On Hopelessness In The Creative Process
I may end up doing a short series on the fantastic "A Technique for Producing Ideas" which is, page-for-page, the single greatest guide for the practice of generating ideas that I have found. In it, James Webb Young give voice to what every individual pursuing a creative end has experienced: sometimes it feels like the answer will never come. He explains that hopelessness is every bit as important a step in the creative process as any other:
"...After a while you will reach the hopeless stage. Everything is a jumble in your mind, with no clear insight anywhere... It is important to realize that this is just as definite and just as necessary a stage in the process as the two preceding ones."
I've certainly felt that sense of hopelessness, but I've never considered it as "necessary" to the creative process. I was delighted to learn a similar sentiment preceded one of the greatest scientific discoveries of all time. Einstein, just before discovering special relativity, reached a stage of hopelessness himself:
"'In view of this dilemma, there appears to be nothing else to do than to abandon either the principle of relativity or the simple law of the propagation of light,' Einstein wrote. Then something delightful happened. Albert Einstein, while talking with a friend, took one of the most elegant imaginative leaps in the history of physics.
"It was a beautiful day in Bern, Einstein later remembered, when he went to visit his best friend Michele Besso, the brilliant but unfocused engineer he had met while studying in Zurich and then recruited to join him at the Swiss Patent Office. Many days they would walk to work together, and on this occasion Einstein told Besso about the dilemma that was dogging him.
"'I'm going to give it up,' Einstein said at one point. But as they discussed it, Einstein recalled, 'I suddenly understood the key to the problem.' The next day, when he saw Besso, Einstein was in a state of great excitement. He skipped any greeting and immediately declared, 'Thank you. I've completely solved the problem.'" (From Walter Isaacson's, "Einstein: His Life and Universe.")
So what does Young suggest we do when we reach the stage of hopelessness? "...You make absolutely no effort of a direct nature. You drop the whole subject and put the problem out of your mind as completely as you can... You remember how Sherlock Holmes used to stop right in the middle of a case, and drag Watson off to a concert? That was a very irritating procedure to the practical and literal-minded Watson. But Conan Doyle was a creator and knew the creative process."
Sounds a lot like Holmes knew when he had permission to seek a diversion.
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