The other night, my friend Paul was over pitching a new story idea for a new script he’s working on. I listened to him attentively and was quite taken by the animated way he was sharing his story. After he finished his pitch, he look a bit puzzled that I neither showed approval or disapproval of his idea. I could tell he was growing a bit frustrated.
I shared some of my reaction to his story the following day and he said, “I’m glad you had a change of heart and came around…”
I told him I didn’t have a change of heart. I told him I thought his idea had a lot of potential and that it could be taken in many directions.
His reaction to my “blank slate” attentiveness reminded me of a couple of things I had read. One was something the American composer Aaron Copland had said about listening to music. He pointed out that a listener should stay with a piece of music for a while and listen to it repeatedly over a period of time before deciding whether or not they look it. I know from my own experience that I have really liked songs that I have heard sometimes at the very first exposure to the song only to grow tired of them quickly and never going out of my way to listen to that particular song again. Conversely I have had the experience (I remember I was this way with both Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” and “Les Noces”) of listening to a piece for the first time, rejecting it as noise and then growing to truly admire the piece. I’ve had this experience both with so called classical music as well as rock (Nine Inch Nails and Aerosmith come to mind).
The other important thing I remembered came from the small but thought provoking book CREATIVITY IN BUSINESS where it talks about the importance of allowing your creativity to work with out the Voice of Judgment. Trying to Judge and quantify a creative endeavor during the moment of creation is like driving down the Interstate with the emergency breaks on. It’s like choking the Soprano while she’s trying to sing an aria.
So I later explained to my friend that I wanted to listen to him and allow my mind to explore the material on its own terms without my own preconceived opinions or experiences. I let his story idea percolate around in my brain. Hours later, I felt I was in a more objective place to comment on it and offer some possibilities.
The tendency is to experience a creative work…whether a book, an oil painting, a sculpture, a piece of music or a movie and immediately assess it against our own set of conditioned expectations and experiences. This robs us of a more fully authentic experience offered by the creative work because it limits us to what we already know and have already experienced.
Next time a friend takes you some where…hopefully to a concert of music you’ve never heard before, or a dinner with food you’ve never tasted, or an artist you’ve never seen, you can allow the experience(s) to wash over you and filter through your brain without immediately assessing and quantifying it against any set of preconditioned criteria. Live with the experience, or the memory of the experience for a bit. I think you’ll find it opens a lot of doors inside you that may have been closed and locked before.
