Concentration intensifies awareness

p.307

All-out intent begets an all-around awareness which also helps us creatively.  I have often admired the alertness of the Abercrombie and Fitch windows in New York.  There is almost always something in them that makes us stop and gaze.  For instance, during wartime I noticed people packed three deep peering at one of the displays, so I wedged my way through.  The magnet was nothing but a hunk of rag with a little card saying: "This piece of cloth came from a parachute of a bomb that devastated a large section of London."

In my newspaper days, such awareness was known as a "nose for news" and is still the distinguishing mark of star reporters.  But even a chemist can set himself apart by developing the same power.

The deferment-of-judgment principle

p. 127

Here's what Schiller wrote: "The reason for your complaint lies, it seems to me, in the constraint which your intellect imposes upon your imagination.  Here I will make an observation and illustrate it by an allegory.  Apparently it is not good - and indeed it hinders the creative work of the mind - if the intellect examines too closely the ideas already pouring in, as it were, at the gates.

Regarding in isolation, an idea may be quite insignificant and venturesome in the extreme; but it may acquire importance from an idea which follows it.  Perhaps, in a certain collection with other ideas which may seem equally absurd, it may be capable of furnishing a very serviceable link.  The intellect cannot judge all these ideas unless it can retain them until it has considered them in connection with these other ideas.

In the case of a creative mind, it seems to me, the intellect has withdrawn its watchers from the gates, and the ideas rush in pell-mell, and only then does it review and inspect the multitude.  You worthy critics, or whatever may call yourselves, are ashamed or afraid of the momentary and passing madness which is found in all real creators, the longer or shorter duration of which distinguishes the thinking artist from the dreamer.  Hence your complaints of unfruitfulness, for you reject too soon and discriminate too severely."

Anticipative imagination

p.33-34

The highest form of anticipative imagination is creative expectancy.  "When we look forward to something we want to come true, and strongly believe that it will come true, we can often make ourselves make it come true."  That is the nub of creative expectancy, as stated by Doctor Albert Butzer.  

The vice versa technique

p. 279

"Switcheroo" is Hollywood's name for topsy-turvy creativity. Many a movie plot has been thought up, or sparked up, by having the man bite the dog instead of vice versa.

p. 281

John Wanamaker likewise believed in reversing the obvious. His right-hand man said of him: "Wanamaker deliberately planned to do the unexpected thing in an different way. So much was this true that some of his associates used to figure on the very opposite of what he was expected to do, and this opposite would be the best guess."

Rearrangement

p. 273

Self-questioning can help us project our own imaginations into still other correlative fields. Countless ideas are to be found in the realm of rearrangement.

Rearrangement usually offers an unbelievable quantity of alternatives. For instance, a baseball manager can shuffle his team's batting order 362,880 times - 362,880 ways of arranging the same nine players! Yes, there are countless alternatives - countless leads to ideas - to be had through questions like: "How else can this be arranged?"... "What if the order were changed?"

A well-filled mind.....

p. 64
A well-filled mind is certainly essential to creativity, since facts are the wherewithal of ideas. But grave danger lurks in memory-stuffing. In his The Aims of Education, Alfred North Whitehead warned: "We must beware of what I call "inert ideas" - ideas that are merely received into the mind without being utilized, or tested, or thrown into fresh combinations." And yet nearly every curriculum stresses the intake and retention of such data.

Setting the "working mood"

pp.118-119

Just as baseball players swing two bats before stepping to the plate, we need to flex our imaginations when approaching a creative task.

....


Open-mindedness is so essential to creativity that we sometimes have to ward off influences which might close our minds while in quest of ideas. It would have been easy for Pasteur to have taken for granted the cause of silkworm disease when he went to the south of France to save it from ruin. The local silk-worm-growers tried to tell him just what the disease was and what caused it. Had he heeded their theories, he might never have found the answer that meant so much to France.