If you’ve listened to any of the interviews where I talk about coming up with “For the Love of Gold,” you’ll notice that I’ve mentioned how large a role a late-night pool game with my dad played in coming up with that story.
I don’t think I’ve talked about pool games with dad much before. But really, it’s been quite integral to my process over the years.
Roc Rider one benefited from many such games, as have myriad of my stories over the years.
Thinking about it, I believe there are two significant reasons for this. One is that my dad makes a pretty awesome sounding board. He’s always been good at taking things I say about a story I’m working on or an idea I’ve had and asking just the right question to get the creative gears in my brain churning.
The other is that the process of playing and chatting is almost meditative in its flow. Unsurprisingly, this makes it quite stimulating to the creative mind.
How is a game of pool and good conversation meditative? I’ll explain.
In my explorations into meditation over the past year (mainly through the Headspace app and a lovely little book given to me as a present), I’ve learned that the creative mind can find stimulation through a combination of two different yet equally important states of mind.
Freedom and focus.
Go through the Headspace on Creativity pack, and you’ll find an interesting exercise. You begin with a particular visualization. Once completed, you let the mind go free and do whatever it wants. Until you realize that you’ve become distracted, and then you reign in your attention to the breath again, counting breaths to ten before once again letting the mind be free.
(There’s more to it than that, but you’ll have to get the app to learn what that is. I highly recommend it)
This combination of the two mindsets prepares the mind to process creative thought. Freedom of thought lets you soak in ideas and explore creative directions. While focus helps you stay on your intended track and give form and function to those creative sparks.
I’ve written before about right-brain and left-brain impacts on creativity and writing in particular. This exercise strikes me as tapping into that duality. The freedom part of the training accesses your systems-brain. The focus part, your specifics-brain.
The use of both parts through this meditation is a wonderful way to get your two brain halves firing together and get the mind familiar with using them in tandem.
A pool game with creative conversation attached naturally follows a very similar flow to that meditation.
During the conversation, my thoughts go free. Follow where the words take us, and dad and I can end up in some bizarre and cool places.
Then, inevitably, my turn at the game arrives. And to shoot pool even marginally well, I have to focus. That focus takes my attention away from the creative problem and the conversation for an intense burst of time.
Yet, just as in the meditation, the repeated back and forth of these two states produces a unique flow state where my creativity shines. And in a practical, usable way.
Be it that every author and creative can find something like pool games with my dad to help them through developing their ideas. I think they’ll find it helpful.
Do you have an activity that engages the two parts of your brain in a back and forth sequence? I’d love to hear about it.
