortunately, these
   efforts are useless as long as we leave undisturbed all the influences
   that inhibit creativity. And they are less useful than they should be
   whenever we fail to open them to all the children in a school.
        But what can we do with you, my readers? You are past the point
   where such encouragement efforts could act. How to help children remain
   creative is beside the point. What we need to discuss is how to restore
   YOUR creativity. And that must involve understanding the blocks to that
   creativity that your childhood and later experiences have laid upon you.
        These blocks are four:

        --Fear of ridicule
        --Fear of failure
        --Fear of success
        --Ego, or fear of self-destruction

        The first three of these fears can be summed up in the term
   "performance anxiety," or self-doubt. That is, they are the fears that
   one cannot perform adequately, that one cannot produce the new ideas
   one needs. They are the fears that block the popcorn mind, and they may
   be the most common inhibitors of creativity. Certainly, they are the
   factors that most often interfere with students' ability to come up
   with and develop ideas for papers. They also seem to account for most
   cases of adult, professional "writer's block."
        The fourth of these fears, fear of self-destruction, has more to
   do with the critical mind. It blocks the separation of good ideas from
   bad. It is therefor just as serious a block as performance anxiety;
   someone who thinks all his or her ideas are golden can never get
   anywhere.

                              FEAR OF RIDICULE

        The first of the performance anxiety fears, fear of ridicule, may
   be the most easily understandable. It is the fear that people will not
   say that your new idea is neat and nifty. It is the fear that they will
   laugh, not at the idea, but at you for being so silly as to think, even
   for a moment, that the idea was worth having. It is the reaction received
   too often by the child who wonders whether giraffes eat hot-dogs.
        One answer to this fear is to recall that people, like turtles,
   never get anywhere unless they stick their necks out. Realize that most
   of your ideas are indeed worthless, but don't let that stop you from
   saying them out loud. Yes, an important part of creativity is recognizing
   those lousy ideas and discarding them. This is the function of the
   critical mind. But if your own critical mind is not up to the job, and
   it often isn't, you must expect your friends and family to fill in for
   it, at least in part.
        The trouble with relying on friends and family is that they are
   more likely to pat you on the back than to say you stink. They are
   reluctant to hurt your feelings, whether you deserve it or not.
        As a writer, I long ago realized that praise for my work may feel
   marvelous, but it is useless. Criticism--pinched noses, raucous laughter,
   wisecracks, kibitzing suggestions--hurts. But only criticism--honest
   criticism--can be helpful, for only honest criticism tells me how to
   improve. And in due time, one develops calluses on one's creative soul
   that are thick enough to bear the pain of the criticism.
        Is there an easier answer to this fear than developing calluses?
   Yes, for if you can somehow distance yourself from your ideas, so that
   they become less intensively YOUR ideas, ridicule becomes less
   threatening. You gain this distance by setting rough drafts of term
   papers, poems, or short stories aside for a few days or weeks before
   beginning the process of revising. The point is to forget just how much
   you first loved your ideas; with this added objectivity, you can then
   criticize your ideas, not yourself, and discard whatever needs
   discarding. You also gain this distance by using any "system" for coming
   up with ideas, for then the ideas are largely a product of the system,
   not you. And it is all right to laugh at or criticize the system and
   its products.
        What kinds of systems are available? Some people throw dice, or
   consult horoscopes or the I CHING. Some use brainstorming, in one of
   its many variants. YOU can use the computer program that is the core of
   this book.

