Steve Brust writes: > I certainly cannot accept that creativity is a function of the > subconscious. Indeed, the more I learn, the more I become conscious > of different aspects of technique, and the more creative I get. Some agreement, some disagreement. There's no question that creative technique can be enhanced and improved. Nontheless, there is also a certain non-conscious component to it. I've noticed this in two particular cases. When writing music (which I do with guitar in hand and mouth in gear), I some times let go and free associate. Good things often come of it. This requires some part of my brain sitting back from what's going on and periodicly butting in to say ``Hey! Remember that change'' when a particularly useful thing occurs. But sometimes it's like a direct line opens up from God and music just pours out. That's rare, but it does happen. Two of my favorite songs came that way, and both bear little or no relationship to the rest of the music I've written. In one case I was setting a poem to music, in the other the music and topic poured out and then I struggled for weeks to get the words right. Both songs use odd (for me) time signatures and no recognizable key. A friend with much better musical training says they're in some weird mode and I shouldn't think about it too hard. By contrast, almost everything that I write while fully engaged is in a square time and standard keys. The other non-concious creativity comes in my sleep. No, it's not dreams, it's something grinding away at a problem while I'm asleep. Last year I spent an incredible amount of time working on a project that required learning and applying some complex abstractions in new (to me) environments. Several times I'd get out of bed in the morning, crawl into the shower, and about half way through the shampoo a solution would present itself seemingly full-blown. And I sure wasn't thinking about the problem in the shower; it usually took until the rinse to actually wake up. It wasn't that I hadn't been working on the problem; if anything I was pushing it a bit too hard (deadline pressure and all that crap). But some time while I was asleep the brain found the critical component and linked it in. Creative? Maybe . . . maybe just the brain doing an exhaustive search through all the pieces to find the one that fit. But it sure *felt* creative when it happened. -- It is far more impressive when others discover your good qualities, without hour help. -- Chuck Pyle 'The Zen Cowboy' http://www.chuckpyle.com/bio.html