VII. Can We Learn How to Create?
Murielle: That’s not a tangent at all.
You’ve just connected how to create to the idea of a discipline.
And that made me think: perhaps How to Create could itself become a new discipline.
We create, but we don’t really know how we do it. We think we do. We know the processes, we know the tools — but do we know what is actually happening when we create?
Can we pinpoint the moment when an idea becomes something else, when it begins to materialize into something less abstract?
To borrow Sourav Sengupta’s model of the different levels of abstraction in the arts, something happens in which this almost ethereal event in consciousness begins its descent. Suddenly it becomes a project we’re working on. We’re creating.
But do we actually understand that passage?
We don’t have a discipline devoted to it — a discipline that asks what is happening when we create.
Loïc Yengo: We don’t.
And this is very challenging. I wouldn’t even know where to start.
Because I think you can describe processes. You can create the conditions for creation to happen. But then there is the je ne sais quoi that happens.
Murielle: But that je ne sais quoi is exactly what we want to find out.
What is it?
Loïc: The short answer is: I don’t know. I guess that’s why I call it the je ne sais quoi.
And even if we were to create a discipline around it, I’m not sure how we would organize it.
But there is an idea I like. I like to think that somehow the things we create exist before they materialize.
You have an idea, or you’re exposed to several ideas, and then the je ne sais quoi creates some kind of cosmic path through which they become embodied in our plane of existence.
I’m being very cryptic here.
Murielle: You’re being poetic. Welcome.
Loïc: [Laughs.]
Murielle: I’ve influenced you.
Loïc: Apparently.
But perhaps that’s what we’re doing when we create the conditions we were talking about earlier. We create the conditions, and somehow lightning strikes.
I like to think that maybe the thing already existed in some way and that you stumble across it.
And I have a feeling from my own scientific work that reinforces this.
There have been several moments in my career when I’ve been working on a problem and suddenly perceived a creative solution. I put two and two together and think: Oh. If I combine these things, this could materialize in this way.
But almost immediately, I have the intuition that someone else is seeing this too.
Which is strange, because it doesn’t feel as though I’m creating it. It feels almost as though I’m recognizing it more than I’m creating it.
Murielle: So you think that the things we create are already present in some form that isn’t perceptible to us?
Loïc: I think so.
Partly because my understanding of creativity includes a notion of surprise.
If we’re always completely in control of ideation and of the process through which something is built, then there is no room for us to be surprised by what emerges.
And surprise seems to be part of the creative experience — for the person creating as well as for the people encountering what has been created.
But I’m also aware that there’s a tension in what I’m saying.
On the one hand, I have this almost Platonic intuition that things somehow exist and that we discover them and bring them into reality.
At the same time, I also believe that we really do create things.
So when it comes to creativity, I’m ambiguous.
Murielle: I don’t necessarily think those two intuitions contradict each other.
Perhaps the question is what we mean by creation.
There may be something we encounter — something that precedes its material form — and yet the act through which it acquires a particular form may still genuinely be ours.
A poem doesn’t arrive as a printed book.
Loïc: No.
Murielle: Something has to happen between the intuition and the work.
And perhaps that’s precisely the territory this hypothetical discipline would have to investigate.
Not simply inspiration. Not simply technique. But the passage between recognition and form.
Murielle: There’s another difficulty.
The experience of creating is exhilarating.
When you’re designing a story in your mind, when a poem arrives, when an idea suddenly appears — it’s extraordinary. There can be an enormous concentration of joy and power in a very short moment.
Who wouldn’t want that experience again?
But if you continually chase that experience, are you necessarily going to arrange the conditions through which the idea can materialize?
I’m wondering whether this exhilarating experience of creativity we’re describing is actually complete.
You can’t live in a permanent Eureka moment.
Marveling at things is wonderful. Being inside the palace of your own mind and discovering all its rooms, hidden chambers, corridors and secret places is wonderful.
But at some point, don’t you need to leave the palace of your mind?
Loïc: I think you do, but that’s another very challenging question.
Leaving the palace of your mind is a strange thing to do unless you have some intuition — or some belief — that there is something outside the palace.
And that’s risky.
If the whole creative experience is connected to something larger, then leaving makes sense.
I think I believe in what I would call an augmented creative experience.
Something is coming through me — perhaps something I’m recognizing. The fact that it comes through me feels more like a blessing than anything else. I’m grateful for it.
But then it has to serve something larger.
Imagine you’re conscious of the limits of your own memory. You know you can’t remember everything, but you want to write or think about something larger than your memory can contain.
So you use notebooks. Post-its. External tools. You store things outside yourself and bring them together later.
You’re augmenting your memory in order to build something that exceeds the capacity of your individual memory.
If you decide that the only things you can create are the things that fit inside your own memory, you can still create — but you’ll remain within that confinement.
You can accept that limited memory is simply one of your individual characteristics while still attempting to create as if you had infinite memory.
Murielle: So creation requires, in some sense, an extension beyond the individual creator.
Loïc: Yes. It has to serve a bigger purpose.
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