When are you Creative?

Water lilies double in area every 24 hours. At the beginning of summer there is one water lily on the lake. It takes 60 days for the lake to become completely covered with water lilies. On which day is the lake half covered?

I find the solution to plot holes when I’m stood in the shower, or at the crest of the hill on the cycle home from university. I’m not sure why these particular times are the most ideal for me but this article here gives the suggestion that it’s because I am doing these activities at my non-optimal working hours.

I work best in the mornings. This results in me having a bedtime that some might consider antisocial for a university student, but it allows me to get my work done. I don’t work in the evenings. Sometimes I write in the evenings, but normally not for an extended period, instead I often draw or spend the time talking.

Creativity Happens When You Least Expect It | Psychology Today.

Of course I was looking into creativity as a part of my essay on entrepreneurs! I hadn’t just got distracted.

When do you work best? Do you think this idea of being creative in your less optimal working phase is true?

Faces

More doodles of no-one in particular. I learnt to draw faces first from copying out of a ‘how to draw Disney princesses’ book. Do you think it shows? When I draw the face of a real person I get stressed at trying to make it look like them. It never really does. Yet I find doodling random faces easy. I suppose because there’s no pressure. As long as it has eyes, nose and mouth it resembles a face.

All I see here is the wonky eyes, but I feel there’s though behind them.

So pointy. Sad?

What do you think she’s thinking? I can’t warm to her.

I think the scribbled words say it all.

What do you think?

Lies, Approximations, Fiction

The boyfriend woke me up this morning to tell me there was three-foot of snow, so much that we wouldn’t be able to get out of the house and university was most definitely cancelled.

Of course there was no snow.

The boyfriend once told me the kitchen was clean. The previous night he’d promised to wash the dishes the next morning, but when I came downstairs for breakfast there was no sign of any attempt to clean up. I told him it wasn’t clean. He professed that it was.

I demonstrated that it wasn’t – over his head and across the room. He spent the morning cleaning.

So are all lies bad?

In school we were often taught an approximation to the truth. Particularly in science. The simple reasoning is that the complete truth is much too complicated, and for the level of understanding we had, the approximation was good enough. It’s the same at university, although more often than not we’re told they’re approximations.

Do you have faith in a teacher who you found telling you a simplified truth and passing it off as the real deal? Or do you start believing that they didn’t actually know the truth?

In fiction, at least, lying is perfectly acceptable. The characters are lies, the settings approximated and the story made up. At the same time, if you don’t trust the narrator, if you can’t believe in the story then it is difficult to feel the emotions of the characters story. You need believability.

The boyfriend show have said there was some snow, and because it was so unexpected (it’s been warm the last week),  the roads hadn’t yet been gritted so we couldn’t go into university.

Three-foot just isn’t believable.

Drawing in a Heart

My pictures go though phases. I draw only stick men for a week, and then suddenly only angry-looking faceless women, or page after page of faces. My writing is the same. A few pages filled with terrible scrawling poetry, followed by pages of diary entries, short story or scene from somewhere, followed by a few chapters of a novel.

I’m unfocused. I have a sketch book full of thoughts yet none of the pictures took more than ten minutes to draw. Even if I had the discipline to stick at a single picture, which I don’t, I would then become panicked with the fear of trying to create perfection and the expectation that comes from actually putting effort in.

Does anybody else have this problem? How do you deal with it?

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Another set of doodles. They aren’t of any particular people and I didn’t have a picture or a model to help me so the various problems with the faces were inevitable. I think you can tell that I learnt to female faces. Each is just a doodle. A couple of minutes with a pen. What do you think?

What You Think You Know

Look at this picture.

Do you see what the problem is?

Apart from the wave intersecting the swan’s wing?

 

 

When you begin writing, you’re told to write what you know. Then, at some point later, you’re told that you should write what you know applied to places and people who you don’t know but have researched, or, in the case of science fiction, designed. You might not have lived in Ancient Greece but if you read books, visit the country, walk the streets and search the internet you’ll come up with some idea of what it might have been like. Then, you apply characters with your characteristics, or characteristics you have witnessed. How your characters conduct relationships, loose and gain possessions or status, and their consequent emotions are the same as what ours would be. They have to feel the same, or your reader won’t be able to connect.

The danger comes in what you assume you know. Take the doodle an example. In the picture of The Boyfriend I had to think about how to place the rowers, consider where their blades would be, what direction was the boat travelling (backwards, of course), and then I drew the swan.

I looked at the picture. I liked the picture. I posted the picture on the internet and it wasn’t until later that someone pointed out to me that swans have long necks. Now I know what a swan looks like. I’ve seen so many swans in my life that I didn’t even think about checking, so if nobody had told me, then I might have never known. I wonder how many times I do this in my writing.

For the Noph

For Noph, who got upset at being left out last time and then refused to sit still!

Doodles

Some of the people in my life:

The Boyfriend:

The rowing outing: where the young men calmly rowing their little boat were attacked by a huge monstrous swan. I think the real incident involved an VIII, not a pair... artistic licence and all that

Slightly closer version of the picture above

The Midget:

The midget is small, but she's also at least as scary as the huge monstrous swan!

