Writing Through to Write your Masterpiece

THE FIELD THEORY OF CREATIVITY

George Bernard Shaw talked about the “field theory” of creativity, borrowing a term from physics.

 Good ideas do not exist alone but in a larger field of imagination.

 As a young man Shaw wrote five novels. Can you name one? 

Shaw had to work through his novelist phase before he could arrive, in his late thirties, as a playwright.

 Shaw believed in productivity — just keep writing, was his advice to everyone. 

Norma Jenckes, a Shaw scholar at the University of Cincinnati, says Shaw’s attitude was that “you had to write yourself through all sorts of things, and then something might become your masterpiece.”

 Geniuses work hard. They’re prodigious. They can’t stop themselves from churning out work. 

Thomas Edison couldn’t stop inventing. Joyce Carol Oates can’t stop writing.

 Shaw published 55 plays. 

Milton Avery spewed paintings by the museum-load; when asked how he got inspiration, he said by going to the studio every day.

No piece of writing is wasted. Even if you don't like it when it's finished. At least you wrote it.  Now it is no longer clogging your brain. It is out there; it made room for the next idea to surface.

You have cleared the way to write something else

When I wrote my first play in the 1990s, I showed it to the great playwright, EDWARD ALBEE.

He was teaching in our department and we had become friends,

He read it and said, "Good  NOW WRITE TEN MORE." 

Then he added "But this will get you into YADDO and it did!

Byron's Ode to the Ocean

 

George Gordon Byron

I fell in  love with Lord  Byron when i was only six years old.

I loved his address to the sea.  

In fact every year I recited it as I entered the ocean for the first time each summer. 

 I adored his good looks 

and I must admit that I took collections of his work from the  Pawtucket Public Library and cut the  image of him that was often the first page of the collection.

 I put those pictures on  my bedroom wall. 

He was to me the most handsome of men.  

Also I knew many of his shorter poems by heart. 

 I often chose  Byron as the poet to  read aloud and talk about in those weekly poetry sessions with my mother.

 I recited my favorite 

 the verse "They know not I knew thee,  who knew the too well.

Long , long will I rue thee too deeply to tell.

If I should meet you after long years,

 how would I greet thee? In silence and tears."

believe it or not 

seventy years after I first read those lines, on this night, I am writing them down from memory, I did not condescend to check their accuracy.

 You,dear reader, may have that pleasure.

HERE IS WHAT I CHANTED TO THE OCEAN--

"Roll on, Thou..."

(From “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”, Canto the Second, CLXXIX.)

Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean – roll!
Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;
Man marks the earth with ruin – his control
Stops with the shore; -- upon the watery plain
The wrecks are all thy deed, not does remain
A shadow of man’s ravage, save his own,
When for a moment, like a drop of rain,
He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan,
Without a grave, unknell’d, uncoffin’d, and unknown.

And I have loved thee, Ocean! and my joy

Of youthful sports was on thy breast to be

Borne like thy bubbles, onward: from a boy

I wantoned with thy breakers—they to me
Were a delight; and if the freshening sea
Made them a terror—’twas a pleasing fear,
For I was as it were a child of thee,
And trusted to thy billows far and near,

And laid my hand upon thy mane—as I do here