Creativity is a riddle that an artist asks himself Stanislav Jerzy Lec Follow the link and sign up for the course Write the fairy tale of your life! Well, shall we begin? Here in front of you lies a blank sheet of paper. The color and size of the sheet are not particularly important, but for creativity I do not use squared or lined sheets of paper. Very reminiscent of school and penmanship lessons. My “fear of a blank sheet” comes from childhood, from the first grade of school, when, under my mother’s strict control, I was doing my homework on “writing” and heard her shout behind me: “I screwed up again!” This is where the fear of making a mistake comes from, the fear of writing “wrong”. If you experience the “fear of a blank sheet,” then perhaps it was also born under the reproachful, stern gaze of a mother, father, or teacher. But now we will not understand our childhood traumas. Let's put off grieving over our talent “ruined” in childhood for now. Now we will learn to write. Create. We will be heroes overcoming fear. We will awaken our creativity, and for this we will act. And so, let's continue. I usually write on clean white A4 paper, and you take the one you like best, and of course, prepare a pen or pencil. In the future, it is not necessary to use paper and pen; after one or two weeks you will be able to type text on a computer, tablet or any medium convenient for you. Your choice. But the first tasks and some training exercises need to be completed only on paper. The purpose of the exercise that I now suggest you complete is to overcome the block that often arises before writing the first line. Its simplicity is that it does not require any thinking, no special training, no writing skills. At first glance, this exercise looks stupid and “stupid.” Have you ever seen how, imitating adults, small children write - they don’t know letters, don’t know how to write, or even how to hold a pen properly? Children write scribbles that vaguely resemble letters - large, crooked, sliding off the line at random, but at the same time very passionate about the process. In order to overcome the psychological barrier - the “fear of a blank sheet” and start creating, we need to “return to childhood” again - learn to write again. But how to do that? Do the exercise below. Exercise No. 1. Take a pen in the hand with which you usually write (for most, this is the right hand, of course). Ask yourself some simple but open-ended (!) question, and write it down. (Open-ended question - This is a question that cannot be answered simply “yes” or “no”; it requires an answer of one or more words) For example: “What do I want?” “What am I doing?!” “What animal do I look like?” etc. The most important thing is to try not to immediately answer this question. Let it “hang” in the air. If, without having time to write down the question, you immediately received an answer to it in your head, write it down in the hand you are used to writing. Then transfer the pen from your right hand to your left (if you are left-handed, then from your left to your right). Place the pen on the paper and let your hand write as if by itself. The answer to the question should ideally come from somewhere in the depths of your subconscious. If it works, the answer comes as if from nowhere, it is not predictable and is born right in the process of writing. Remember the quote from the poet and philosopher Stanislaw Jerzy Lec at the beginning of this letter? Creativity is a riddle that an artist asks himself. Start asking yourself such riddles. If the answer seems logical and familiar to you, this means that the right hemisphere of the brain (which is what we want to “wake up”) is not connected to work, and your “working” brain, the left hemisphere, “speaks” to you. It is the right hemisphere that is “responsible” for our creative activity. It is there that our fantasies and dreams are born, it is the right hemisphere that creates amazing phantasmagoric dreams. But we usually rarely load it with work consciously, and therefore it is not used to working. The left hemisphere.