Unused creativity isn't benign. It lives within us until it’s expressed, neglected to death, or suffocated by resentment and fear. ~Brene Brown
Unused creativity isn't benign. It lives within us until it’s expressed, neglected to death, or suffocated by resentment and fear. ~Brene Brown
Creativity Prompt #25: Mastering The Art Of (Self) Conversation | 30-Day Creativity Challenge
.
Gustav Klimt's Pear Tree (1903)
And just like that, here we are on day 25 of the 30-Day Creativity Challenge, leaving us less than a week to complete our journey together. How exhilarating!
Yesterday’s creativity prompt, based on May Swenson’s rich poem, “Question,” was, I admit, complex. Today will be less demanding though at least as valuable, because you can do it every day, multiple times a day, without taking up any extra time at all. We’re going to talk about the creative value of … talking. Yes, talking. To yourself.
As always, the prompt itself will be structured and specific. It will distinguish between multiple approaches, and identify the most (and least) valuable ways of talking to yourself, including ways of particular importance for writers. (And this prompt will be expanded upon toward a more structured activity tomorrow—one that, teaser, hails from David Bowie!).
But first, some background. On Sunday, I introduced you to my youngest, Billie—who wrote Creativity Prompt #23: The Secret Power of “Not Yet” and the Importance of Stillness.
In their guest post, Billie mentioned that they are a writer and a trained yoga teacher and that they are foster parent to a beautiful two-year-old boy. They did not mention that their degree is in early childhood education, but that’s meaningful information about Billie, because their passion for and understanding of children tends to permeate everything they do. And when they were still in school, still wholly immersed in the study of child development, they’d often share with me snippets and highlights from lectures and coursework. One memorable such share was in regard to the purpose and surprisingly high value of toddler self-talk. The way I remember Billie explaining it to me—so any errors here are mine, not theirs—is that as toddlers narrate their activities (Now I am putting my arm in my sleeve, now I am stuck, now I am putting my arm in my sleeve again, etc.), this narration not only describes what they are doing or going to do, but serves to organize and encourage their actions, especially when the task at hand presents challenges. In other words, self-talk helps toddlers do hard things successfully.
And it does the same for adults, as well.
Knowing this, Billie and I became much more intentional about our self-talk, and much kinder. We began to talk to ourselves in the same clear, kind, encouraging, and, when necessary, firm way we might speak to a very young child. You would not believe how effective this can be.
That’s in part because speaking our thoughts out loud (versus thinking our thoughts silently) engages more regions of the brain. And, according to Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score, which is one of the most important books on my shelf), it engages regions of the brain connected to possibility, solution-finding, and connection-making—which silently thinking does not.
No doubt this is why we say sometimes say to our partners, friends, sisters, and brothers, as we noodle out loud about a situation or dilemma, “I just need to say this out loud to someone, thanks for listening.”
Cognitive philosopher Daniel Denett explains the value of speaking aloud vs. thinking silently this way:
“[…] consciousness developed as a way to internalize talking to oneself. Speaking words triggers parts of the brain involved in moving the diaphragm, tongue, lips, vocal chords, etc. Hearing words triggers parts of the brain connected to the ears. Speaking aloud can be a bad survival strategy, especially when you’re thinking about the chief’s wife, so we developed consciousness as an internal monologue. It works, but it doesn’t exercise as many areas of the brain as speaking and hearing your own words. […]”
The thing about self-talk is that we all do it, whether it’s intentional or not. Research shows this repeatedly. Therefore, this persistent practice offers an opportunity to practice paying attention and being intentional, which in turn helps us reap more of the potential benefits for creativity. And those benefits are real, from improved mental performance to greater emotional control. Indeed, research has identified five specific benefits of thinking out loud:
1. Boosts self-motivation
2. Improves perceptual processing
3. Enhances problem-solving skills
4. Improves timing & precision
5. Boosts memory
And a recent study from Bangor University even found that thinking and talking out loud might even be a sign of intelligence—which, for me, raises the chicken-egg question, since the practice is known to help organize our thoughts and improve mental performance.
Personally, I love the implications of this research for writers, who are famous for needing self-motivation, obviously, but who can also benefit greatly from enhanced problem-solving skills. Every poem, essay, story, and book is really just a set of interesting questions/problems needing our attention in order to spot possible directions/solutions/plot points, etc. In The Learning Mind, Lottie Miles describes a study finding wherein computer programmers found, by explaining what they wanted the code to achieve—then speaking out loud in line by line detail—that answers soon sprang “to mind as if leaping from the spoken thoughts,” then I’m up for it!
And perhaps my favorite exploration of the benefits of self-talk come from writer Ulrich Boser in the Harvard Business Review, who says this:
Self-talk also helps us think about our thinking. When we’re engaged in a conversation with ourselves, we typically ask ourselves questions along the lines of: “How will I know what I know? What do I find confusing? Do I really know this?” Whether we hit the pause button while listening to a podcast or stop to reflect while reading a manual, we develop skills more effectively by thinking about our thinking.
Ask why. Self-explaining can give voice to impulses of curiosity that may otherwise remain unexplored. It’s about asking ourselves the question, “Why?” Now, if we really know a topic, “why” questions are not that hard. If I asked you a why question about the town that you grew up in, the answer would come pretty easily. It’s when we don’t know something that why questions become more difficult — and create a way to develop an area of expertise.
To illustrate the practice, let’s examine a query like, “Why are there waves?” Some of us can bumble our way to a basic answer. Maybe something like: “Well, waves have to do with the wind. When wind blows across the top of the water, it creates ripples of water.”
But then comes the inevitable follow-up: “Why does the wind lift the water?” or “Why are there waves when there’s no wind?” Here we draw a blank.
Boser goes on to say that next steps might be searching the internet for more answers, but I would propose that for creative writers, a deeper access to richness and imagination could be unearthed by continuing to muse out loud, speculating about various answers, regardless of how ungrounded in science they might be, until we’ve expanded our curiosity far beyond any previously perceived limits.
In any case, today’s prompt will give you a variety of helpful tips from cognitive experts, some of which are specific to writers. Hopefully you’ll find these helpful as you amplify your awareness of, and your frequency of, talking to yourself, and master the art of (self) conversation.