One of our most popular guests ever, Mary Robinette Kowal, finally joins Brandon, Dan, and Howard as a full-time cast-member. And now that she’s with us, we’re going to go back and revisit the very first topic we attempted to record (in a lost episode you can only hear in the bonus material on the 1st Season CD), which is whether or not creativity can be taught.

Mary says aspects of it can be taught. Howard’s inner Zen master says nothing can be taught, but anything can be learned. And from there we dive all the way in.

And you know what? Mary totally rescues the discussion, bringing perspectives that we were missing in that first session back in 2008. Especially right at the end, where she gives us some awesome creativity exercises.

Welcome to the team, Mary Robinette Kowal. We’ve needed you for three years.

Audiobook Pick-of-the-Week: The Game of Thrones: A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 1 by George R.R. Martin, narrated by Roy Dotrice

Writing Prompt: Take one of the creativity exercises and run with it. Alternatively, use this mash-up: “The Silence of the Mexican Herbie Part 2: The Two Towers.”

Pearl of Wisdom Not To Be Taken The Wrong Way: “Stealing from children is an awesome tool.”

Liner Note Link: Here is the narration and context exercise Mary mentioned.

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Transcript

As transcribed by Mike Barker

Key points: Some people pick up creativity faster than others, but anyone can learn to be creative. Simple creativity is combining two things that have not been combined before. Creativity starts with curiosity. Asking questions! Take an object, ask why is it like this, and think about what it would be like if it were different. Substitution is fundamental creativity. Try taking an existing story plot — fairytale — and changing one element. Ask people to give you random elements, and build a story. Play off expectations, replacing it with something unexpected. Change the context! But beyond synthesis, look for the spark. Try things.

Creativity push-ups: take a classic story, change one element. Take a dialogue, and put a setting around it. Movie mash ups! Movie title mash ups, with genre switching. Build a story from random elements.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, season six, episode one, can creativity be taught?
[Howard] 15 minutes long.
[Mary] Because you’re in a hurry.
[Dan] And we’re not that smart.
[Brandon] I’m Brandon.
[Dan] I’m Dan.
[Mary] I’m Mary.
[Howard] And I’m Howard.
[Brandon] To start off season six of Writing Excuses, we have a very special surprise for you. We have Mary Robinette Kowal joining us full-time as a fourth podcaster.
[Dan] Yay.
[Mary] Hoorah.
[Brandon] Hoorah.
[Howard] I cannot tell you how happy I am.
[Brandon] Oh, yeah. I guess then we won’t let you talk, because you can’t tell us.
[Dan] He’s not allowed to tell us how happy he is.
[Brandon] For a long time, we felt that we needed a fourth podcaster and Mary has been gracious enough to join us. She has flown out to record with us live, in person, rather than over some weird Skype thing.
[Dan] Newfangled inter-webs.
[Howard] We can’t use Skype now that Microsoft bought it. That would just be wrong.
[Mary] Well, I mean, it would short out in the hot tub.
[Brandon] [inaudible]
[Howard] Water noises go here, Jordo.

[Brandon] The very first podcast we did, way back when, when we were young kids…
[Dan] Which most of you have never heard.
[Howard] Because you have not bought the CDs.
[Brandon] Yes. Because… Yes. Plug for the CDs goes here.
[Howard] Yeah. It was the unreleased very first episode, Can Creativity Be Taught? It was weak sauce.
[Brandon] Yeah, it was terrible. So we were going to try and do it…
[Howard] So we sold it as bonus material on the CDs that most of you have not bought.
[Dan] And some of you chumps bought it.
[Brandon] I mean, it was awesome.
[Mary] Maybe it’s because of that marketing technique of there’s this really terrible thing that you get as a bonus?
[Howard] That we put on this disc for you? It occurred to me that it would be fun to revisit that topic with Mary.
[Brandon] And hopefully not being… What did you call it? Weak sauce?
[Howard] I think Dan said, “Weak sauce.”
[Dan] No, I did not say, “Weak sauce.”
[Brandon] Let’s just pretend none of us said that term and move on. Mary! Hi!
[Mary] Hi.

