APLOMB: Mnemonic creativity
The Third Layer is a lot about getting to know your creative process in advance so that it’s easier for you to be creative when called upon. APLOMB — the creativity methodology I often teach — stands for Awareness, Prompt, Layer, Observe, Marinate, Blueprint.
A) Awareness: Become aware of who you are and what you like
P) Play: Triangulate that with some outside prompts and lots of openness and play
L) Layer with deeper exploration, research and experimentation
O) Observe: get and give feedback
M) Marinate: Creativity desperately needs elongated time, and then finally
B) Blueprint: Use a Creativity Notebook to write it all down.
“The Swamp Monster pulls us down from finding our voice, but our Inner Salsa Dancer pulls us back up. ”
Awareness
It sounds counterintuitive to most people at first, but before you can be creative you need to look at what you like. Sounds odd, right? I wouldn’t have believed it myself if I hadn’t gotten stuck trying to teach hundreds of writing students and writing interns how to write. We all learned grammar and sentence structure by junior high. I can’t teach you how to write. But you can learn how to get out of your own way.
And that’s by enacting awareness of your PIPE. (Have I mentioned that I love initialisms?) PIPE: Your Preferences/passions, interests, perspective and experiences. What do you like? Like to do? How do you uniquely see the world? What have your experiences been?
Books I’ve written about creative prompts, volume 1.
I love the quote from Oscar Wilde: “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” Do you feel like you should write a short film about border trauma in Pakistan, when what your heart needs to write about is cleaning out your childhood bedroom of your recently deceased parents’ home? I once watched — I dunno, maybe it was a Twilight Zone episode? — about a writer stuck with literal, actual demons as he was trying to write a novel? The only thing that made the demons finally disappear, after months or even years? Writing about the demons.
Write (dance, paint, develop computer software, etc) about your demons.
Play
Here is the mathematical formula for creativity:
Your brain
+
????
=
Creativity
The secret to number two? Play.
The definition of play is to engage in an activity that’s not serious. You don’t have to lace up a pair of cleats or break out the LEGO. Even Einstein credited much of his work to ‘combinatorial play’: a little physics, a little violin, and back and forth until whammo! Relativity. (Is that how physics work?
Another example of a playful way to get to know your creative voice is to literally create an imaginary friend. Like Beyoncé did.
When Beyoncé was too terrified to go out on stage in her early years, she stayed in the dressing room instead. Sasha Fierce went on stage. Sasha Fierce was calm and collected, sexy and badass, confident without a shred of stage fright.
Who is your Sasha Fierce? Who is your Creativity Companion or Creative Ally? I often teach an Inner Critic workshop, but I really need to start teaching an Imaginary Creativity Friend one, too. The Swamp Monster pulls us down from finding our voice, but our Inner Salsa Dancer pulls us back up.
One of the best ways for your brain to get playful is to bounce off prompts. I wrote a book with 365 of ‘em. As Einstein says, don’t try to find a solution from the same brain that got you into this mess. Your brain is creative, brilliant, genius, inventive. But it has its limits. There’s a really, really big world outside of the confines of your skull. Interact with it as much as you can, in an unserious, non-directed, non-transactional way. Take notes. Pay attention.
You can make prompt shortcuts, too. I advocate everyone on the planet should create their own Creativity Notebook. Create lists. Go to the Mathematics of Joy or Ten True Statements posts in here. Write lists of poems or songs that help you get in touch with your creative mojo. Write lists of when or how your creativity gets stuck. Anything that helps prompt you back up the creativity ladder.
Layer
Creativity is surprisingly messy and inefficient. The first layer of my creative process involves far more cheesy poofs and puppy videos than I’d care to admit. Or, that I would have cared to admit, before I saw that I wasn’t alone. Let your process be your process.
But then add to it. As creative expert Natalie Nixon says, creativity requires wonder (what I call Play) … and rigor. The great thing is, you need to layer before you get to rigor.
Observe
I have a suspicion this is why creativity is drummed out of us by society, schools, The Man — creative expression is terrifying to law and order. What if we all become a bunch of messy, lazy hippies just fingerpainting our feelings all day?
If the first layers of creativity are about getting messier than you’re comfortable with, the later ones are about getting more structured than you thought messy hippie artists ever would.
You’ve looked inside; now it’s time to observe outside. What have others done? Who’s written books on this subject? Which colleagues can help you think through your dilemma? Where could you get your questions answered?
And you can observe within your own brain, too. This simply requires looking at your process as if you were an outside observer.
Write. Everything. Down. What’s true for your creative process? Do you have a hard time getting started? Write down five true statements about that. Do you need to work til 5am, knowing you’ll be exhausted the next day? Write it down.
I call these your BRR, or Bumper Rail Rules. Maybe one day your creative process will change, but until you’ve observed how it works, you won’t know how to harness it.
Marinate
Creativity requires elongated time.
Mmm, Taus marinating up at Human Nature School.
What do I mean by that? Our brains can grow to become dot-connecting little miracles of nature. Seriously, hide yourself from a baby or dog with, like, a sheet of paper, and they’ll think you disappeared off the face of the very planet. What we can piece together by the time we’re teenagers or early adults is biologically, neuroscientifically fascinating.
So use this to your advantage! But: Mindfully. You’re aware. You’ve played. You’ve layered. You’ve observed. Your brain needs a break.
Put a problem you want to solve or a creative project you want to do into your brain. Even better: Write it down in your Creativity Notebook.
Then go take a walk. Binge a season of Resident Alien. Take a Thai boxing class. Sleep eight hours. Dance. Cook. Play peekaboo with your baby, watching its creative, problem-solving abilities grow in a single minute.
As Einstein said, don’t try to solve a problem (or be creative) with the same brain that created it or got you stuck. But our brains have this outlandish ability to grow and become more neuroplastic, even in seconds. (The famed Aha! moment that gets all the creativity glory but is .0000001% of our collective creative process.)
With a mindset stuck in how schools often unteach creative thinking, imagine how we’re going to even begin to compete with AI. I’m not kidding when I say the fate of the human race might rest on how much time we give ourselves to think more creatively. AI is already outpacing us. If we’re going to keep our seat at the table, we need to do what humans do best. Which is make connections and collaborate on a deeply human level.
Blueprint
Your loosey-goosey hippie days (or minutes) are over. Your layering and observing is done. Now is the time for action, efficiency, productivity, rigor. I often call the APLOM part as ‘pre-creativity’. We’re now at the actual, card-carrying, forward-movement, creating part of creativity.
But our messy brains still need structure and support. That’s why phone numbers across the world are only seven or eight digits, and broken up into digestible chunks:
(844) 903-5346
(That’s LEGO customer service, by the way. The best toys are often creativity prompt machines in disguise.)
Trello. To-do lists. Weekly planners. We know how to do productivity blueprints. But we don’t know how to do creativity blueprints.
When you need to do a task that calls upon your creativity, what might that process look like for you? How will you freak out or procrastinate? What does creative fear or frustration look like for you? Where do get stuck? What are your common obstacles? Who is your Creativity Ally? What helps you bounce up your ladder?
Have some of these written in your Creativity Notebook, and your brain will grab the keys to the Porsche and take off.