Spark

Read this book!: Spark: How Creativity Works by Julie Burstein with a forward by Kurt Andersen. The book is copyrighted, 2011, by Public Radio International, published by HarperCollins. It is, primarily, a compilation of the highlights of fascinating interviews with successful, creative people, the gleanings of insight into their processes.

Burstein is the lead producer and Andersen is the host of the radio show Studio 360. Their tagline says Studio 360 is the place "where art and real life collide."

A few tidbits from the book:

'...[in] an essay called "The Amateur Spirit" by the great scholar and writer Daniel Boorstin. The main obstacle to progress is not ignorance, Boorstin wrote, but "pretensions to knowledge.... The amateur is not afraid to do something for the first time.... the rewards and refreshments of thought and the arts come from the courage to try something, all sorts of things, for the first time... An enamored amateur need not be a genius to stay out of the ruts he has never been trained in."
'Here was a supremely credentialed prince of the Establishment, the ultimate professional intellectual—Rhodes Scholar, Ph.D., professor at the University of Chicago and Cambridge University, museum director, Librarian of Congress—arguing in his seventies that while professionalism of the good kind (knowledge, competence, reliability) has its place, it is the curious excited, slightly reckless passion of the amateur that we need to nurture in our professional lives, especially if we aspire to creativity in the work we do.' (Foreword by Andersen, ix-x)

' " You don't want to do too many projects of a similar type," (Tibor Kalman) told me. "The first one, you fuck it up in an interesting way. The second one, you get it right. And then you're out of there." ' (Andersen, x)

'Danny Boyle.... "There's something about the innocence and joy when you don't quite know what you're doing." ' (Andersen, xi)

'Steve Jobs.... "The heaviness of being successful... was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life." ' (Andersen, xi)

"Engaging challenges often force us to create stronger work." (Burstein, 3)


For myself, I want to hold onto every bit of knowledge, competence and reliability I can muster, and I want to hold onto that excitement and interest of the beginner's mind, of doing a thing in a slightly different way, holding onto the joy of being interested in the twist, the odd detail, that presents anew a whole, wide world of possibilities.