I’m an Australian novelist who had writer’s block while doing my PhD in creative arts and struggled so wildly that I sought help from neuroscience. I later transformed this crisis and the resulting research into a book, The Mystery of the Housekeeper: A writer looks at creativity and neuroscience. Since then, I have continued to explore neuroscience to discover what it knows about enhancing creativity.

Little did I know that my fascination would lead me to the creation of an international “creativity bar”.

I began using my research to teach creative writing, which is traditionally taught without any neuroscience, first at the University of Sydney and then at the National Drama Institute of Australia, invited by the headmaster of the school, Stephen Sewell, himself a playwright. , who understood that neuroscience offers us a useful way of thinking about creativity. When a group of neuroscientists studied the effectiveness of our course for a year with a battery of 22 objective before-and-after tests and one subjective test, I was delighted, and even more so with the results. It turned out that our teaching improved the flexibility of students’ ideas by 34 percent and their originality by 65 percent.

I hadn’t imagined teaching anyone other than writers, but as a result of this research, Kim Cunio, who headed the University’s School of Music Australian National Universityinvited me to teach its composers to be more creative. At first I was reluctant, but I had long known that, despite the difference in our output, we practitioners, regardless of our disciplines, fall into a common language when we talk about everyday creative work.

So, for three exciting years, I taught composers. It was Covidso the classes were on Zoom, but the students, often too musiciansinvariably wrote glowing reports afterwards, which for me confirmed the research results. Cunio said: “Composers are so fragile when they are learning their skills that what is often hardest is keeping the inner songbird alive as they grow – this project was a big part of this process. »

The composers were eager to share their creative process, which resonated with my practice, so I felt that with them I had found my tribe. To stay in touch with them, I decided to create a “creativity bar”, so called because at the time they often gave concerts in bars, and I organized it once a month. As the musicians became busier, I began to invite poets, novelists, visual artists, directors and screenwriters that I had met in my research.

I knew from the start that we wouldn’t talk about the ideas that would emerge in the final work because, when they are so new, they are vague and often just felt. Artists learn that putting them into words too soon makes them disappear. For many of us, ideas don’t manifest until the end. The work must grow within the artist at his own pace.

What we are talking about instead is the felt experience of associative thinking, so different from linear, logical, analytical – in Heidegger’s word, “calculative” – thinking. We explore associative thinking’s insistence on the cessation of all other modes of thinking, such that it evaporates if this rule is broken; his addiction to meditation, that is, often starting to know nothing, just a feeling of knowing (as Kenneth Bowers et al. wrote); his unexpected leaps; the involuntary emotions it arouses; its sequence of seemingly unrelated, often ridiculous things; it evokes images and even voices of disconcerting realism. After all, it takes place in a completely different brain network than analytical thinking – which, from experience alone, seems to have a different modality.

As the creativity bar continues, I have discovered as a practitioner what joy and relief it is to share common experiences of this strange thinking – like when work seems boring and uninspired and the thing the wackiest we’ve ever undertaken, and yet we feel strangely obligated to stick with it. This constraint is always a sign, I have learned, that the work expresses something essential for us and that it will perhaps end up finding an echo with others. At this point, we all agree, it’s tempting to give up, but then comes a flood of relief when the work suddenly comes alive and responds. These discussions about the process elicit the same relief that anyone might feel while moaning and exulting with their co-workers over Friday night drinks.

Visual artist Patricia Townsend said: “I was wondering if the conclusions of my research with visual artists would also apply to poets, novelists, composers and other art forms. Then Sue Woolfe contacted me and I was lucky enough to discover it. The Creativity Bar offered me a valuable space to meet creatives from other disciplines and share the highs and lows of what it means to be creating new work.

Since a key element of the bar is that everyone is often in the early stages of work, I knew these revelations needed to be protected, so I decided not to invite any learned critics or spectators, no matter how well-intentioned. -they. Everyone had to be equally vulnerable.

When I invite an artist, I make sure they agree that what we talk about will never be shared with others. It is for this reason that I do not record the sessions, although I recently broke with this practice when I invited the Portuguese potter and doctoral student Paulo Tiago Cebeca to speak to us and he needed a recording of the session for his application. I had received so many apologies from the group that I offered to share the recording, but I carefully gave everyone involved 24 hours’ notice to object.

I always suggest topics that, in practice, could lead in any direction; I often invite a member who has just opened an exhibition, published a book, or composed a piece to talk about what it was like to have “spectators” – that old-fashioned word we find so useful – and sometimes I invite a speaker.

Composer Wendy Suiter said of the bar: “Making others intensely interested in my own ideas from years of work in the abstract, intangible medium of music, and the joy of seeing our stumbling lyrics taken seriously by other practicing artists, as we struggle to find a A way to verbalize these inner processes and feelings, by candidly sharing our own thoughts, our creative struggles and processes, and sometimes our products, is a very empowering experience.

Because research continues to inform our discussions, I use the University of Sydney Zoom site. The Creativity Bar is now halfway through its third year and seems stronger than ever. Every year I check to see if the artists want to continue, and every year they do.

Does talking about getting our work done improve the final work? Not directly, but when a work of art seems naive, other artists know that behind it are not only years of learning in its discipline (on average it is estimated at 10 years, but I would say a whole life) but also learning the skills required by the associative world. think about them and patiently put them into practice without ever losing courage. I’d like to think the bar helps us be tough.

Only recently did I realize the truth of what an artist said: Where in the world is there another place where we practitioners can share our concerns without judgment or embarrassment? And if that’s true, why is that so?

Sue Woolfe is an Honorary Associate in the discipline of English and Writing at the University of Sydney. She is the author of five works of fiction, including Leaning towards infinity (Ligature e-books), which in its first year of publication won the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction and the Commonwealth Prize for the Pacific Region and was a finalist in awards such as the Commonwealth Prize and the US Tiptree Prize for Speculative Fiction.

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