                               FEAR OF FAILURE

        This fear is closely related to fear of ridicule, for failure is
   often indicated by the reactions of the people around you. They may
   even laugh, though other reactions--pity, sympathy, rejection,
   censure--may be as common, and as much to be feared. But many people
   fear even the failure that only they know, either because they never
   revealed their attempt to others or because they call the result failure
   when others don't.
        It does not matter what sort of failure we choose to talk about.
   Secret failures, public failures, self-defined failures, other-defined
   failures, all hurt, all invite one not to risk another shot, all inhibit
   creativity.
        No one likes to blow it. Especially, no one likes to blow it again
   and again and again. Yet, as we have said already, most of a creative
   person's attempts at new ideas are garbage. Why do these people persist?
   Why don't they give up and settle into a quiet, conventional, trivially
   creative life, just like the rest of us?
        Yes, they have calluses. They also have confidence. They know that
   they CAN come up with good ideas, and that it is the good ideas that
   matter. The bad ones will be forgotten. Their attitude resembles in all
   but sheer nerve that of the psychic who utters thousands of predictions.
   If one or two pan out, he or she trumpets that "success" to the tabloids
   while sweeping the rest under the rug, confident that the world will
   never notice [see my "Psychics, Computers, and Psychic Computers," THE
   SKEPTICAL INQUIRER, vol. 11 (Summer 1987), pp. 383-388].
        Writer's block strikes when the confidence fails. Professional
   writers can, even after dozens of articles or books, suddenly become
   convinced that they can no longer generate good ideas, or that ridicule
   or rejection awaits their next sortie into the marketplace. It takes
   thick calluses indeed to carry on regardless. Many writers who come
   down with this crisis of confidence block or freeze. They cannot resume
   their careers until they somehow loosen the logjam in their heads.
        If you lack--or have lost--your confidence in your ability to
   create, then here is another reason to use a "system." The I CHING,
   brainstorming, and other techniques have long provided ways for writers
   to resolve their blocks. Now this book too offers you a way to say that
   the garbage you generate is not YOUR failure, but the system's. Your
   task becomes sorting through it for the gems, and when you find them,
   turning them into successes.

                               FEAR OF SUCCESS

        Is it difficult to imagine that fear of success can inhibit the
   idea-generating popcorn mind as thoroughly as can fear of failure or
   ridicule? It seems to happen less often, but some people can face a
   task and ask themselves, "What if I succeed? People will expect more of
   me, and I will have to come through, and I'm not sure I'll be able to."
        In this sense, then, fear of success is the same as fear of failure,
   though failure at a higher level and at a later date. It is the fear of
   not being able to live up to the expectations you create by your success,
   and it has but one answer. For most people, the confidence that comes
   with repeated success diminishes the fear of further success; some fear
   may remain, but it is incapacitating only in pathological cases.
        But there is another kind of fear of success. We might express it
   in an interior monologue like so: "I have had some success already. I
   know that I will have more, for I am good at what I do. Eventually, I
   may even become well known. But then, my God, what will my relatives
   and friends and strangers think of me?"
        We hinted at this in the list of reasons for the decline of
   childhood creativity near the beginning of this chapter: "You have to
   be careful around Aunt Mary, you know. She's an inventor/ poet/ writer/
   painter/ dancer/ musician!" Creative people, says our mythology, are
   immoral, disreputable, crazy, and if they are sensitive to the opinions
   of others, this mythology, when turned full upon them, can be paralyzing.
   Again, such creative people need calluses, or some "system" upon which
   they can blame their creativity.

