Two musical mysteries, an idea for storing creative project materials, information on how to establish creative habits and a fantastic interview on the meaning of art round out this week’s dose of web-based creativity!

1. Music often seems mysterious to those who haven’t played an instrument or sung in a choir. However, the Cognitive Daily blog reports a study by Andrea Halpern, in which she taught non-musicians to accurately identify tunes played in a major or minor key by suggesting that the major key tunes sounded “happy” and the minor key tunes “sad.”

Even more fascinating than that bit of data are the topographic maps of EEG-measured brain activity of musicians and non-musicians while listening to tunes in a minor or major key that are included in the post. The non-musicians showed a rather uniform reaction to both types of tunes, but the trained musicians had dramatically more brain activity when they listened to tunes played in a minor key.

Post author Dave Munger reports,

“The researchers suggest that the lack of activity in musicians during major tunes may be due to the fact that most Western music is played in a major key: 97 percent of popular American songs, and 73 percent of classical music is in a major key. So the activity occurs when an relatively unexpected key is used — but only for trained musicians.”

2. On an entirely different musical note (so to speak), the research digest blog of the British Psychological Society reported recently on a phenomenon that takes the song you “can’t get out of your head” to a new level: musical hallucinosis.

The post recounts several anecdotes of patients who suffered from the condition, which consists of perceiving music being played when none is within earshot. Most were aware that they were experiencing a hallucination, which makes the condition different from persons experiencing psychotic hallucinations.

The post notes that Ramon Mocellin and his research colleagues, who recently published a scientific paper on the disorder, have observed that musical hallucinosis is often associated with deafness. Mocellin’s team members think the condition may reflect the spontaneous, aberrant firing of those brain cells whose job is to process music, if there were any to be heard. Higher brain levels then seek to make sense of this spontaneous firing, often drawing on musical memories in the process.

3. Janet Rae-Dupree of the New York Times recently wrote an interesting article about the relationship between changing habits and increasing creative thinking.

She writes that talking about habits, which can often seem quite restrictive, and creativity in the same breath can seem counter-intuitive, but brain research now indicates that the development of NEW habits, which requires the development of new synaptic paths and brain cells, can jump the mind into new, more innovative modes of thought, as well. In other words, the more new things we try — the more we step outside our comfort zone — the more inherently creative we can become.

For the article, she interviewed Dawna Markova, author of “The Open Mind” and an executive change consultant for Professional Thinking Partners. Markova notes that humans are born with the capacity to approach challenges in four primary ways: analytically, procedurally, relationally (or collaboratively) and innovatively. Current educational testing focuses on analytical and procedural thinking almost exclusively.

Rae-Dupree writes:

“Few of us inherently use our innovative and collaborative modes of thought… This is where developing new habits comes in. If you’re an analytical or procedural thinker, you learn in different ways than someone who is inherently innovative or collaborative. Figure out what has worked for you when you’ve learned in the past, and you can draw your own map for developing additional skills and behaviors for the future.”

There’s additional good news in this article: there’s no need to kill off your old “bad” habits to make this process work! Procedural ruts get worn into the hippocampus permanently. But, the article says, “The new habits we deliberately ingrain into ourselves create parallel pathways that can bypass those old roads.”

4. The Unclutter blog had a post the other day about reusable temporary storage solutions that has implications for creative people who need a place to put their project materials.

The post discusses how the authors made more storage space in their bathroom by using InterMetro shelving and inexpensive white storage boxes of varying sizes to create a mobile, non-permanent way to organize different types of materials. I saw the picture accompanying the post and immediately thought of how nice it would be to have craft materials, drawing accessories, project papers, and other creative project materials easily at hand.

5. Finally, the San Francisco Chronicle’s “Finding My Religion” columnist David Ian Miller recently chatted with Jane Dillenberger, 92, a professor of art and religion at Berkeley’s Graduate Theological Union and a working art historian since 1942. The article that resulted from their conversation is an intriguing discussion of artist Andy Warhol’s spirituality (which he apparently had in spades—he prayed with his Ukrainian Catholic mother and painted dozens of versions of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Last Supper”) and of how spirituality and creativity are related.

