Creativity and Time

The other night, I watched a half hour talk about optimising creativity by John Cleese, well loved British comedian and actor. Here it is, in case anybody is interested in watching it:

Anyway, one of the things he talked about was giving yourself the time to be creative. In itself, this is an obvious statement, but what he actually meant was not giving yourself ample time, but rather a shorter slice of time with a pre-determined start and finish. This will limit procrastination and time wasting (I can relate to this - often on my thursday writing day, because I have "all day" I know very well that feeling of getting other things done because I can write 'later') and, Cleese states, increase productivity.

It can be a bit of a scary notion sometimes, setting myself smaller concrete writing tasks to complete in an hour or two. But it's good to sit with this fear and then write anyway. It doesn't even matter if I'm just writing for the sake of writing; the point is that I'm writing openly and intuitively and some of the material I produce may well prove fertile composting ground for future stories. With this in mind, I had a go at a couple of writing exercises from the writing workout website whereby you are timed for 300 seconds to produce some writing following a given prompt. This made me feel distinctly uncomfortable at first, but once I had told myself that it didn't matter, that there is no right or wrong, I think writing with time constraints can be really valuable and help with focus. This website is an extreme example of working within a given time, but since watching John Cleese's talk, I do feel motivated to embrace the short time I have to write (how often do I grumble as busy mother of three that I never have enough time to devote to writing?) and squeeze every ounce of creativity possible from it.