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Asc2Com (MorganSoft) | 1994-02-04 | 20.5 KB | 285 lines

------------------------------------------ This is the seventh of nine chapters of THINK THUNDER! AND UNLEASH YOUR CREATIVITY Copyright (c) 1989 by Thomas A. Easton ------------------------------------------ CHAPTER 7: ELABORATING: CREATING BY DECORATING As we discussed in Chapter 6, editing is essential to the creative process. However, editing of the sort we discussed is a destructive thing. That is it reduces pages to paragraphs and paragraphs to sentences. It is the opposite of padding. It therefore also fights your need to write something of a specific length, such as that three-to-five-page paper, typed, double-spaced, that is due in class on Tuesday. There is a definite place in the creative process for adding instead of taking away. With writing, it comes in after you have chosen a title, outlined a paper, taken notes, or selected a heading for a piece of a paper. It comes in when you have written the first line of a paper, or of a paragraph. It comes in again when you have edited a rough draft down to nothing, or at least to too little to meet the requirements of an assignment. And it comes in again when you are trying to turn the sort of nonsense you get so easily from the THUNDER THOUGHT program into something useful. To create, you begin with a bare-bones idea--a topic. Then you expand upon that topic. Decorate it. Add frills. That is, elaborate upon it. Then look for the unnecessary garbage, and edit it out. Elaborate upon what remains, and edit it again. Repeat until you can find no garbage to remove and think of nothing essential to add. The result, if all goes as it should, will be a paper, poem, story, or other creation which needs no more work. It will be of the perfect length, with no fat and no empty spaces. What I have just described is that endlessly recursive process known as revision, which writing teachers say is among the hardest aspects of writing to teach. But it is essential. Creative thinking necessarily has to begin with an idea. This germ or kernel of creation may be a title, a heading in an outline, or some short statement of topic or idea. It may even be what you have left after editing. But creative thinking does not end once you have come up with an idea. That idea must be refined by editing, elaborating, editing again, and elaborating some more. Creation is thus work. Indeed, it is painful work, for editing demands destroying the self, and elaboration requires telling yourself that, no, you have not blown your creative wad by coming up with the initial idea--you are not done; your idea is not adequately developed; you cannot stop now; you must keep slaving away. The pain is made worse when your editing convinces you that all your ideas are worthless--as it is all too likely to do, since to edit, you must throw away so many of your ideas. Such feelings may seem more likely to afflict people who aren't terribly creative or verbal. But don't kid yourself: Even the most creative and verbal of all can react in such ways, at least some of the time. Fortunately, there are four tactics that you can use to make elaboration easier. They are: explaining, arguing, free-associating, and asking the next question. All four of these keys to successful elaboration share a single aim, never to let a reader say, "Hah?" That is, if something you have written seems likely to puzzle your readers, to make them wonder what you are talking about or ask a question, or to prompt some related but diversionary thought, forestall them. Answer the question. Cut off the diversion, or exploit it. Explain yourself. By the time you are done, your initial idea will be thoroughly elaborated. EXPLAINING Explaining simply means making yourself clear. The techniques are the classic ones of exposition: description, comparison, contrast, giving examples and definitions, classifying and dividing, and laying out causes and effects. See any textbook of composition or technical writing for all the details you can stand. And then add one more key to clarity that is often ignored in the textbooks: Be sure that you are saying what you mean, and that you mean what you say. That is, choose and spell your words carefully. Don't, for instance, say, "He poured over the papers," unless you mean he poured syrup over them. The proper word is "pored," as if he were soaking the news in through his pores. (And speaking of papers, they contain dozens of other such gaffes every day.) ARGUING Sometimes the best way to develop an idea is to argue with it. Pretend that someone is trying desperately to convince you that your topic is a good idea, and fight back with all the reasons why it is a bad idea. Bring in suitable facts, quote authorities, appeal to emotion or authority. Or turn all this around, and YOU try desperately to convince someone else of the idea's worth. Either approach can be a very effective way to turn an idea into something larger. It should be familiar to you from politics, environmental activism, and other "cause" arenas. FREE-ASSOCIATING Does your initial idea make you think of something else, and that of something else again? You are free-associating. Write down whatever pops into your head, and use it. This