The Spark Crew – May: Process

Love a peek behind-the-scenes? This one's for you

The Spark Crew is a generative space for writers, artists & creative folk. Each month we explore a new theme and take inspiration from a medley of arts-based practices. If you’d like to read on beyond the preview, a paid subscription (£6 a month or £60 a year) provides full access. You are welcome to pop in and out, or stay with us, as suits!

My current art process can best be described as messy

One of the best bits about being a journalist (I’ll tell you about the worst another time), was that it gave me full permission to embrace my curious nature. After graduating, I spent two years working as a reporter in my hometown on the North East coast of Scotland which, despite having the highest murder rate per capita, was painfully low on newsworthy events most days.

During a slow news week – which you can probably sense by now was most weeks – I would head out along the beach road hoping that a pod of dolphins, some long lost treasure or a bevvy of drug dealers would appear. Dear reader, I suspect you know where this is going.

Fortunately, I was kept busy with the accoutrements of local news gathering. This included: transcribing highly technical, and inexplicably hand-written, articles on the Boat Of The Week; attending Community Council meetings where giant gull attack was always on the agenda; trying not to make eye contact with ex-classmates in the defendant dock; and writing advertising features.

The latter was where my love of being given a nosy backstage truly shone. Because it turned out that there were some fascinating businesses in the locality. One afternoon I learned about DNA sequencing and genomes from a pioneering female scientist operating a lab in a converted cowshed. Another I was given a tour of a funeral home, where the undertaker patiently demystified the preparation process, cold storage and all.

A search of my memory box unearthed some old gems. The photo on the right shows 15 year-old me (sporting a textbook mid 90s fringe) on work placement at the weekly newspaper, an experience that put me off studying news journalism. On the left, I’m back, aged 21 and fresh out of a drama & theatre arts degree with a whopping student loan to pay off. Spoiler alert - I still haven’t.

My love of getting to see the inner workings – be it police control or psychic con – hasn’t faded with time. When the rare non-nasty reality TV series appears (I’m thinking of The Parisian Agency), I’m there with my popcorn right away. As for the bits at the end of nature documentaries, where they show you how they got the footage, I could watch them for days. I can’t see myself ever tiring of hearing how other folks develop ideas and create new things, whether it be in business, science or the arts. And judging by the conversations I have with fellow writers and artists, I don’t seem to be alone in this. So this month, I thought we’d take a deeper dive into creativity itself which, as research shows, is intrinsically linked with curiosity.

I’m a life-long keeper of notebooks and ideas. This one is from when I was 18.

The creative process can feel mystifying at times, particularly when we’re observing practices and art forms outwith our own. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s seminal work, Creativity explores the pathways that lead to landmark developments across the arts, science and beyond. In doing so, he identifies the systemic nature of creativity, defining it as something that “does not happen inside people’s heads, but in the interaction between a person’s thoughts and a sociocultural context”.

We see this in our own work – in how we respond to events, be it at a global or personal level – and in the work of other writers and artists. In the emergence of the Dada movement, in reaction to the horrors of the First World War, and in the collections of poetry written in response to recent, equally horrifying events. As Csikszentmihalyi’s research highlights, curiosity forms an integral part of this process. Experiencing “curiosity, wonder, and interest in what things are like and in how they work” brings a great advantage to creative work, he states. As does openness to experience and “a fluid attention that constantly processes events in the environment”.