Does the right side of the brain power creativity?

In a recent article, Scientific American discusses how the sides of the brain work together to express creativity.

Instead, the entire creative process– from the initial burst of inspiration to the final polished product– consists of many interacting cognitive processes and emotions. Depending on the stage of the creative process, and what you’re actually attempting to create, different brain regions are recruited to handle the task.

Importantly, many of these brain regions work as a team to get the job done, and many recruit structures from both the left and right side of the brain. In recent years, evidence has accumulated suggesting that “cognition results from the dynamic interactions of distributed brain areas operating in large-scale networks.”

The networks are described in more detail in the article.

The only movie making guide you'll ever need.

Save the Cat is a guidebook to making blockbusters that offers incredibly specific advice and appears to have been used in many movies.  Jurassic Park, a personal favorite, is noted as one that had similar parts but not the correct order.

I am not praising this book, by the way, merely pointing out how formulaic movie making has become.  Not at all like Casablan...oh, wait.

Here is the list of events and when they should take place - apparently one page equals about one minute of screen time.

a song a day from Damn Sight Radio

From a Busan co-worker:

If you don’t already know.. I’m writing and recording a song for every day of 2013 and posting them here.  This is the 203rd song so far.

It’s about the cast of Saturday Night Livelosing at least 2 of its strongest members.  I think Jason Sudekis is leaving too

Steampunk festival in Coldwater

It's on August 10, at Coldwater Ontario.  I hope to be there for the morning, and possibly with a few guttersnipes in tow.
Facebook page.  Coldwater Event calendar.

In a similar vein, Orillia's Museum of Art and History has a Steampunk exhibit.

So, what is Steampunk?
Squiddo says:

Over the past thirty years authors have been trying to combine the past with the present to create the 'modern' steampunk. This involves manipulating the Victorian industrial era with futuristic inventions largely run on steam. As a sub-genre that is still growing in popularity it is hard to know what elements are "necessary" for a story to be considered steampunk.

Squiddoo focuses on three main points.
Language (Cockney and Victorian), Industrialization, Historicism


One Nanowrimo wannabe says

Air pirates and air ships are a big one! I'm personally a big fan of air ships. :) This isn't necessarily a literary steampunk thing, but goggles are very much a staple of steampunk costumes and aesthetic. As are gears on clothing and such. I use this to a slightly humorous affect. The gears on clothing in one of my WIPs has no purpose beyond the fact that the society finds it aesthetically pleasing and pretty, and people that dress up in steampunk nowadays do. People often use something called called "aether" in steampunk media that's sort of a vague thing. In classical beliefs (and the 19th century), it was thought that aether was some sort of substance that acted as a medium of transition of electromagnetic waves.
The thing about cliches and tropes is, they are cliches and tropes because they /work/ if you want to write in air pirates and what have you, go for it! Own it and make it your own.

This quote is from 2012, so this person might now be a Nanowrimo completer,

unlike me, who remains a wannabe.

Steampunk Canada has more info.

TV Tropes has suggestions on how to write Steampunk:

"Steampunk", of course, suggests steam-driven technology, so you will need to include this in your story. In a broader sense, steampunk also usually refers to a general attitude and aesthetic around that of the nineteenth century, incorporating the styles and fashions, attitudes and politics. This means, of course, that your story will either be set at some point within the Industrial Revolution or the nineteenth century, an Alternate History which spun off from this point or another world which is based on these stylings....Steampunk tends to run on Rule Of Cool; in actuality, a lot of steampunk technologies (particularly those which attempt to replicate modern technologies such as the computer) would have been massive, consumed unsustainable amounts of fuel and would probably have ultimately been unworkable (there's a reason in real life the human race switched from steam to oil and gas). This, of course, does not mean that your story cannot work — it does, however, mean that you need to make sure you get the reader's Willing Suspension of Disbelief on side. In general, as it's such a fantastic genre, the audience will accept quite a lot — but this does not mean they will accept absolutely anything.Steampunk is also an aesthetic. Technology affects the world around us in great ways, and a world based on steampunk technologies would be quite different in terms of politics, attitudes, fashions, etc. You need to keep this in mind; your reader will not be convinced if you simply transplant modern society with a slightly steampunk makeover.