The article sheds new light for some of us on Warhol’s complex nature, and is a loving look at a woman who has spent her life helping others appreciate the meaning and beauty of great art!

Today, I interview my first photographer for In the Studio With…, Diane Varner of the fabulous photoblog, Daily Walks. Her photographic record of her walks with her dog is stunning, covering a wide variety of techniques and subject matter.

If you enjoy the photos she has graciously allowed me to run with this post, please visit Diane’s site and sign up for her e-mail list at diane@dianevarner.com if you’d like to be notified when she is able to offer her photos as note cards and prints for sale!

Tell us about your creative pursuits, paid and unpaid.

Varner: I have always had my hand in something artistic throughout the years and have been fortunate enough to generate an income via several creative occupations. I started out as a graphic designer combined with illustration and then moved into web design, which I have done for the last nine years. The pursuit of photography came as a bit of a surprise, but was a natural evolution, as it combines all my skills that have I used along the way with my other endeavors.

Do you have any formal training in your creative discipline(s)? Do you feel training is important in creative development? Why/why not?

Varner: I have drawn and painted my entire life and studied fine art at UC Santa Barbara. Although there has been no formal photography training, I believe my art background has enabled me to create images that are visually successful. In art, one learns about composition, colors, lighting, moods, etc., all of which can be applied to any creative medium, including photography.

Since my career has been in the graphic and web design field, I have spent many years working with Adobe Photoshop which is the post-processing software that is used on digital images today. This experience has given me a huge advantage as I have mastered this software program prior to using it for my photography.

So, do I feel that training is important? I suppose the answer would be yes. Having said this though, as an artist, I understand the desire to bypass the formal training and jump right into the act of creating. Perhaps the best of all worlds would be to get some basic art, photography and computer training as a foundation and then move on one’s own exploration and style as soon as possible.

What habits do you cultivate to facilitate your creative “flow”?

Varner: With my photography, I start out each day with the promise to myself that I will go out and take images. This commitment alone keeps the “flow” going. There are days when I just don’t “feel it” but take myself and my camera out anyway, and start walking (of course, my dog Boomer, nudges me along!). Inevitably, something appears before me that catches my eye and generates excitement; it’s not long before I’m completely engrossed in the act of capturing images.

I also write on a daily basis. These writings are quotes, thoughts and meditations on the images that I take each day. The writing is often more difficult than the post-processing of the images but for me, adds depth to the overall experience. Again, to keep the flow going, I choose one photo a day and write about the feelings it evokes within, while attempting to allow the thoughts to emerge without judgment. I go back later and fine-tune the writing for my website and future books.

What advice would you give to a “blocked” artist in your discipline to free up their creative energies?

Varner: As a photographer, I think that this is an easy one. Pick up your camera gear, go to a place that feels safe and makes you happy (this could be a new place or not) and start taking photographs. Don’t worry if they are any good. The goal is to remember what it feels like to be creative; to get yourself back into that “zone”. Once this feeling is restored, the fears and other things that blocked you, tend to fall away.

More advice would be to let go of the technical boundaries that have been dictated for photographers and think creatively. By all means, take chances! Each of us has our own exclusive way of looking at the world and it’s only by experimentation that one eventually develops their distinct, personal style.

Which artistic project that you are working on excites you the most right now?

Varner: I am currently working on two projects. The first one is a new business and website for my photography called Leaftracks Press. I hope to have several products to sell via this site: cards, prints, journals and books.

The second project is a series of books that will combine my imagery and writing from my Daily Walks. I’m extremely excited about these.

How do you select your creative projects? What elements of potential project tend to intrigue you the most?

Varner: I have learned to listen to that voice inside that can’t wait to get to that “next” project. When I hear it, I know it’s time to pursue it.

I suppose what intrigues me more than anything on any given project is discovering the mystical in nature that is quite often, just a step outside our front door. Being able to do this and share it through my photography and words gives me profound joy.