[Brandon] Can creativity be taught?
[Mary] I think certain aspects of it absolutely can. There are people who will pick it up faster than other people, the same way some people will pick up math or music faster than others. But I think that with enough time, that you can actually teach someone to be creative.
[Brandon] This is an interesting topic to me, because a lot of… My family… A lot of my family members claim to not be creative, particularly my mother. Who will say, “I don’t know where he came from, writing these weird, wacky books.” I mean, she loves me, she supports me, but it’s bizarre to her what I do. It doesn’t seem that bizarre. It’s just another skill. It’s one that I’ve trained myself in, but I think my mother has the capacity to be creative in this same sort of way, but she’ll never admit it.
[Howard] My inner Zen guy says, “Nothing can be taught, but anything can be learned.” Which is…
[Brandon] Okay. Wow. Thank you.
[Dan] Your inner Zen guy sounds like a jerk.
[Howard] He really is. When the student is ready, the master will appear.
[Brandon] Can he cut [unclear — donuts?] in half?
[Howard] The point there is, if you want to be creative, and don’t feel like you’re creative, hey, good news. You can learn to be creative. I stand behind that 100%. I think that all of us here in the room on the podcast… All of us have techniques that will help you, fair listener, become more creative than you currently are, no matter where you are right now

[Brandon [One of the problems we may run into with this is defining what it means to be creative.
[Dan] Exactly.
[Brandon] So maybe we should talk about that. Dan, what does it mean to be creative?
[Dan] Okay. For me, I would say, at a core, most simple definition of creativity, it is combining two ideas, or two concepts, or two somethings that have not been combined before. That, I think anyone can do that, they just don’t think of that as creativity.
[Brandon] Yeah. I would agree with you. In fact, that would be my definition, too. That’s creativeness. And creativeness… Let’s pretend I didn’t say that. But that’s…
[Mary] Creativity.
[Brandon] Yeah. Creativity. It really comes back to one of the core fundamentals we’ve talked about with Writing Excuses… Which is taking the strange attractors, as they talk about in Hollywood, or combining the familiar and the strange.

[Mary] I actually think it starts before the combining. I think it starts with curiosity. That before you combine things, you have to first ask the question, “What happens if I do this?” Or “What happens if this? Why does this happen?” That element of curiosity. Teaching someone to be curious and ask questions is, I think, the first step in learning to be creative.
[Brandon] Okay. So how do you do it?
[Mary] Well, I mean, first of all, you need someone who wants to be creative. Because…
[Howard] Or needs to be creative.
[Mary] Or needs to be creative. No, that’s fair. Some people need to be creative for their jobs and feel uncreative. The first thing that you have to do is look at… You can take any object and look at it and go “Why is this like that?” Then you start researching that, or you start thinking “What would it be like if it were different?”
[Brandon] Okay. I think this is fundamental to being a storyteller. I mean, a lot of times… If I look back at the main reason I became a storyteller, it’s because I would read the books and then naturally, I would say, “Oh, but what if this had happened instead?” Usually, it’s happening even just like in act one of a book I’m reading. I would think, “Wow, what if they hated each other?” Or “What if this character had died?” What if… And suddenly I’m telling my own story, and it branches right there, very starkly.

[Howard] Let me tackle this from the point of view of your mom, the noncreative person, who doesn’t understand you. Does she cook?
[Brandon] Yes, she does.
[Howard] Okay. When she is cooking, does she ever discover that she has run out of a key ingredient? Because that act of substitution in the kitchen is fundamental creativity, and we do that all the time, with all kinds of things. It’s problem-solving.

[Mary] That actually leads directly… Thank you for the segue… To an exercise that I think helps people who are learning to be creative. One of the things that happens when you’re first starting out is that you get paralyzed by all of the possibilities. The white page, the what am I going to do. So starting with a set of parameters, like an existing story plot, like taking a fairy tale and saying, “Well, what would happen if instead of Goldilocks and the three bears, it was Goldilocks and the three giants?”
[Brandon] Right. Right. Just do that. This meets this.
[Mary] Swap one thing.
[Brandon] Swap one little thing.
[Howard] Well, you’ve swapped three things.
[Brandon] And they’re kind of three big things. I mean, let’s be honest.
[Mary] That’s true. I will say that I totally stole the Goldilocks and the three giants from a kindergartner.
[Brandon] Oh, okay.
[Mary] When I was teaching puppetry, this group of kindergartners, we were learning about adaptation, and they did Goldilocks and the three giants. It was like a Dadaist play, because everything was “I’d like to sit down, but this is too big. And this chair is too big. And this chair is too big.”
[Howard] Fortunately, this chair is…
[Chorus] Too big!
[Dan] That’s awesome.
[Howard] But stealing from children is an awesome tool.
[Mary] Absolutely.

