John Cleese On Creativity – A Review | The Great Acting Blog

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John Cleese’s book, Creativity, gives a fascinating insight into the creative process of one of the minds behind Monty Python and Fawlty Towers. 

One of the joys of this book is that it can be read in such a short gallop – just under an hour’s reading time. I don’t mean to sound decadent, but sometimes a quick win does lift the spirits. And Cleese’s book certainly does that. It may be short in length but it’s packed with insight, as you would expect from an artist of his calibre.

One trusts Cleese because he’s been there and done it – he knows what he’s talking about – the proof of the pudding, after all, is in the eating. Cleese’s Creativity then, is not some scientist’s projection or some psychoanalytic treatise, but the codification of a life-time of creative practice. And like all doers, Cleese is precise, unwaffling and unfussy – the book is designed to help you get your creative work done not keep you chained to study. It’s practical creativity. Paradoxically however, one of Cleese’s techniques for greater creativity, is to actually delay making decisions for as long as possible. Creative people, Cleese informs us, are better at coping with the vague feeling of worry brought about by leaving something unresolved. The waiting provides the mind with more time to come up with a more creative idea. He sites the time when he lost a completed script and had to re-write the whole thing from memory – this new version turned out to be much stronger than the original because his unconscious mind had had longer to work on it. 

Cleese further outlines methods of creativity such as defining a specific length of time for creative work, because after all, creativity is play and play must be separated from everyday work – it must be given a special status, if you like – how can it be play if it is indistinguishable from work?  He also tells us that our play-time must be locked-off from distractions because distractions take us away from our creative thinking, ideas may be lost in the psychological turbulence and never found again.

 

NOTES ON JOHN CLEESE’S CREATIVITY

• Anyone can be creative 
• you can teach people the circumstances in which they will become more creative…

 

THE CREATIVE MINDSET

• Unconscious working on stuff without my being consciously aware of it
• when you’ve eaten your body will digest the meal for you, you can’t consciously help the process.  
• You can’t order the unconscious about, you have to coax it
• you can’t ask your unconscious a question and expect an neat answer
• because your unconscious communicates with you through the language of the unconscious, and the language of the unconscious is not primarily verbal, it shows you images and feelings

 

HARE BRAINED, TORTOISE MIND

• Play – the ability to get enjoyably absorbed in a puzzle. Become curious about it for it’s own sake. Child-like.
• deferring decisions for as long as possible
• creative people are better at coping with the vague feeling of worry when we leave something unresolved. If you can tolerate it you give yourself more time to come up with a better decision.  

 

HOW DO WE LEARN HOW TO PLAY LIKE A CHILD?  

• greatest killer of creativity is interruption – it pulls your mind away from what you want to be thinking about
• worrying about making a mistake can paralyse you. When you’re in creative mode there’s no such thing as a mistake – you must follow your line of thought right to the end to see whether it’s likely to be useful or not. Explore without necessarily knowing where you’re going. If we know exactly what we’re doing when we’re investigating something then it’s not research.
• you have to create a safe place where you can play. Create boundaries of space and boundaries of time. Boundaries of space to stop others from interrupting you – time: set a specific time to preserve your boundaries of space. Knowing this chunk of time is sacred you then start to play.
• the longer you sit there the more your mind calms down and settles. Then you can focus on the problem you’ve chosen to think about. It’s a kind of meditation.
• when you get a new idea your logical brain shouldn’t attack it too soon until it’s had time to grow and become clearer. New ideas are easily strangled.
• how to tell when your creative idea is done and it’s time to move on to critical thinking… if you have a lot of vague ideas and start to feel overwhelmed or confused then that’s the moment to start clarifying them.
• when your analytical mind starts to get bored that’s the sign to move back into your creative thinking mode again. So you go back and forwards between the analytic mode of thinking and the creative mode, until finally you get to something that’s a bit special. This back and forth process is called iteration.

 

HINTS AND SUGGESTIONS

• You’re most likely to be creative in an area you already know and care about.
• Borrow an idea from someone who you admire, one that really appeals to you. If you work on that you’ll make it your own as you play with it and you’re learning from someone you admire – and that’s not stealing – it’s called ‘being influenced by’ . Williams Shakespeare stole all his plots.
• the bigger the leap, the longer the creative period is likely to be… 

 

COPING WITH SETBACKS

•  Blockages aren’t an interruption of the process they are part of it. Don’t quit just sit around until your unconscious is ready to cough up more stuff. 
• You can’t have a new idea until you’ve got rid of the old one

 

GET YOUR PANIC IN EARLY

• Good thing about panic is that it gives you energy. Don’t expect to solve anything for ages, just begin by making a few notes. Unconscious will start working on the problem. 

 

YOUR THOUGHTS FOLLOW YOUR MOOD

•  If we’re depressed we have depressed thoughts – if we’re happy we can’t take gloomy thoughts seriously 
• feeling creative isn’t an emotion, it’s a frame of mind – if you’re distracted or worried about something else you’re not going to be creative.
• play optimistic music because your mood will dictate your thoughts. 

 

4 QUESTIONS YOU NEED TO ASK 

1. Where were you bored?
2. Where did you not understand what was going on?
3. Where did you not find something credible?
4. Was there anything you found emotionally upsetting? 

 

RELATED READING
John Cleese On Creativity – Lecture Notes 
Csikszentmihalyi’s Creativity

 

RESOURCES
Creativity Audiobook [narrated by John Cleese]