CREATIVITY

Actor, comedian, screenwriter, and producer Cleese, co-founder of Monty Python and co-writer and star of the British TV comedy Fawlty Towers—among many other achievements—draws on his long, accomplished career to offer a slim compendium of random musings on creativity. He is convinced, he writes, that “you can teach people how to create circumstances in which they will become creative.” Contrasting “quick, purposeful thinking” with ruminating, based on Guy Glaxton’s Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind, Cleese admits he was surprised to discover the power of the unconscious in creative processes. The unconscious is “like the language of dreams. It shows you images, it gives you feelings, it nudges you around without you immediately knowing what it’s getting at.” Although, like many people, he was taught to privilege analysis and critical thinking, he came to believe that creativity flourishes in “an atmosphere of uncertainty and gentle confusion.” Creative people, he has found, “are much better at tolerating the vague sense of worry that we all get when we leave something unresolved.” Among many pages of helpful hints, Cleese suggests that people are most likely to be creative doing something they know and care about, but they should avoid complacency. When they are sure they know what they are doing, “creativity plummets. This is because they think they have nothing more to learn.” They shouldn’t be afraid of fallow periods, which can serve “as preparatory to the fertile ones”; nor of panic, which the author has found energizing. As for asking for help, Cleese writes that he always shows his work to others, alert to their responses, but not necessarily adopting their advice for how to fix something: “you and only you must decide which criticisms and suggestions you accept.” While many of Cleese’s observations and suggestions may seem obvious, his candor is endearing.

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