[Brandon] No, it really is. If you don’t think you have things to talk about or stories to do, try these writing exercises that you see people do at cons. I mean, I’ve done it before. We’ve done it here on the podcast, essentially. You can’t… You get a bunch of random people together and say “Give me X, give me Y, give me Z.” They’ll build a story for you. Give me a character. Give me a profession. Give me an age. Give me something unusual about this character’s past. Okay, give me this. Just get a list of five or six of them. Ask your friends to give you things. Have them make it a challenge for you. You will come up with, if you do that enough, a story you want to tell.

[Brandon] We’re going to stop for our book of the week. Dan, what is our book of the week?
[Dan] Our book of the week is A Game of Thrones by George RR Martin. He was recently named one of the… Times 100 most influential people in the world, which is, to my knowledge, the first time a genre author has ever gotten that. This is the first of his… I mean, he’s done a ton of writing before this, but Game of Thrones is the first of his big series that kind of made him the juggernaut he is today. It’s really good.
[Brandon] George RR Martin is a fantastic writer. Nobody can do characters as quickly and efficiently as George RR Martin. So if you’re going to listen to Game of Thrones, pay attention to that, how he quickly characterizes somebody without pages and pages, and yet they’re all very distinctive. I will give a slight content warning on Game of Thrones. It is not a PG rated. So be warned. Game of Thrones has mature content. If you want to listen to Game of Thrones, get a free copy, Howard?
[Howard] Head out to audiblepodcast.com/excuse. There’s a promotion there. You can kick off a 14 day free trial membership. Get a copy of Game of Thrones or any other audio book you’d love to listen to for free. Help support the podcast, so that we can keep doing this, and keep flying our good friend Mary out to Utah and having her join us.

[Mary] They keep me in the basement.
[Howard] Shhh.
[Dan] That’s okay. There’s plenty of company down there.
[Howard] It rubs the lotion on its skin.
[Mary] Now this is an example of how to be creative very quickly.
[Brandon] Okay. How was that an example of how to be creative very quickly?
[Mary] Well, we took a situation and we just turned it into a horror movie.
[Howard] By borrowing elements from an existing horror movie.
[Brandon] No. I mean, this is actually really good. If you all pay attention, there’s a lot… Pay attention to this. A lot of the ways that we’re creative are very similar, but they can have different outputs. For instance, jokes are the same essential creativity. You’re just replacing something with a non sequitur. If, instead of the story of the three bears, instead if it’s the three positronic brains, then it’s… It can be silly, it can be science fiction, it can be silly. You play off the expectations, you replace it with something unexpected, and you have a joke. If you replace it with something unexpected yet thought-provoking, you have science fiction set in the future, asking questions. If you instead replace it with something dramatic, you’ve got a drama. I mean, you can do this in very interesting ways just with the right substitution.
[Howard] Something to note, though, is that Mary said we made it something horrible. But we were all laughing. We were laughing because we didn’t want to do a horror movie, we wanted to do a joke. So the whole tone in which we delivered that was this is going to be funny. We’re going to deliver this as humor, rather than as horror. So the tool there, that I fall back on a lot, is context. You frame it in the right context, and what you’re delivering can be completely different.
[Mary] Again, with creativity, when you’re playing with the parameters, that’s another tool that you can play with, is just change the context of something familiar.
[Brandon] Yeah. There are a lot of great… In fact… Game of Thrones. Since we just promo’ed it. George RR Martin has spoken of… He’s a medievalist, he’s a medieval scholar, he knows a lot about the medieval era, and he just did a fantasy retelling… Or it started as a fantasy retelling of the War of the Roses. Which is a historical event, a house war in our world, and he added some fantastical elements, came up with his new characters, and suddenly he has an entire framework for his story that he can base it on. That’s not cheating at all, that’s the way we do it.
[Dan] Absolutely.

[Howard] I do think that creativity… The act of creation can be more than just synthesis. Synthesis, the word synthesis is a combining of existing elements. There is often in creativity… There is that spark of… There is some element that is new, that is more than just what has been, it… I’m stammering madly.
[Brandon] Yeah. We do need, for the people listening, simply coming up with cool ideas is not enough.
[Mary] Not enough.

