Spontaneous Creativity and One Way of Accessing it
It was back in 1999. The Head of my children’s primary school rang me to ask if I’d do a day’s storytelling and workshops. When I told my kids, Sal, who was still young enough not to be embarrassed said, “Yesssss!” Sam, four years older, rolled his eyes, to which I replied, “Don’t worry Sam, I’ll make sure I’m dead cool,” to which he rolled his eyes some more!
I always told the older juniors scarier tales, they love them. I’d been working on a children’s version of Bluebeard, but hadn’t decided how I was going to end it. What I did know was that I didn’t want her being saved by a man.
The other factor was that I knew at least half the kids in the school as they either came to my Saturday drama sessions in the village, or they were friends of our kids. This gave me licence to play. I probably figured that I could always ask them to make it up if I couldn’t!
The wonderful thing about oral storytelling (though it could be argued the opposite way!) is that once you’re on stage, you can’t run away from it like you can a blank page or a sketch book.
So there I was, on stage, telling ‘Bluebeard’ to a hall full of older juniors, still not knowing how it ended…
He was chasing her along the corridor to that room.
I found myself saying:
“By her left ear she heard a voice screaming, ‘Stop!’ She turned around…”
In my minds eye I was looking down the corridor but I couldn’t see anyone, so I found myself going on to say,
“But there was nobody there…”
What followed was a long, very pregnant pause, which, much later, I realised was sheer panic on my side, while the kids were all revelling in a highly dramatic moment, waiting for the reveal! And the reveal came, all at once, out of me.
It was her mother’s voice, and in that moment she knew what to do. She put out her foot and Bluebeard tripped and fell through the open door. She yanked the door closed, locked it, and ran upstairs to grab her coat. As she ran back downstairs she heard someone hammering on the front door. When she opened it, her mother stood there in the darkness,
“Oh my dear, I just had this sense that things weren’t right. I know I’m being stupid, but I just wanted to make sure you were ok. I even shouted out to you on the way here as if you could hear me.”
“Mum it’s ok. I heard you.”
So where on earth did that come from? Since then, I’ve often wondered if that ending, for better or worse, would have come out of working with it beforehand? I’ll never know. Creativity is like that. It wasn’t something I did, at least not with my thinking self. It was simply not having the thought that I couldn’t, because in that moment that wasn’t an option.
Can you think of times when you had no option, and so you came up with the goods?
If you want to play with these ideas further, you can get “The Cinderella Experiment” HERE It’s free.