It’s another banner week of links from the creative blogosphere!

1. Katherine Tyrrell posted a fantastic primer at her blog, Making a Mark, on 10 tips for how to sketch people.

I like the post because it is so very practical (or it sounds that way to this drawing-impaired writer) and also because she notes that sketching can help artists to draw everyday, which she says “which will bring fluency and confidence to your drawing.” The color and black and white sketches included with the post are also a delight.

2. Elaine Fine, who writes the very interesting blog Musical Assumptions, wrote an intriguing entry recently about the challenges of playing her own music, that is, music she has composed herself.

She notes,

“I have a great deal of difficulty performing (my own music) because I have to make so many decisions in order to give it a successful performance. They are the same kinds of decisions that I have to make when I play music written by other people, but it is much easier to play music by people who are dead and who I never would have known even if they were still alive…

“From the experience of preparing my own music for performance I learn (over and over again) that the emotional content of a piece has a less to do with the pitches and rhythms than the musical moment or sequence of musical moments that happens during a performance.”

3. Open Culture, which bills itself as “your guide to smart media,” alerted me to a lovely interactive feature in the New York Times about the backstory behind many of Ansel Adams’ iconic Yosemite photographs.

The feature has a map and wonderful audio commentary by Adams’ former assistant, Andrea Stillman. The feature has been paired with another story, “What Adams Saw Through His Lens,” which touches upon the pilgrimages many make to Yosemite to take photos from the same vantage points as Adams did.

Reporter Louise Story notes,

“Yosemite does not often appear as it did at the moments Adams tripped his shutter… ‘I’ve had people say they are kind of disappointed,’ says Glenn Crosby, the curator of the Ansel Adams Gallery. ‘They only know the park through Ansel’s eyes, and he was only showing you the keepers. The park is not always as dramatic as his work.’”

All in all, the two items are fascinating for what they reveal about this master American photographer and about those who would follow in his footsteps.

BONUS LINKS

A few more I just can’t let slip under the radar…

Creative Construction has begun a weekly creativity contest to inspire its contributing bloggers and readers. Each week’s winner receives a $10 gift certificate to Amazon.com.

Mich Alland, writing at The Online Photographer, has penned a provocative post about an approach to “street photography,” including tips on how to get the best shots and his assertion that composition is king for this kind of photography.

Finally, in the “I’m just excited this blog even exists” category, there is the My GPS Camera Phone blog.

Not only do I love that someone has created a robust blog around a tool almost everyone has (and uses) these days, I just love his artistic attitude. He shows readers how to rework their cel phone pictures into mini-masterpieces using common photo-editing and graphic design programs.

He answers the question, “What is the point of this blog?” by saying,

“It’s more than just shooting photos. It’s about working with limited tools while trying to achieve great results. It’s about looking around at the mundane and realizing that it isn’t so mundane after all. It’s about finding the purpose of each and every thing in my immediate surroundings.”

Amen!

I like to say sometimes that I’m building my small business empire from a bus seat, and it’s mostly true.
When I began my current day job in 2004, I lived only 20 minutes from the university that employs me. I moved about 15 miles farther out in 2005, and last year, I bought a house about 5 miles even farther out than that.
For much of the last 3 years, I’ve ridden city buses to get to work, or caught an intercampus shuttle that takes me directly to my day job from a satellite campus of the university that’s nearer to me. That choice to take mass transit, bolstered by my employer’s decision to provide staff with free bus passes, has given me at least 45 minutes, twice a day, in which to create.

What have I done with my time on the bus?

• Composed blog posts.
• Drafted articles.
• Edited articles, both my own and the work of other writers.
• Read books I’m using as research for articles, posts, workshops, etc.
• Developed outlines for workshops I plan to teach.
• Tracked my weekly progress on my writing, coaching and blogging goals in a journal.
• Brainstormed new article ideas.

