Fear of a Blank Canvas

There's nothing quite as scary as a blank canvas.  They come in many forms - empty lines of manuscript, a blank DAW session, an all-white word document.

The reasons we fear these are simple - there are too many options and no clear directions.

This reminds me of Dr. Dan Siegel's river metaphor.  A well-adjusted human flows down the river between the banks of structure and spontaneity.  When we flood the bank of structure, we become rigid.  When we flood the bank of spontaneity, we become chaotic.

Empty canvases are chaotic.  And unless we have a boundary or form in mind, we become overwhelmed by the infinite potential of the blank space before us.

To balance out the chaos we need some structure.  There are many kinds of structures, too many to cover here.  For now, you just realize the importance of constraints and make up your own.

Some of you may scoff and say "boundaries only limit creativity, man!"

And to that I would pose a challenge:

Create anything, whether it be a song, a poem, a dance - whatever your heart desires, and complete it in the next 10 minutes.

Now you may feel paralyzed by the plethora of choices in front of you.  Barry Schwartz, in his book The Paradox of Choice, explains how having near endless options is actually bad for our mental health:

“The fact that some choice is good doesn’t necessarily mean that more choice is better. As I will demonstrate, there is a cost to having an overload of choice. As a culture, we are enamored of freedom, self-determination, and variety, and we are reluctant to give up any of our options. But clinging tenaciously to all the choices available to us contributes to bad decisions, to anxiety, stress, and dissatisfaction — even to clinical depression.”

By implementing certain parameters around our creative work before we start, we make it easier to dive into the work without spending our mental energy being overwhelmed by hundreds of choices big and small.

And for those of you who were not phased by my previous challenge, well, I tricked you.  A 10 minute deadline is itself a constraint.  Deadlines are some of the most effective creative constraints I've come across - without them I'll just spin my wheels pondering all the ways to develop a piece of music or an article.

If you still don't believe me, know that many legendary creators believe in the power of creative boundaries. 

The problem with unlimited choice is that we often worry about whether we made the right choice.  With artistic endeavors, this analysis paralysis is accompanied by perfectionism - we want our work to be perfect, and wasting time deliberating which choices are right only leads to abandoned projects.

My interest in constraints may seem odd to those of you who know my band Space Whale Orchestra.  We are a free improv collective, and as such constraints should be contrary to our nature.  We like to combine both approaches, utilizing certain structures in form, which I will explain next week, and completely free pieces where we just start playing and see what happens.

The thing with free improvisation is that our own biases and relationships with the other musicians essentially act as constraints.

A free improvisation begins to form it's own constraints as the piece unfolds.  The instant a musician plays their first note, or starts to make noises on their instruments, as members of SWO are want to do, the rest of the ensemble has an idea of how to contribute to the piece in a way that makes sense.  In a way, we have trained to create constraints collectively and spontaneously.  Without those constraints, an improvisation would turn into chaos - which has definitely happened before… we don't like to talk about it…

Attendees of our Creative Improv Jams will also understand the power of impromptu constraints.

We end our sessions with a totally free group improvisation.  After a few hours of improvising to loose structures, it's nice to totally let go.  It can be overwhelming to some to start a piece, as there are endless possibilities in the beginning.  But what always ends up happening is that as the improv develops, motifs and themes emerge as well.  Performers naturally follow these themes and build subconscious constraints around where they expect the piece to go and where they've been before.

I find that placing these free improvisations at the end of a session primes people's ability to listen and look for these themes.  Starting a session with a constraint-free improvisation, especially with a group of strangers, often leads to a handful of simultaneous solos.  The piece may gel into something more cohesive, but more often than not it degrades into boring mush.  However, improvising together for a few hours with guidance helps tune people in to particular ways to create structure and coherence in the spontaneity of improvisation.  Participants create beautiful improvisations together without predetermined constraints because their subconscious knows what to look out for.

It's like meditation.

I often use Headspace, and in most of their guided meditations, Andy will start by having you focus on the breath, noticing when your mind wanders and gently bringing your awareness back to the breath.  At the end, he then gives you permission to let your mind do whatever it wants to do - it can think about anything.  Nearly every time I find that my mind just goes blank… it doesn't need to think anymore.  Focusing the mind in the beginning helps clear the mind when we give it space.

In group free improvisations, having constraints acts as a way to focus the mind, limiting the endless options and reducing overwhelm.  Once you take away constraints, the mature improviser will find clarity in the freedom and jointly create amazing art with their fellow improvisers.

If you didn't take my 10 minute creative challenge before, try it now!  And if you're still overwhelmed with what to create, add these constraints: draw on an index card using only straight lines.

Here's what I came up with:

Not quite a DaVinci level doodle, but it was fun to do nonetheless

Your turn!

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