is one form of brainstorming (unassisted by the computer). It requires editing out the useless free-associations, and then forging links between the ones that remain. We will not discuss it further just now because it is much the same as what we do with THUNDER THOUGHT's randomly generated prose, and we will be looking at that shortly. ASKING THE NEXT QUESTION In Chapter 4, we discussed how a piece of writing can be organized as a list of questions that require answers. The list of questions is the outline. The list of answers is the paper or magazine article or book. But asking the next question is also a useful way to fill in the details as you write. It is a guide to thinking analytically, and to the pursuit of implications. As I said in my book HOW TO WRITE A READABLE BUSINESS REPORT (Homewood, IL: Dow Jones-Irwin, 1983), "You have stated a fact. What is that fact's significance? What additional facts do you or your readers need to interpret it? You see this principle in action most simply in any piece of writing phrased as a series of questions and answers.... "You should always query yourself, your meaning, your vocabulary, your sequence of thoughts, your facts. Phrase your questions like so: Who am I to write this report? What is my expertise or authority? Who am I talking to? What are my audience's concerns, needs, interests, and abilities? Am I meeting them? Am I saying what I mean? Am I confusing my readers or raising questions in their minds? Where do my thoughts lead? Should I follow them? Or should I, in the interests of brevity, cut them off? How can I cut them off without upsetting my readers? "And so on. There is ALWAYS one more question. If you [ask it] consistently, your writing and thinking will come a lot closer to being smooth, clear, useful, and effective. You will prevent your reader from interrupting the flow of thoughts into his or her head while he stops reading to say, 'Hah? What does he mean by...? But what about...? Who cares about...?' Such interruptions impair effectiveness. You must do all you can to forestall them." ELABORATING THUNDER THOUGHTS Elaboration is clearly essential in normal writing. It is no less so when working with THUNDER THOUGHT, for there we face a single fundamental problem: The program generates random nonsense, and if we are to use it, we must somehow MAKE that nonsense make sense. How can we do that? In Chapter 6, we saw the usefulness of editing when we thinned a garbage pile down to four lines, which we then rearranged and combined to get: A cloud of robots flew by moonlight from a cavern high in the mountains of Mars. Now we wish to elaborate this result. Our key tactics are explanation, arguing, free-associating, and asking the next question. The first gives us--or me, at least--a picture that reminds me of a cloud of bats leaving an Earthly cave at nightfall. But Mars' air is thin, so the bats' wings are necessarily wide. Arguing is perhaps not too appropriate here, unless we wish to deny that any such thing could possibly exist. In that case, the argument leads us back to Earth and the cloud of bats, and that becomes a topic for elaboration in its own right. But let's stay on Mars (after all, I'm a science fiction writer, among other things), and ask a few questions: What are the robots doing there? How big are they? Huge, tiny, or in the middle? Are they alien or human in origin? If the former, are they emissaries of native Martians who eons ago took refuge from the harshening environment in the planet's depths and now send forth the robots as scouts and foragers? If the latter, are there two groups of humans who use robot armies in some titanic war? The answers contribute to our explanations, and then they provoke more questions, until.... You say I forgot the free-association? What do you think shaped my questions? What do you think will shape your answers, and the implications you draw from them as you create your own science fiction story? Or perhaps you prefer the graphic arts. If so, do a painting of the scene, and watch free-association come to your aid as you fill in the details that bring the scene alive. Would you like to see what can be done with single lines produced by the THUNDER THOUGHT program, without preparatory editing and splicing? Then consider the list in Exhibit 7. The only preparatory work I have done is to have the program generate some random nonsense and then to select some promising lines. --------------------- EXHIBIT 7: Can you elaborate one of these lines? Surprisingly, the acolyte shriek a plainly modern map. A green expectation learn the obviously dull cavern. We blow the computer of a galactic robot from a fantastic highway. The poetic hero listen the roughly rich door. An elegant page exhaustedly repair the spontaneous floor. Surprisingly, a robot preach the rarely loud ball. We eat the storm of a royal fork from a rich weather. A diseased fantasy competently infuriate a home. A wet mist queerly hold the frozen satellite. The drunken tent competently ward off a moon. A solitary wrench mistreat a critically dull machine. A maiden conquer a loosely ill award. A high village actively preach the elephant. An electric table cut a practically mad injury. We record the book of an royal forest from an alone bikini. You