When I have a week or a month where I have to drive in to work frequently, I miss my bus time. Choosing commute time as my primary creative time does the following for me:

• It provides a reliable 90 minutes a day in which to practice my craft free of most distractions.
• It has helped me become very good at “chunking” my projects into pieces that can be completed in 20- or 30-minute stints.
• It also provides an environment in which I can easily “fish” for ideas–there’s stimulation there if I need it for inspiration, yet quite a bit of “white noise” and rhythmic motion to lull me into a state where ideas can emerge from the subconscious.

The trade-off, of course, is that almost all commuting options besides single-passenger car trips cost extra time–which in my case translates into lost sleep. However, I would need to carve out the time to do my writing anyway–so doubling up and writing while I commute seems like a winning combination to me.

The questions to you:
Have you ever worked on a creative project consistently on the bus, light rail, or other form of mass transit? Did you enjoy the process? How did your project(s) turn out?

Given the importance of Really Simple Syndication or RSS to the world of Web 2.0, it’s worth expanding your May Day celebrations to include a toast to the fact that May 1 is RSS Awareness Day. 

Given the importance of RSS to my recent entry on creating an online dashboard for your worthy project, I thought it fitting to mention the celebration and encourage readers to visit the RSS Day site, esp. as it includes a Common Craft video that explains the concept of RSS. Common Craft is a company that takes Web 2.0 concepts and manages to explain them visually, using little more than paper, printouts, markers, white board and their own two (or more) hands!

(A tip o’ the blog to Tina at The Cycling Artist for alerting me to today’s celebration. RSS rocks!)

Reflections on what inhibits innovation in the workplace, several examples of bite-size creative output, and your advice to a young artist are today’s links from the creative blogosphere.

1. Professor Keith Sawyer of Washington University at St. Louis posted his thoughts recently about a Stanford study that looked at how corporate protection of so-called “proprietary secrets” can inhibit creativity.
The study, conducted by Pamela Hinds of Stanford worked like this:

Hinds took 69 undergraduates and asked them to imagine they worked for a company and that their goal was to “generate novel and marketable ideas for consumer-oriented information appliances” (like a toaster with a computer screen on it).  Before starting the task, she gave each of them a packet with eleven pieces of information about information appliances.

Half the students were told that several pieces of information could not be used in developing a final solution because the information was proprietary. In terms of average number of ideas generated, novelty and marketability of the products suggested, and in terms of the single highest idea per student, the students who had to deal with the constraints of “proprietary” information scored lower than the students who were told all the information they had was public and could be used to formulate a final solution.

Sawyer writes:

“The results are not dramatic but they are suggestive…. It could be that suppressing the proprietary information is mentally demanding, and so interferes with idea generation.  Or, it could be that students in the proprietary condition perceive the task to be more constraining, feel that they have less autonomy, and thus their motivation to create declines.”

(Disclosure: I interviewed Dr. Sawyer last week for an article I am writing on team creativity. He’s a heck of a nice guy.)

2. Next, several brief notes:
Author Paul Ford wrote recently about a technique he uses to cut the fat out of his writing: he creates an Excel sheet to track sources, relationships, etc. He explains: “The grid imposes brevity. Relationships between sentences are exposed. Editing becomes a more explicit act of sorting, shuffling, balancing paragraphs.”

Using this technique, he reviewed 763 songs and made each review exactly 6 words long. Perhaps extreme, this little entry (itself less than 200 words) provides food for thought to anyone struggling to cut their prose.

Meanwhile, at Twitterprose, K.G. Schneider, a librarian and writer, also known as the Free Range Librarian, presents great lines from creative nonfiction works through her Twitter/RSS feed. The feed is fed by reader suggestions, so send her your favorite link, or perhaps suggest your own work! (It’s not explicitly forbidden, so why not?)

Finally, over at Chris Webb’s blog on all things publishing, Chris interviewed Erik Chevalier, publisher of the online ultra-short fiction magazine Burst Fiction. The discussion of how to write fictional stories that will fit an entire tale with in 1000 characters (that’s characters, not words–so several times larger than a Twitter post, but still extremely brief and mobile device-friendly) and where the ‘zine is going is worth reading.