[Brandon] Part of the creativity for what we do is the framework. You get that spark, then you learn to properly put it in the right framework, which becomes a way of conveying the coolness of your idea to your readers, so that they say, “Wow that was cool, and I see the extrapolation.” The extrapolation becomes interesting. I’d say that extrapolation requires quite a bit of creativity in and of itself, but it can be trained. It can be talk. You can learn to do this.
[Howard] Yeah. You just… You have to foster an environment in which it…
[Mary] One of the things you can do with that is, and this is I think really important if you’re learning to be creative, is read.
[Brandon] Yeah. It definitely is.
[Mary] Because the more input… And not… The more inputs you’ve got, the more ideas.
[Dan] Definitely. The more tools you have in your toolbox to work with. The more raw materials you have in your kitchen.
[Brandon] Right. Read widely. And try… If you’re going to be a writer, try different things. I mean, Dan, you kept trying the same thing, and it wasn’t until you tried something different that things really exploded for you. Right?

[Dan] Yeah. I grew up reading fantasy, and thought I was going to be a fantasy author, and wrote several fantasy books. I mean, you say I tried the same thing many times… All of those books were a new thing. Fantasy flavored in this direction, fantasy flavored as history, fantasy flavored as horror, fantasy flavored as comedy. Eventually, kind of through trying new things, figured out what I was good at, and ended up in modern horror where I had never expected to be.
[Brandon] Right. Although, backtracking just a little bit, a lot of the things that you learned while writing are the same regardless of what trappings you put on it. We’ll talk about that in another podcast. We’ve got one planned where we talk about changing the trappings to… And keeping the core story. But at the same time, for you, it just didn’t all come together and tell you started writing modern horror.
[Dan] And now it did. Which is great.

[Howard] I want to enumerate some of these exercises for people who don’t feel creative. I want to give them things that they can go home with and just teach their brain. I want creativity push-ups.
[Brandon] Okay. All right.
[Mary] Here’s some. Take Goldilocks and the three bears. Change one element about it. Everything that you change… Anything that you change has to affect everything in the story. Like the giants. You don’t have to pick Goldilocks and the three bears, but take a classic fairytale and change one element and see where it goes from that. Another exercise is find a transcript… Find a transcript and put a setting around it. Try writing the same scene once as a science fiction, and once as a fantasy. All you’re changing is the setting.
[Howard] When you say find a transcript? Like a radio play or like a…
[Mary] No. Like a transcript of actual dialogue.
[Brandon] Right.
[Mary] I have a transcript that we can put up that I use for… It’s actually…
[Howard] We’ll put that in the liner notes?
[Mary] Yeah. We can put that in the liner notes.
[http://www.maryrobinettekowal.com/journal/exercise-using-narration-and-context-to-shape-dialogue/]

[Brandon] One that I would suggest doing is take a movie from the last year that you’ve seen, and mash it together with another movie you’ve seen this last year. They can be similar, they can be very different. Try and take two core elements from those two movies, two core parts of the story… We’re not just talking one little thing… And ran them together. See what happens if you put those two movies together, what do you get?
[Howard] Yeah. A variation on that exercise… Take a movie in one genre, a movie in another genre… The titles… Take the titles of those two movies and mash them together into a new title. Set that story in a third genre. So you take The Silence of the Lambs and Herbie goes to Mexico… What was the latest Herbie movie? Okay? But mash the…
[Dan] I didn’t see Herbie goes to Mexico.
[Brandon] I’m not up on my Herbie lore.
[Mary] Isn’t that Christine?
[Howard] Huh? That may be where you end up. But… And it becomes epic fantasy. The Lambs of Mexico and it’s now set in…
[Dan] Herbie Is Silent in Mexico… With wizards.
[Mary] The Silence of the Love Bug.
[Howard] But as you start playing with that, you’re going to realize some of these combinations just won’t work for epic fantasy, but they’ll work fine for telling a quick joke. But with those words, you can get there.
[Dan] No. But doing that, you can do that. Howard and I did this at a conference just last week. We had an audience give us a bunch of random elements. They gave us, I think, cloning, chimney sweeps, and olives, and then one other weird thing. We used those to brainstorm a really cool idea that we wish we had time to actually write. So you can do that. You just need to put in the work.

[Brandon] Through this season, like we’ve done in previous seasons, we’ll do that here on the podcast. We’ll show you step-by-step professional writers approaching building a story out of disparate random elements. You know what? Those are plenty of writing prompts. I’m going to in this podcast by saying take one of these writing prompts. Whatever we’ve just given you. If you can figure out what Howard’s was, use that one. Otherwise…
[Howard] I didn’t give you a prompt, I gave you a puzzle.
[Dan] Whatever you write for your writing prompt, the title is going to be The Silence of the Mexican Herbie Part 2: The Two Towers.
[Brandon] Okay. I think that’s enough. We’ve beaten this one to death. This is been Writing Excuses. You’re out of excuses. Now go write.