                      EGO, OR FEAR OF SELF-DESTRUCTION

        Even when the popcorn mind is popping right along, generating scores
   and hundreds of ideas, all is not necessarily well. In fact, it is not
   unreasonable to say that all is not well anyway. Although one of your
   ideas in a hundred may be worth developing, you will probably pursue
   ten. And the end result was expressed admirably by the late science
   fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon. He was once asked by a journalist why
   90 percent of science fiction was such utter crap. His reply--"But 90
   percent of everything is crap!"--has come to be known as Sturgeon's
   Law, and it indeed suggests that most creative people waste a lot of
   their effort. Their critical minds are less critical than they should be.
        Why? I said earlier that the criticisms of others are painful. So
   is self-criticism.
        If you hold any good opinion of yourself at all, you think that
   your ideas are just fine, thank you. They do not deserve ridicule,
   rejection, or neglect, and the niftiest thing about being a writer,
   poet, painter, or inventor is that you can dress up the least of ideas
   in such a way that other people will pay attention and say, "Aahhh!"
        Remember Sturgeon's Law. It says that you are fooling yourself.
   Nine ideas out of ten--of those that reach the marketplace--are baloney.
   Ninety-nine out of a hundred--of those that pop into your head--are
   worthless. Only one is a really good idea.
        But many creative people have trouble stopping with that one. They
   develop the nine in a hundred half-good ideas. Often enough, they work
   on some of the 90 no-good ideas too, which has led some people to say
   that Sturgeon was an optimist.
        Why do creative people have trouble discarding most of their ideas?
   Perhaps it has something to do with the way we are taught as infants
   that every least one of our productions is valuable. But I suspect that
   creative people in other cultures, which have other attitudes toward
   toilet-training, also have trouble getting their critical minds to be
   brutal enough with the effusions of their popcorn minds. The trouble
   may have its strongest roots in educational practices that encourage raw
   creativity--the popcorn stage--over the discipline of the critical mind.
   Or it may simply be that throwing away one's own ideas is a form of
   self-destruction in any culture, and the human ego will not ordinarily
   permit such behavior.
        We see another form of the same problem with the feeling of many
   creative people that their words, artwork, or designs are sacred. Let
   someone else, such as a teacher, editor, or art director, suggest
   changes, and they get huffy. They cannot see that the changes may
   actually improve the product, whatever it is. They see only that they
   are being criticized, and if they do not refuse to allow the changes,
   they certainly feel hurt. They may also fail to cooperate fully in the
   revision process. Every editor is familiar with such prima donnas and
   dreads meeting the next one.
        Is there an answer? We might imagine a society of orchardists whose
   every member is intimately familiar with the way that pruning excess
   branches from a fruit tree strengthens the remaining branches and
   increases the yield of fruit. Such people might have no difficulty at
   all in accepting the self-destruction inherent in the activities of the
   creative person's critical mind. But we do not live in such a society.
   For us, self-destruction is painful, even when done in a good cause.
   What we need is some way to redefine creative self-criticism in such a
   way that we can see it as SELF-destruction no longer.
        Let's look again at the possibilities inherent in any "system"
   that generates ideas for you. Use such a system, such as the one offered
   in this book, and the ideas are not so thoroughly yours. You need not
   feel so attached to them or view them as sacred. You can butcher them
   mercilessly, and no one feels pain. You can allow your critical mind to
   function at peak efficiency, and then you can focus your efforts on the
   one good idea in a hundred.

                                DISTRACTIONS

        What can you do about distractions? They can be a real problem for
   the creative person, as we mentioned in Chapter 2 and as the case of
   Coleridge and "Kubla Khan" amply demonstrates. The answer is the ability
   to hold a chain of thought in mind. Some people can resume work on a
   piece of writing at the end of a paragraph, scene, or chapter weeks or
   months after dropping it to take a trip to Hawaii or visit their in-laws.
   Others have trouble picking up the thread after a coffee break. Some can
   write poetry or short stories in the midst of chaos, such as on a
   rocking, roaring subway car. Others can be distracted by a whisper.
        Is there any help for those to whom distractions mean disaster?
   Not in this book, for the system we offer here focuses mostly on the
   popcorn mind. But there are some helpful tactics. Some writers always
   quit for the day in the middle of a sentence, in order to take advantage
   of the momentum they gain by completing the sentence later. Others take
   notes on their plans for the next day's work, or outline the next page
   or two. Some pray.

                                   SUMMARY

        Rampant childhood creativity usually dies out by adulthood because
   it has served its purpose of exploration and learning, or because it is
   inhibited by ridicule and disapproval. Nevertheless, it survives in
   some people, probably mostly because their parents encouraged it,
   approved of creative role models, and did not discourage the thought
   that nonconventional goals were worth pursuing.
        Creativity can be encouraged in adults by finding ways around the
   blocks that inhibit it. These blocks are performance anxiety or
   self-doubt--in the form of the fears of ridicule, of failure, and of
   success--and ego. Self-doubt inhibits the popcorn mind, or raw
   creativity. Ego interferes with the critical mind, which must discard
   the great bulk of ideas thrown up by the popcorn mind. Both inhibitors
   become weaker when one uses a system such as brainstorming to produce
   the raw material of creativity, for the system makes that raw material
   less intensively the creator's, lessens the investment of identity or
   ego in the raw material, and makes fears less worrisome and criticism
   more vigorous. Unfortunately, such systems can do little to help people
   who easily lose their chains of thought.

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