I attempted my own list of tropes or requirements for Steampunk before I began research so lets see how mine compares:

• Steam powered engines: train, dirigible, ornithopter, etc
• Above, either biomimickry or loud, clanky, dirty, dangerous massive machines
• Victorian settings, styles, classes: nobility travel with huge amounts of luggage and servants,combination of guns and swords, repressed emotions and sexuality, flowing booze and copious amounts of food
• Brass, steel, leather, wood construction, goggles and gears
• Magic or Magic/science - Mesmer's hypnosis, Frankenstein, ouija boards.

Added the next day:
Boingboing reviews a book on Steampunk Device making.  Amazon link here.

Added March 14, 2014, Steampunk 101.

TWIC: how to- list, marketing and profitable blogging

Behance (via lifeblogger), has a list of 29 ways to stay creative.  The ideas are good but not profound.  The list shines in its presentation, which is one of my weaknesses.  The list covers a few things I am good at but mostly omits the work of creativity, which is another of my weaknesses.  #29 is Finish Something. The actual work of making or writing the dang thing.

A.C.F. Crawford, author of Sailor of the Skysea, has given me his book on digital format asked me to read and review it on Goodreads.  This is part of his marketing strategy.  Many authors are now offering a few of their first books for free to build up a readership before actually trying to sell one.  Scott Sigler (Wikipedia) is the one I'm most familiar with.  Even established publishers do this now with Baen offering the first book of several series' to get people interested in their worlds. Well, Baen is using the technique to re-introduce older authors and series. I like the idea except that it means even more work before seeing that first paycheck.  Self-publishing is a scary gig.

In the above two examples, I've discussed my aversion to work.  Colin Schultz's post appears, at first, to be more my style.  He describes how he writes each blog post in one hour and gets paid well for it.  On the other hand, he had to earn his chops (is that the right metaphor?) before he was offered a blogging position at the Smithsonian.  He specifically says that nobody he knows makes money with Google Ads and Wordpress or Blogger.

The core of his post is how to be successful at science blogging and this paragraph introduces all the elements:

Now, those two goals: to be right, and to be original, run smack into the biggest and most important constraint in this kind of quick turn-around blogging: time.

TWIC: lego, groomed dogs, and lots of books

The change in Lego expressions to somewhat grimmer visages has not harmed your children.  An excerpt:

... New Zealand researchers demonstrated that LEGO faces have become much more diverse in the past 35 years, but the finding that got the most attention is that LEGO is making more angry-looking minifigures than ever before, to a point where the proportion of angry faces rivals that of happy ones. But, contrary to what you might have read, the study did not look into the effect that these facial expressions are having on children and their emotional development. In fact, the study did not involve children at all. ...
“Around 20 percent of reporters read the study beforehand,” estimates Bartneck. “The bad ones just copied what everybody else was writing.” This is unfortunate, because the findings of this study are interesting in their own right.

Happyplace.com has images of "bizarre-crazy" dog grooming.  One example.

Writing advice 1 (journalism):

2.) When interviewing for a job, tell the editor how you love to report.
How your passion is gathering information. Do not mention how you want to be a writer, use the word "prose," or that deep down you have a sinking suspicion you are the next Norman Mailer.

Writing advice 2 (sexy lamp test):

"The Sexy Lamp Test. If you can remove a female character, replace her w/ a sexy lamp & your story still works, you’re a hack." - @kellysue [Ed Yong]

Writing advice 3: self-publishers, let us know who you are.

I stumbled across the title Mad City Eats: Food Adventures in Madison, Wisconsin, by Adam Vincent Powell. ...I'm always vaguely curious who these local authors are (if they are truly "local") and what they're out there doing.But when I brought this book home, I was disappointed. I have no idea who this Adam Vincent Powell* is, and the book includes no introduction, preface, or really any kind of clue to enlighten me. The book literally just launches into its subject matter,

Writing advice 4: hard to excerpt from this one.  Two points in brief. a) be careful when your views change as you write a book so that the conclusion matches your introduction and b) be sure that people can recognize your voice from those of imagined critics.

Amazon has licences to allow fan-fiction to be sold on Kindle. Win (fan writers) - Win (Amazon) - Win (original writers).  Time for some Jedi knights to land in the Well of Souls (I'm reading some old Chalker now).

Hirschman felt that creative leaps were seldom intended but forced.  People just thought the project would be easier, then had to finish the damn thing.

