Lauren 2. Enough Recollection, Time For Creation

As someone who writes and maintains their own blog, I can understand the difficulty of getting creative. Many authors, writers, painters, creators and other creative people like to discuss how they get into a creative mood; or how it gets into them. Because for me, it is one hell of a challenge.

In one specific journal piece written by Paulus and Dzindolet (2008) there is an interesting discussion on the comparison between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.  I agree that during the first creative stages, intrinsic motivation can be the most important. Whenever I go to write something, whether it be a blog post, a short story, or a review, I need to have a personal reason for doing it. Something that's interesting or compelling I want to express, or I have an urge to get a head start on a particular topic.

Now compare this to a challenge set to write a book in 24-hours. At first there is that intrinsic motivation to complete the task or to see what kind of story can be produced in a short, intense period of time. But what happens after the 16th hour when your exhaustion starts to set in and what was initially motivating you has now been washed away with four shots of espresso and two packets of TimTams. That's when the extrinsic motivators help.

Being in a room of other people under the same pressure pushes you further. I know I would be a lot more productive if I had other people around me either pushing me to finish my project or at least suffering under the same terror as I. There is also that looming fear of failure for not getting it completed in time, and while the extrinsic influences may cause a stifling to the original creativity coming from the intrinsic ones, you need those external forces to push you over the finish line.

With that in mind, it's time for us to start putting our ideas for Remixed into the grinder to see what comes out.

For me, I'm fascinated with the number of words used in the book. if:Books kindly provides a spread sheet presenting all the words included in either the chapters or the book, and when you start to think about it, the words themselves mean nothing.

Take for example this image I made:

"The" is used 3237 times throughout the book. It's such a simple word and when you see it repeated so many times like in the image above it begins to lose meaning. But without it the book would not have the same meaning. And without the word I wouldn't have been able to make this image that depicts both the beauty of typeface and the integration of words as art.

I also want to try expressing the difficulty of forcing your brain to function at odd hours, just like the chart shows:

To me it displays a good example of the first initial intrinsic motivation with a big spike of extrinsic in the last few hours. The only question is, what other ways can we display it?