Rapunzel and her knight in shining armour singing in the shower boy:

Rapunzel in her tower. I've no idea why I call her Rapunzel. It's one of those odd names which you find and then sticks.

Close up of the boy. He should stand up straight!

Do you doodle?

‘Fika’ at the Wrong Side of the Road

A continuation of my adventures on the way to the World Scout Jamboree in Sweden. Read part one.

I don’t recall much of the ferry journey. I’m terribly travel sick and so when Miss H suggested I take one of her travel sickness tablets I thought it was an excellent idea. Later research, back in England, a doctor pointed out that these drugs aren’t available in this country. They did however work extremely well. I slept for a solid 12 hours. Did some of my cross-stitch (at about a quarter of the pace of Miss H’s cross-stitching ability) and feasted on the cereal bars and cartons of orange juice we’d brought with us.

At the other side, Esberg in Denmark, I drove off and began my first experience of the ‘wrong’ side of the road whilst reading speed limits in kilometres per hour! The first navigational instruction I was given was a left turn on a road which I’m sure had about six lanes! Ending up in the wrong place, or pointing in the wrong direction terrified me.

We managed to get onto the dual carriageway and drive for half an hour before coming off at a service station. It was McDonald’s for coffee – ‘Fika’. This Swedish word means something like coffee and cake break, but makes the Germans giggle. Of course, that didn’t go entirely smoothly, but at least we had a supply of milk in the car so my inability to order wasn’t a complete fail.

As a rule, when we were driving, it was raining. In Scandinavia, you keep your headlights on for a reason. The stop for the night was Odense – our first parking meter. With four currencies in our purses, and only English, French and German between us, we weren’t ideal for using Danish parking meters. Luckily, a kind local gave us her parking ticket, which covered us for the hour we took to unpack the car into the youth hostel (we decided on a full reorganise and repack, which meant unloading three weeks worth of luggage). Luckily, not too far away there was a free car park.

Have you any experience driving on the wrong side of the road?

Read: The Man in the Back Seat

If you look at Omanikee’s blog today you’ll find my response to her ‘Your Turn’ challenge. I wrote the response whilst sat on the train the other weekend going to visit one of my friends. Mine’s the ‘His’ piece.

http://omonaikee.blogspot.com/

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I however shall be going to bed.

“Is it nearly bedtime?”

It’s 8.55pm. I’ve been working all day, sat at the computer fighting with Mathematica, trying to model solar flares. Even though I have a pile of books, I’m burning through and there is so much to read I’ve barely read anything fun all day. I haven’t drawn anything, although I generally doodle every day. Instead, after finishing the day’s work I flopped in front of the second half of Toy Story 3. The boyfriend has Man Flu. I was exhausted.

Bedtime is a guilt-free full stop. When bedtime occurs, you no longer have to feel bad about all those things you should have done because it’s time for sleep. Sleep is precious.

When I was a child, I didn’t have a bedtime. I think I must have when I was very little, when my parents actually put me to bed, but I can’t remember it. Instead, I had a bedroom time, a time at which I had to be in my bedroom and quiet. There was no reason I couldn’t stay up and play, read or draw. Even for a while, play on the computer. At some point, my father decided that there should be a limit of when I could use my computer. At 8:55pm it would flash up a message, telling you there would be five minutes until the computer turned off. At 9:00pm, it would begin the shut down sequence.

Bedroom time no longer exists. Now I have a strictly enforced bedtime, enforced by me. At 10pm, I’m in bed, or at least heading there. By half past, I’m most certainly tucked in. It takes me only a few minutes to fall asleep.

I’m strangely grateful to my parents for allowing me to learn to set my bedtime. I used to think it funny that my friends had a time they had to go to bed. I often went to sleep earlier.

When do you sleep? Do you have a strict routine?

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Enjoy Omonaikee’s blog.

http://omonaikee.blogspot.com/

Beekeepers, the Canterbury Tales and Plastic Hearts

Now as an uneducated person, in terms on English literature, I didn’t know that Geoffrey Chaucer wrote the Canterbury Tales. I’m thinking maybe I should have.  I was even more surprised however, to find that it is the same Geoffrey Chaucer that we have to blame for all this Valentines stuff. Valentines celebrations apparently aren’t Hallmark’s fault, it’s Chaucer’s! Chaucer and his associates made the bit about romantic love up. There’s someone with an influential imagination.

Did you know you can get a heart-shaped box of strawberries from Sainsburys? Isn’t that a little excessive?

Until England in the 1300′s Saint Valentines day (today), wasn’t associated with any form of romantic love. Actually, even Saint Valentine’s identity is a bit obscure – there were 14(ish) of them and we could be celebrating the triumphs of any one of them. There was supposedly a feast on the day, but not much else. The name Valentine means something to do with being ‘worthy, strong and powerful’ and just to make it even more confusing, Saint Valentine is the saint of beekeepers and epilepsy!

So, as a guidance for the men who may need some prodding, the original inventor has some guidance.

Women desire six things: They want their husbands to be brave, wise, rich, generous, obedient to wife, and lively in bed.
Geoffrey Chaucer

Enjoy your Valentines day.

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Quote from BrainyQuote