 Hence, the only way in which we can bring our creative resources fully into play is by misjudging the nature of the task, by presenting it to ourselves as more routine, simple, undemanding of genuine creativity than it will turn out to be.

My son and I will soon be building an awesome robot!

Designed to be enjoyed by children with an adult on hand, Welcome to Your Awesome Robot provides perfect material for a fun family activity day or a kids workshop. Viviane Schwarz has illustrated hilarious comics throughout the book to explain the blueprint instruction pages, so this is just as much a story as it is a workbook.

---------------------

Link below added mere minutes after first posting!

Dim the lights to be creative.

“Darkness increases freedom from constraints, which in turn promotes creativity,” report Anna Steidle of the University of Stuttgart and Lioba Werth of the University of Hohenheim. A dimly lit environment, they explain in the Journal of Environmental Psychology, “elicits a feeling of freedom, self-determination, and reduced inhibition,” all of which encourage innovative thinking.
Steidle and Werth describe six experiments which provide evidence for their thesis. The key one featured 114 German undergraduates, who were seated in groups of two or three in a small room designed to simulate an office.

Update and new TWIC

I have been working at a wildlife conservation area, educating groups of children on ecological and historical subjects, for the past six weeks and doing little else. I really enjoy my work -not the paycheck so much -and still have the energy to consume internet material but not to create any.  This disappoints me and one thing I need to be creating is more job applications.  After that, I want to write.  I want to write about creativiti, life in small-town Ontario, evolution and more.  I want to write fiction, non-fiction, travelogues, political rants...

My last post showed a few examples of my son's creative thinking.  This was only a still image of his output, which is probably similar to all kids his age.  We are not well-integrated into the community yet so he fills a lot of alone time with self-guided play and making his own narratives.

At work, I've made two fairly well-received jokes and many not-so-well received.  For the former, I spoke Spanish to visitors to my workplace - they were there for CUBAree, which apparently does not involve people from a large island near Florida - and told co-workers about the huge mass of "broken, no-name ping pong balls" I was finding.  The latter joke doesn't work if you don't know that the snapping turtles of the area are laying now and raccoons are digging up the clutches and feasting (leaving behind small, white, broken balls).

All right, time for the links:
Sci Am revisits the complexity of the creative mind:

In the 60s, after extensively interviewing some of the most creative people of his generation, legendary creativity researcher Frank X. Barron came to the following conclusion:
“Thus the creative genius may be at once naïve and knowledgeable, being at home equally to primitive symbolism and to rigorous logic. He is both more primitive and more cultured, more destructive and more constructive, occasionally crazier and yet adamantly saner, than the average person.”

Complexity, bank tellers and artists:

Consider a hot off the press study just published in Creativity Research Journal. Edward Necka and Teresa Hlawacz recruited 60 visual artists and 60 bank officers in Poland, and administered a variety of tests of temperament and divergent thinking (one component of creativity requiring the ability to generate many different possibilities). How did the artists differ from the bank officers?
Bank officers were about as good at divergent thinking as the general population, whereas artists were amazingly good at flexibly generating original pictures and words. In fact, they were almost at ceiling! What about temperament? This is where things get really interesting. On the whole, artists didn’t substantially differ from bank tellers in their temperament. To get to the bottom of this finding, the researchers looked at the relationships between the various measures within each group.

Not entirely on topic, but if we are looking at complexity, I guess we should look at individuality.
Still off-topic but back to complexity: is genius the result of nature or nurture?

On topic again, can we research comedy?

McGraw leans on historical references, formulas, peer-reviewed studies, curious findings from his “Humour Research Lab” and good old-fashioned jokes. Just as scientists before him sent a man to the moon, this one thinks he can break whatever code needs to be broken for us to understand what exactly makes people laugh. And to do that, McGraw has tiptoed away from a long-established study of judgment and emotion and cannonballed instead into the field of humour research.

...[big ellipses here!]

“Like a magician, the comedian wants to have some air of mystery. To reveal the trick may actually hurt the entertainment aspect of it all,” he says with some sympathy. “Another thing is, to crack the humour code in some way may take this thing that does seem so difficult, so special, and make it less special in their eyes.”

The late Iain Banks left 11 rules for good writing:
Number 3, "Never give your protagonist a simple motivation" is the one I liked the best - the others were too complex for me.