Creativity is seeing what others see and thinking what no one else ever thought. ~Albert Einstein
Creativity is seeing what others see and thinking what no one else ever thought. ~Albert Einstein
Creativity Prompt #28: The Ugly Beautiful Surprise of Incongruity | 30-Day Creativity Challenge
Two cats, blue and yellow (1912) painting in high resolution by Franz Marc
I once taught a writing salon called Ugly, Beautiful. The premise was to explore the crucial importance of never allowing our writing to be just one thing—for life itself defies such oversimplification.
And in one of the best essays ever written, “The Fourth State of Matter,” published in 1996 in The New Yorker, the brilliant writer Jo Ann Beard wrote a sentence that stunningly portrays this principle:
“The Milky Way is a long smear on the sky, like something erased on a blackboard.”
Beard’s sentence better explains than I ever could—through exemplification, not explanation, of course—how literary juxtaposition of incongruities works—the gripping command it holds over the page, and us.
Today’s creativity prompt explores the power of juxtaposing incongruities in our lives, both as humans and writers. I’ll provide you with some very clear instructions for mining this particular gift and applying it in your thinking and in your prose. You can scroll down to the bolded subhead if you want to jump right in.
Otherwise, since I’m an armchair philosopher at heart, follow along for a little more background on incongruity if you want to better understand the massive, magical power it can wield in our purposeful creative development. Here is how Changingminds.org explains the intersection of incongruity and attention:
When we sense the world around us, the first thing we must do is make sense of it, recognizing objects and inferring meaning from what we see. When our recognition is only partial, when things are not quite as they should be, we are struck by the incongruity of the situation and are unable to make full sense of what we see. This creates a tension gap that draws us in, causing us to attend closer in order to make better sense and resolve the tension.
And that—the tension gap, the drawing us (or our reader) in—is what we are seeking when we intentionally create incongruous juxtapositions in our writing. Of course, in order to create incongruous juxtapositions, we also must learn to experience, see, sense, recognize them in the world.
Jo Ann Beard’s sentence takes one of nature’s most magnificently beautiful expressions—the Milky Way—and describes it as a “smear.” The unexpectedness of that description grabs hold of us whether we realize it or not, asking us to think just a little bit harder about an overly familiar poetic image that could otherwise have “auto-filled” in our mind’s eye.
Another less overt example of incongruity that we have looked at during this 30-Day Creativity Challenge comes from Larry Levis’s poem “Winter Stars,” in which he describes stars this way:
That pale haze of stars goes on & on,
Like laughter that has found a final, silent shape
On a black sky. It means everything
It it cannot say.
Oh, the gorgeousness. It’s so real it hurts, especially because this poem is in part about an estranged relationship between a son and his dying father. Stars as a “pale haze” that goes on & on, like “laughter that has found a final, silent shape.” My heart breaks in the most divine way, the way that reminds me of what it means to be human, to love, to ache, and to persist.
Stars or no, the idea of “laughter that has found a final shape” is itself an incongruity, especially in the context of a poem pointing toward death. The surprising truth of this sentiment stops me short—and the stopping begins with the surprise. Again, from Changingminds.org:
Incongruity surprises and confuses. It makes us pause and perhaps even laugh (incongruity is a common essence of humor). It makes us look again and think again. What was an unconscious process of interpretation now becomes a conscious process of assessment and revision.
Today’s prompt walks you through a three-part, inventive, and iterative process you can repeat indefinitely for opening yourself to incongruity, playing with it, and applying it in your writing. I hope you enjoy it and that you’ll share your experience in the comments or the chat!