In our next in-depth post, Lizzie O’Connor, Postgraduate Community Engagement Manager in the University Graduate School, digs into creativity in research and suggests some simple activities to help you get creative!
As a researcher, would you call yourself a creative? Would you classify research as a kind of creative endeavour? The notion of being a creative person might feel totally alien, even daunting.
Image from Wikimedia Commons
In fact, you are utilising a whole range of creative skills every time you sit at your desk, arrive at your lab, or put pen to paper. Research requires us to wrestle with a question, to experiment, and to think outside of existing knowledge. Your supervisor may be encouraging you to bend the rules, to try new ways of doing things, to think outside the box. When you are writing up your thesis, you are finding patterns, playing with words in order to express ideas and discover. Sometimes the process of research can be messy, nonlinear, and nebulous; full of questions with no discernible answers, and solutions you have to find before you know they exist.
All this is, in short, being creative.
Some scholars may be encouraged by supervisors and mentors to embrace their creative skillset, and some may have interests or hobbies in creative fields, but most PhD researchers will not explore creativity as part of their training, or even be encouraged to frame their research in this way.
Often, the way we talk about research is to strip it of its creative elements. We aspire to publications, lists of conferences attended, points on a CV, funding attained. The current academic labour market means it is increasingly difficult to land a permanent job post-PhD, which skews our priorities towards the output rather than the process of our research. We all know that famous catchphrase, ‘Publish or Perish’, and it has huge implications for the way that we conduct research by emphasising productivity over play.
Yet, if we want a research culture that values originality, innovation, interdisciplinarity, and new ways of looking at problems, creativity is the most vital skill we can acquire and nurture as researchers. The best scholarly work strives to find new connections between fields, to identify new problems worth solving, to explain the previously unexplained, to solve problems that haven’t been solved before, to discover new ways of interpreting cultural or historical events, and to ultimately find new methods to understand the world. For all disciplines, novelty and innovation is at the heart of what and why we research, and underpins our success.
In this post, I explore notions of research creativity. We’ll look at some easy exercises, taking no more than 10 minutes, that can help us generate ideas and engage with our creative selves.
Being Creative
Creativity is generally defined as “the use of skill and imagination to produce something new“. Ambiguous and wide-reaching as this may seem, we can see the connections between creativity and the act of research in this meeting of ‘skill and imagination’. Think about how you came up with your PhD topic: you probably reflected on what you already knew, found gaps, and imagined how those gaps could be filled. You explored possible solutions to a problem, based on your own vast knowledge base and existing specialism, and landed on a novel, original approach to test your hypotheses.
The majority of creative scholars are self-taught, and we are already, through our every day practices of research, teaching this skill to ourselves. Being creative can look like being open to new ways of doing things, taking a break from the problem, working without presumptions and biased perceptions, experimenting, and not being afraid to make mistakes. But what would happen if we chose to consciously develop our creative selves, chose to think of ourselves as creatives, and used these skills to support our best research? We might find that our ideas multiply, or are honed into something more precise and usuable. We might spot new, original patterns and connections between our fields and others, or between research and industry. We can even use creative exercises to release our minds if we’re stuck on a problem, to silence our inner critic, and overcome mental blocks.
Below are three exercises proposed by artists, researchers and scholars which aim to engage and exercise your creative muscles through free-writing, play, and downtime, giving you the opportunity to hone and recognise your inherent creativity, and reconnect with your creative skills as a researcher.
Exercise One: Free Writing and ‘Morning Pages’
Beloved by creatives such as Alicia Keys, Patricia Cornwell and Pete Townsend, Julia Cameron’s 1992 creative workbook The Artist’s Way posits that short, daily creative practices can foster inspiration by emptying our minds and overcoming the doubts that might stand in the way of our most innovative thinking.
Cameron suggests writing three pages longhand at the start of each day, before trying any other work. No planning, no preparation, just free-writing with whatever is in your head, keeping pen to paper, until you come to the end of three notebook pages. You can write truly whatever passes through your mind: shopping lists, descriptions of the weather, thoughts, feelings, patterns and, hopefully, unexpected ideas.
Cameron recommends her morning page method as a way of gaining ‘confidence, security, enthusiasm and hopefully a little bit of frivolity’ for the rest of the day’s work. This stream-of-consciousness exercise is designed to override your internal censor and develop new ideas and perspectives. It works to empty your mind of its usual clutter, by writing down everything that’s in it, allowing for unconscious realisations and inspiration to emerge.
Exercise 2: The Importance of Play
Cameron’s ideal of ‘frivolity’ is, ironically, an important one. One of the biggest barriers to our work is the fear of getting it wrong, or a preoccupation with it being ‘perfect’.
But ideas can be very fun to mess around with, so long as we don’t take them too seriously. Many of us will remember how easily ideas came to us when we were children, and how openly we followed them. Whether it was an idea for a painting, an imaginative story, a playground game, we worried little about whether it would be ‘perfect’ and simply got on with the important business of trying it out.
In their 2021 text Creative Writing for Social Research : A Practical Guide, Richard Phillips and Helen Kara talk about the importance of warm-up exercises related to play, which support our writing by encouraging us to ignore our inner critic and enjoy the processing of putting words together. They suggest choosing one of the following exercises for 3-5 minutes before launching into what you really need to write (and deleting it as soon as it’s done!):
- Write about your research from the point of view of a character in a novel
- Write about your research from the point of view of an inanimate object connected with you or your work, such as: something you use for personal grooming, something you use at work, or something you always carry with you.
- Write a short poem, such as a haiku or limerick or a short free verse, about the next stage of your research.
- Put on some random music – from a selection on shuffle, or whatever a radio station happens to be playing. Write a few sentences about how the music makes you feel and think, then write about how that might link with your research.
- Write an email or letter, to someone connected with your research, about anything you like. If there’s something bugging you about your research, write about that. Your language can be as ranty or rude as you please!
- Write a fictional diary entry about an ideal day of research work. (pp. 26-27)
Exercise 3: Resting
Finally, I want to acknowledge the importance of rest in unlocking our creative brains.
Julia Cameron, for instance, proposes regular ‘artist’s dates’, time set aside to nurture ‘creative consciousness’ by engaging with art, reading a book, playing a videogame or watching a film. The idea is that your inner creative can only work if fed and nurtured by new ideas, but it also illustrates the importance of down-time for your brain in unlocking new ways of thinking and seeing.
The recent book Creativity in Research invites researchers to compare a day in their research life to one of Charles Darwin’s.
When he wasn’t sailing around the world in the HMS Beagle, Darwin spent only a few hours in dedicated work. The bulk of his day was spent writing letters, going on walks, resting on the sofa, or eating with his family. (p. 5) Darwin understood that allowing your mind to rest allowed it to generate and associate ideas in new ways. By distracting your conscious mind away from its worries and preoccupations, you leave room for unexpected connections and conclusions to strike. It’s an idea we have probably heard or experienced before – that inspiration strikes during a shower, just before falling sleep, when daydreaming, or on a commute – but it can be difficult to justify stepping away from your desk in order to work better. Next time you are tempted to skip your lunch break to continue working, you can ask yourself: what would Charles Darwin do?
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