Creative Alchemy

Welcome!

Welcome to the Creative Alchemy blog. My name is Claudie Plen, and this is where I write about creativity, where creativity intersects with business and ideas and thoughts which spring from the work I do.

Risk and Creativity: when you don't know what's going to happen

What's your relationship with uncertainty? This year I seem to have found myself doing so many things without a safety net, setting up a brand new partnership (www.edgethinking.co.uk), taking on far bigger projects and challenges, and often not knowing how any of this is going to turn out. My old response to not knowing would have been to go to bed and not come out, or to have the odd nervous breakdown, but I'm starting to trust that things have a way of working themselves out. 

The thing that made the difference for me was making sure I was clear on the worst possible consequence of every decision. When I realised that the unlikely event of the utter devastation of my business and livelihood might at worst lead to me having to get a job in a bar, or rent out my flat and that I was okay with that possibility, I was able to take the bigger risks in confidence. I managed to find a level of risk that I was comfortable with, and was able to break the deadlock.

Risky business

A couple of weeks ago I suddenly learned how to stay upside down. I'm not being weirdly metaphorical here, the upsidedownness being part of my (nearly daily) yoga practise. The thing is, I've been doing yoga for years now, and I've never been able to do headstands. Or those crab things. Or for that matter most things involving significant upper body strength. I could do all sorts of things which came easily to me but somehow managed to forget to practise the difficult stuff, the stuff I didn't feel I had the confidence to try. As my yoga teacher pointed out to me, we all have a position which comes naturally to us, that we can't imagine not being able to achieve effortlessly, and the rest we have to work towards. It kind of helped every time I felt like everyone else could do something which completely stumped me, realising that I had my own secret power too.

Just the Two of Us: Making creative partnerships work

What’s different about creative partnerships? When two creative personalities get together in a commercial environment are the challenges and issues they face unique?

With the end product closely tied to self-esteem and identity, it’s no surprise that creative partnerships are intense affairs. Control issues and vision clashes abound and the industry divorce rate is high. The good news is that none of these problems is insurmountable. In this post I will explore some of the key issues affecting creative partnerships, and offer advice for anyone who is currently in a creative partnership, or considering entering into one.

New Year's Unresolutions

I don’t make New Year’s resolutions. The reasoning behind this is pretty simple. Usually (this year being no exception), I spend the first few days of the New Year paralysed by fear. I’m talking serious no-sleep, nails-dug-deep-into-the-palms- of-my-hands terror. I don’t sleep or eat properly (unless you count chocolate and toast as one of the major food groups). I stop writing, painting, communicating with the outside world on any kind of deep level, and I waste countless hours glued to trashy geek sci-fi (the more escapist the better) or chat shows (other people’s problems are so much easier to solve by shouting at the TV). All of this usually takes place from the safety of my sofa, in my pyjamas.

Happiness

The first chapter of 'The Interpretation of Murder' by Jed Rubenfeld begins like this: "There is no mystery to happiness. Unhappy men are all alike. Some wound they suffered long ago, some wish denied, some blow to pride, some kindling spark of love put out by scorn - or worse, indifference - cleaves to them or they to it, and so they live each day with a shroud of yesterdays. The happy man does not look back. He doesn't look ahead. He lives in the present.

Creativity - Accident or Design?

As usually happens, my life this week has conspired to test out a previously academic theory around creativity. In other words something went horribly wrong, without warning and I found myself watching helplessly as my carefully built up structures fell to pieces around me.

What surprised me the most in the aftermath of the big important thing being lost, was a sudden explosion of euphoria, followed swiftly by a sense of freedom, and quickly after an avalanche of new ideas, solutions, and possibilities. The worst thing had happened, someone had moved the goal posts without my permission and my response was a pure rush of creativity.

No failure only feedback

What do we do with things we don't need any more? Ideas, images, thoughts, approaches, names, abandoning the ones which don't seem to work is an essential part of the creative process, if we don't leave something behind its pretty impossible to move forwards at all.

We go through a similar process in other areas of our lives. Some people move on quicker than others, leaving redundant relationships, jobs or homes without so much as a backward glance as soon as they lose their sparkle, become too difficult or get boring, or simply because something better turns up which distracts their attention. Others resist change desperately, or simply hoard everything, accommodating the new alongside all the accumulated junk of years. There's security in accumulation but it's easy to drown completely in all the excess information.

Asking Questions

This week, I am mostly writing a book. Not the great british novel (which would require me to be far more tortured than I actually am), but a book about creative process. More specifically a book about creative process in the commercial environment, about managing creative businesses, and the specific challenges which exist when creativity and commerce collide.

Knee deep in research, I find myself right at the start of the creative process, wondering whether for many creative businesses, this is where it all begins to go wrong. The problem is with the creative brief. Or rather, not getting the right creative brief. The question is, whose responsibility is it anyway?

I have pretty strong feelings on the subject. Its easy to assume that’s it’s the responsibility of the client to produce a comprehensive brief and the job of the creative to respond to it. But that’s making an awful lot of assumptions, the biggest and most dangerous being the belief that the client always understands how to communicate what he or she really wants. The business model based on the vague hope that the client always knows what they are looking for and is able to communicate that effectively to you is seriously flawed. How much more successful you can be if you spend that bit of extra time asking the right questions, establishing the exact desired outcome for the work is easily proved. Just try it some time.

Change Management

I woke up about a month ago and realised that I was incredibly bored. Bored with my flat, bored with London, bored with seeing the same things every day. This may sound a little extreme, but it tends to happen every so often.

Different people need or like different frequencies of change, for some, one major change every ten years is quite enough whereas others like to do something completely different every day if not every hour.

Luckily I was able to take a step back, and realise that buying a new property wasn’t really an option purely on the basis that I was a bit bored of the old one (although I admit to having worked out the figures, so it might still happen). I also reminded myself that I have a business that I love, which provides me with constant change and stimulation. But sometimes, it’s still not enough.

The Invitation

Recently I was taught the beginnings of the art of performance storytelling, by the wonderful storyteller and teacher, Ben Heggarty (www.crickcrackclub.com). Its been terrifying, challenging, creatively inspirational and at times just very funny. Above all else I have been challenged to be more authentic. In the way I communicate, in the way I create.

I'm still processing the experience and what it all means to me and how I'd like to use it, so I'm not going to write much about those thoughts right now. The question of authenticity has brought me back to thinking about The Invitation, by Oriah Mountain Dreamer, and (at risk of being in breach of copyright) I'm going to reproduce it here:

It doesn't interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for, and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart's longing.

It doesn't interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dream, for the adventure of being alive.