Everyone starts out copying… the third part of the Everything is a Remix video series by Kirby Ferguson examining the roles that influence, and the earlier work of other people, plays in creativity.

Happy, stable, relationships could be an impediment for musicians and song writers… many find the quality of their work declines without the angst that accompanies being lovelorn.

Is turmoil a necessary ingredient for artistic success? Quite a few musicians I spoke to worry that peace in their personal lives robbed them of their creative spark. Most of them listed artists they admire whose work suffered when they married. Muzzey expressly wonders whether a happy, stable relationship might jeopardise his financial success. The male songwriters and composers spoke of the creative influence of tension and conflict, and one even mentioned rage

US broadcaster Ira Glass on the frustrations of starting out in any creative line of work:

For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this.

Highly creative people also tend to be reasonably eccentric, but I didn’t realise just how quirky some of the world’s greatest intellects were…

Albert Einstein picked up cigarette butts off the street to get tobacco for his pipe; Howard Hughes spent entire days on a chair in the middle of the supposedly germ-free zone of his Beverly Hills Hotel suite; the composer Robert Schumann believed that his musical compositions were dictated to him by Beethoven and other deceased luminaries from their tombs; and Charles Dickens is said to have fended off imaginary urchins with his umbrella as he walked the streets of London.

The Periodic Table of Storytelling… makes sense since there is probably a science to good storytelling.

I don’t count myself as being remotely artistic but Austin Kleon’s article How To Steal Like An Artist (And 9 Other Things Nobody Told Me), about how artists often really live and work still makes for educational reading.

As Flaubert said, “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” I’m a boring guy with a 9-5 job who lives in a quiet neighborhood with his wife and his dog. That whole romantic image of the bohemian artist doing drugs and running around and sleeping with everyone is played out. It’s for the superhuman and the people who want to die young. The thing is: art takes a lot of energy to make. You don’t have that energy if you waste it on other stuff.

Stanford University’s d.school, or the the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, in what seems like a refreshing departure from the outlook of many of educational institutions, teaches students how to use their imagination to find solutions to a variety of design, and other, problems.

The d.school’s defining mission is to foment personal transformation. Founder David Kelley, a guru of ingenuity and intuition, loves any scenario in which students are collaborating, the more radically the better, and prototyping their imagined solutions using everything from mallets and pliers to cameras and laptops. It all falls under the rubric of “design thinking.” Students who absorb that method, says Kelley with a gregarious twinkle, can apply it to nearly any part of their lives, from finding a suitable spouse to throwing a killer dinner party.

Deadlines as a productivity tool? Why not, a lot can be achieved when time is at a premium.

Dickens’s writing is always spontaneous, majestic and intrinsically comic, apparently without a care in the world, even when addressing momentous themes of life and death. But it is also urgent and driven, with a relentless momentum inspired by those looming deadlines. Dickens, then, is a novelist who benefits, creatively, from the restrictions placed on his art by the prevailing publishing conditions.

The internet, enhancing our productivity and well-being, but eroding our creativity in the process, so claims US tech and business writer Nicholas Carr, in his new book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.

Carr thinks that he was himself an unwitting victim of the computer’s mind-altering powers. Now in his early fifties, he describes his life as a “two-act play”, “Analogue Youth” followed by “Digital Adulthood”. In 1986, five years out of college, he dismayed his wife by spending nearly all their savings on an early version of the Apple Mac. Soon afterwards, he says, he lost the ability to edit or revise on paper.

I like his Analogue Youth/Digital Adulthood analogy… now a thing of the past as the generation that is virtually digital is now among us.

The benefits of doodling, sketching up apparently meaningless drawings while seemingly bored or distracted, have been greatly underestimated:

The teacher who chastised you for “mindless doodling” was wrong on both counts. Far from shutting down the mind, the act of doodling engages the brain in the kind of visual sense-making people have practiced for over 30,000 years. Doodling sharpens concentration, increases retention, and enhances access to the problem solving unconscious. It activates the portions of the visual cortex that allow us to see mental imagery and manipulate concepts, and unifies three major learning modalities – visual, auditory, and kinesthetic.