There is a tendency among how-to enthusiasts to talk about creativity as if it had fixed objectives: things you know from the start will turn out to be novels, symphonies or paintings. Writers and musicians who have suffered the uncertainties of creation know that this is an unlikely prospectus. If they have to talk about it at all, they cite “artistic vision” and leave it at that.
I think both these approaches are inadequate. Experience tells me that creativity often lies to one side of a declared aim, and “artistic vision” is a redundant metaphor, because what we are considering has a lot to do with vision itself.
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Aspiring writers are tempted by the idea that they can identify a template and knock out a thriller. Positions are adopted: “story” is three acts and a cast of characters. Well, maybe so, but only because centuries of artistic evolution have slowly produced forms like the novel. But novels aren’t jelly moulds. And Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart didn’t write his music in something called “sonata form”. These terms come later, after the job is done. The problem becomes clear when you start work, creatively, because the need to believe in a guaranteed objective gets its hooks into you as soon as you encounter difficulties.
Neuroscientists call this need the Einstellung or set effect. (Einstellung is German for “attitude”.) It finds that a general tendency exists to favour known methods in problem-solving at the expense of alternatives, even when we think we are looking for them. It has been , but if you have ever tried a key in a lock and discovered that, though there are other keys to be tried, you prefer to keep jiggling the one that doesn’t fit, then you have demonstrated this tendency.
The Einstellung effect is also a good way of describing what can happen when an artistic approach stops producing results. A few years ago, when I finished Murmur, a novel about Alan Turing, I knew I wouldn’t be working that way – intensively, sequentially – again. Nevertheless, I tried a second historical fiction about ancient Britain and then one about silent cinema. Neither took. Meanwhile, I was playing the piano and composing on the side, and that was ticking along nicely.
The side-long view is important. When Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven spoke of apprehending their musical compositions visually, they weren’t being poetic. They were describing their navigation through complex territory. The world about us offers some parallels. Some birds rely less on an internalised map of the world to locate food than on what they see when they are moving. When a bee flies sideways, generating motion parallax, the location of a flower is revealed as much by that motion as by the flower itself. (We use motion parallax, too: look to one side when you are cycling, and you will see the pavement moving by in a blur, while the houses behind it are sharper.)
Here’s Beethoven, in 1822, on writing a new piece: “I begin to elaborate the work in its breadth, its narrowness, its height and its depth… It rises, it grows up, I hear and see the image from every angle… I work at several things at the same time.” In other words, it is his mobile consideration of the work – seeing it move, moving around it “from every angle”, like a bee – that reveals its nature, not any kind of pre-set appearance.
Perhaps artistic vision is a part of physical seeing, in which our expectations for a work are not as important as the work’s rising shape; where motion parallax and peripheral awareness, looking away or sideways, matter more than locked-on focus. The artist’s need to discover the properties of a new work is an extension of the brain’s need to stabilise new stimuli. Creative projects and artistic vision are a part of our animal response to the world, and this is always dynamic, not fixed.
Will Eaves is an author and musician. His latest books are The Point of Distraction and Invasion of the Polyhedrons
