more from 'Freeing your inner tortoise'

Jane Sullivan,2014, "Freeing your inner tortoise", The Saturday Age (Life & Style), 11 January, p. 24. 

" ... but there is a much grander, more operatic perspective, where the creative mind is not so much a tortoise as a tortured soul."


Eminent creators have been depicted as "locked in a Faustian bargain, where they must sacrifice their personal life to fulfil their vision.
     In the rarefied height of this creativity, nothing is achieved without punishingly hard work, failure, isolation and rejection in the creator's field. As Nietzsche believed, the truly original creator must destroy old systems of thought and break from the status quo. That's bound to be painful."

"So what can help the writer? Which image comes closer to the creative mind: the tortoise or the tortured soul? I like to think of creativity as a spectrum. At one end, a handful of gifted, brave and almost superhumanly dedicated people make extraordinary breakthroughs. At the other end, where most of us labour, breakthroughs may mean little in the grand scheme of things, but everything on a personal level.
     Even a little breakthrough may require great patience, hard work and sacrifice. It may also require the kind of inspiration that comes when the mind is working without our conscious knowledge."

"We may not have the musical genius of Stravinsky or the comic genius of Cleese, but we can all learn more creative ways to use our minds."