The legend of the stone soup

Once upon a time, not so very long ago, and in a land not a million miles from here, there were two hungry dervishes, who are seekers, people of the 'poor'. 

One evening in their travels, they came across a small village and decided to stay for the night. There was an inn there, just by the side of the village green. But because they had no money, the two dervishes could not afford to stay there. Sometimes the pair would take out their musical instruments and play and entertain the inhabitants with jokes and news, in exchange for a few coppers for food and lodgings. But not tonight, for it had been a long haul up into the foothills of the mountains that day, and they were both too dog-tired to play, or even raise a smile. 

So it was that the two dervishes set their scant belongings down by the side of the village green, right in front of the inn. While one of them set about stacking up the sticks of wood he had scavenged along the way, the other arranged the stones which he'd collected in his travels, into a small circle around the wood. 

Habit and improvisation, and Sufi Necessity

One of the early aims of the Sufi teachings is to regain the flexibility of mind that is lost as we grow out of childhood. Almost inevitably in this abode of decay, we humans become creatures of habit. But it needn't be this way.

To quote Arthur Koestler in The Ghost in the Machine in a chapter on Habit and Improvisation:

“[Regarding] Lindauer's study of the honey-bee. Under normal conditions, there is a rigid division of labour in the hive, so that each worker is occupied on different jobs in different periods of her life.

Andrea Wulf's Magnificent Rebels, The First Romantics: Book Review

★★★★★ Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self by Andrea Wulf is a fabulous book.

In the late 18th century, what we now call Germany consisted of a great many large and small self-governing principalities and fiefdoms, and the authorities rigidly controlled a great many aspects of their subjects' lives, not least ruling on who could marry whom, or divorce, and requiring permission to travel.

The book is about the lives and works of the first Germanic Romantics, a group of philosophers, poets, artists and thinkers, who gathered for a number of years in the small and relatively free town of Jena, 150 miles south-west of Berlin, around the turn of the 18th century, and whom the author terms the Jena Set. These were people like Caroline Böhmer-Schlegel-Schelling and her daughter Auguste; Johann Gottlieb Fichte; Johann Wolfgang von Goethe; Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel; Alexander, Caroline, and Wilhelm von Humboldt; Novalis; Friedrich Schelling; Friedrich Schiller; August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel; Friedrich Schleiermacher; Ludwig Tieck, and Dorothea Veit-Schlegel.

If there's one takeaway from this compelling and well-rounded history that tells it “warts and all”,  it is that the wonders the German Romantics of the Jena Set wrought so energetically perfectly illustrate that “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” – in their case far greater – when creative folk come together to chat and discuss a wide, inter-disciplinary range of topics, and collaborate in producing literary or artistic works. All the more so when such meetings of minds are facilitated by someone as intelligent, perceptive, informed and energising as the Jena Set's muse, Caroline Böhmer-Schlegel-Schelling.

Author H.M. Forester on the writing process

Phase 1: Pantser

When I first started out writing in my pre-teens, in the late 1960s, I didn't plan at all. I just wrote down the first thing that popped into my head ("wrote by the seat of my pants"), or pretty much copied whatever I'd read or seen on television. I guess that's how we begin to learn things: by imitation? Five decades later, I look back and cringe, and yet for all its deficiencies, I'm thankful that I found an early interest in writing, and I'm immensely grateful to my junior school teacher, Gordon Sharpe, for actively promoting this interest, not just in me but for the whole class.

Phase 2: Planner

Fast forward a couple of decades to the early 1980s, when I was by then working in science education, and I found myself increasingly and meticulously planning my writing. I'd surround myself with a barricade of reference books and spend half my time checking spellings and meanings and hunting for apt quotations. I guess that there were five elements at work here: at that time, I was unsure of myself; words did not come easily for me; I still hadn't found my own voice as a writer; I felt that other writers expressed their ideas much better than I could; and, probably due to my technical education and work, I was what we once incorrectly termed "left brained", that is logical, linear and methodical rather than lateral thinking, intuitive or inspirational.

Working in education, there was quite a relaxed environment and I could at times rest on my laurels. However, when I next came to work in industry, I encountered a game-changing culture shock. Here I found that I was only as good as my last customer helpline call; I had to multitask; and I had to do everything on the hoof, with a steep and often frantic learning curve. This, too, probably contributed to a dramatic change in my writing style from long, spoon-fed descriptive passages to fluent dialogue and action, often leaving the reader to exercise their own imagination.

IMAGINE: How creativity works

A wonderful animation by Flash Rosenberg, expressing the ideas of the author Jonah Lehrer in his book IMAGINE:

IMAGINE: How Creativity Works from Flash Rosenberg on Vimeo.

• By Etienne de L'Amour ~ Google+