It’s not uncommon for writers to talk about how quickly they wrote a play, book, or screenplay. For instance Arthur Miller wrote Death of a Salesmen in six weeks, Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road in three weeks, and six weeks is also how long it took Diablo Cody to write Juno.
But those numbers are deceptive. For ideas may have been planted for months or years (sometimes decades) before they came to fruition. I was reminded of this today when I read a post on Kent McCuddin’s blog Creativity is not random. Kent is the creative director for Blue Bunny Ice Cream in La Mars, Iowa and who I have become acquainted with while producing online videos for them over the last few years.
In his post The Magic is in the fields Kent (along with help from Gordon MacKenzie) offers an simple exclamation of why creativity often comes in quick bursts.
“If you were to draw a line on a piece of paper to visualize the creative process timeline, you would need to draw a long line not a short line. The first 90 percent is prep time and the last 10 percent is idea generation.
Gordon MacKenzie best illustrated this process with a story about dairy cows. ‘Imagine dairy cows in a field eating grass. It may not look like much, but that field is where the magic happens, turning grass into milk. Not until the cows get in the barn do you ever see the product, milk. You can’t continually milk the cows and expect to get the same quantity and quality of milk with each milking. That cow needs to spend 90 percent of their time in the field hanging around eating grass before they can deliver their milk.’
The creative person needs time in the field before they can make their magic happen. They must first fill their brains with information, have time to process that information then they can start generating creative ideas.”
That may explain why artist Grant Wood once said, “All the good ideas I ever had came to me while I was milking a cow.”
Related post: Where Do Ideas Come From? (A+B=C)
[…] It’s not uncommon for writers to talk about how quickly they wrote a play, book, or screenplay. For instance Arthur Miller wrote Death of a Salesmen in six weeks, Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road in three weeks, and six weeks is also how long it took Diablo Cody to write Juno. But those numbers are deceptive. For ideas […] Original Source… […]
[…] It’s not uncommon for writers to talk about how quickly they wrote a play, book, or screenplay. For instance Arthur Miller wrote Death of a Salesmen in six weeks, Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road in three weeks, and six weeks is also how long it took Diablo Cody to write Juno. But those numbers are deceptive. For ideas […] Original Source… […]
This is exactly what I needed to hear tonight. Thanks for posting.
That’s what I’m here for. BTW-just read today that Frank Darabont bought the movie rights from Stephen King for what became “The Shawshank Redemption” years before he wrote the script. It took him just eight weeks to write the script.