carefully roughly eat a radio. The celebratory tusk record a publically broken floor. We torment the office of a frozen loneliness from a robotic maiden. ---------------------- One of my favorites in this list is "The poetic hero listen the roughly rich door." It calls up images of a classic hero in doublet and tights eavesdropping on the villain. In a moment, he will dive through the door, sword in hand, and then.... Or how about "A solitary wrench mistreat a critically dull machine"? I think of an antique robot, designed as an art critic in the 1890s, all chrome and gears and spinning flywheels, that has lost its ability to critique new art. (Perhaps it slipped a cog when it saw its first Cubist or Dadaist.) Now someone is trying to repair it, but he doesn't know how and he is too proud to ask anyone for help. He seizes a wrench and dives into the machinery, and of course he ruins it utterly. Do you think I'm full of baloney? Then argue with me, and thus elaborate the same lines in a very different direction. Or choose your own favorite lines from the list and play with them in your own way, uncontaminated by my suggestions. Or better yet, turn on THUNDER THOUGHT, give it some words to play with, and generate your own raw material. ARE YOU A TEACHER? We discussed in Chapter 6 how to use the nonsense the THUNDER THOUGHT program generates to teach editing. Obviously, you can also use THUNDER THOUGHT to teach students how to develop ideas. Or you can be sneaky. As a teacher, you have heard hundreds of students complain that they can't think of a topic for their paper. Now you can turn on THUNDER THOUGHT, generate a little random nonsense, and say, "Well then, I guess I have to give you one. Here." Are your students--or you!--too hard-headed, too reality-bound, to tolerate the ambiguity of random nonsense? Then stress that, whatever their topic, the same principles apply: Explain it. Argue with it. Free associate to it. Ask the next question. And use THUNDER THOUGHT's nonsense for practice exercises, much as I did above. You will surely improve your students' ability to explain, argue, free associate, and pursue implications--in short, to think. If your students have more flexible minds, consider being even sneakier. Think of an exam question for a writing or philosophy class that reads: "Discuss 'We torment the office of a frozen loneliness from a robotic maiden.'" In a writing class, this would provide an excellent opportunity for the students to display their abilities to explain, argue, free-associate, and ask the next question, and in the process to organize their thoughts. In a philosophy class, it would test for the mental gymnastics that subject strives to develop. Could you use the same technique in other courses? Why not? Use THUNDER THOUGHT to generate topics for impromptu speeches in a speech class. Or take the vocabulary of a biology, history, religion, or psychology lesson, feed it to THUNDER THOUGHT, generate some nonsense, choose a likely line, and ask, "Why doesn't this make sense?" Such an exam question would give your students just as great an opportunity to display what they have learned as some more conventional question. STIMULATING THOUGHT If you have read this far, you know what my attitude toward original thought--toward creativity--is, and you will not be surprised to hear that I think that such exercises and exam questions must do far more to stimulate original, creative thought than more conventional exercises and questions. Sadly, stimulating original, creative thought is the goal of far too few educators. Most seem to think their mission is to produce graduates who will not rock corporate, political, religious, family, or other institutional boats by asking awkward questions. Some who would utterly repudiate this view may still fear that their peers would hoot at them for asking their students zany questions that have nothing obvious to do with the course material. Whoever you are, and whatever your reasons, if you are not already encouraging your students to think for themselves, please remember that only those who think for themselves, who ask awkward questions, who defy authority, who take risks, ever contribute noticeably to the advancement of civilization. SUMMARY Creation is a process that requires many cycles of revision: First you obtain an idea, perhaps by editing brainstormed material like that produced by THUNDER THOUGHT. You expand upon that idea, or elaborate it. Then you edit it down again, and expand upon it again, and so on. Where editing is the removal of excess, elaboration is the addition of the necessary. The four keys to elaboration are explaining, arguing, free-associating, and asking the next question. All are designed to keep your audience from wondering what you are up to. And they work just as well with ideas you generate yourself as they do with those you mine from THUNDER THOUGHT's random garbage. They also give teachers opportunities to stimulate their students to think. ------------------------------------------------------------- Press <ESC> to exit this chapter and BROWSE the next chapter. ------------------------------------------------------------- Complete book and software available from R.K. West Consulting P.O. Box 8059, Mission Hills, CA 91346.