3. Finally, Alyson Stanfield of ArtBizCoach.com posed the ultimate question on her blog’s Deep Thought Thursday last week: What advice would you give to someone just starting down the artist’s path?

The posted comments so far range from practical (buy a paint tube wringer) to motivational to the business-like (look professional with the work, the portfolio/website, and yourself). Join the conversation, or as Alyson encourages readers to do, post your own answer on your blog and link back to her entry (and mine!).

What is my advice?

Remember why you love to create.

Create daily.

Learn business skills, but hold fast to your own vision.

Remove the obstacles that stand between you and your art as you would weed a garden, or clear a lot you intended to build a house on.

Working on a schedule doesn’t diminish your creativity; indeed, it lets your inspiration know the best time to show up.

Fall in love with your projects and let the momentum carry you through the hard days.

Your perspective on the world matters, therefore the art you make–whether anyone else sees it or not–matters.

Have you ever wished people understood what your day was really like? Perhaps you can help them out, and enjoy a little creative practice while you’re at it, with a new challenge project I’ve seen floating around the blogosphere.
Vivien Blackburn started the challenge at her blog after seeing a talk by illustrator Liz Minichiello. The idea was for visual artists to chronicle their day through a series of 12 single-panel drawings drawn from memory.
Jeanette, over at Illustrated Life, took up the challenge, as did Robyn at Have Dogs, Will Travel. All three artists provide well-drawn looks at a “day in the life,” and their “comic strips” exude humor, pathos and self-insight.
My thought on this is, beyond being an excellent exercise for dry-media visual artists, this challenge could be tweaked to strengthen almost anyone’s creative storytelling skills…

• Filmmakers could describe their day in 12 storyboards (very similar to the original challenge)
• Photographers could present their day in 12 snapshots (regular camera or cel phone)
• Playwrights could tell the story of their day in 12 snippets of dialogue
• Poets could tell the story of their day in 12 evocative lines
• Musicians could provide the story of their day through 12 riffs.

The underlying value I see here is capturing a moment in a concise way and weaving that moment in with other moments in the day to tell a coherent story.

The questions to you:
Have you ever attempted a “day in the life” project in your art?

Was it for practice only or did your project end up being shared with others?

How “typical” did your day turn out to be?

If anyone takes up this storytelling challenge, please post a link to your results in the comments section to this post.

Putting your wallet where your goals are, two views of productivity, and the potential of an emerging content/media format are the blog-o-rific gleanings for this week.

1. Creative Construction is a delightful group blog, dedicated to helping women (mostly mothers) reach their creative goals. Miranda, one of the bloggers, posted recently and reported on a new goals site, Stickk.com, which provides a place to publicly state one’s aspirations, but provides a twist when it comes to additional incentive.

If you want, you can wager an amount of money on whether or not you’ll accomplish the goal, and if you fail, the money will go to a charity you dislike. Since its launch two months ago, the site (whose name refers to a stick, as in “carrot and stick,” and K, the legal shorthand for “contract”) has attracted some 13,000 registered users, 5,500 of whom have signed contracts.

I tend to think of positive rewards for challenging goals as being more motivating, but the one of the co-founders of the site argues that the specter paying out to those you despise if you fail amounts to “raising the price of bad behavior” and can be a powerful tool for keeping work on a project on track.

2. Two unrelated thoughts about productivity, both of which have merit for working artists and innovators.

Lifehack.org beat me to an entry on Gregory Martin’s concept of a “treadmill journal,” popularized last year in an article he wrote (“Want to be productive?) in the April 2007 issue of The Writer.

The idea is simple: everyday, take out your journal and write an entry consisting of the following information–the time and date, how much writing (or other artwork) you plan to do that day, what specific thing you plan to work on, how it went, what you plan to work on tomorrow, and when and for how long you’ll work tomorrow.

Martin says “it’s hard to romanticize a treadmill,” but his idea reminds me of the running journals I used to keep in the 1980s when I ran in track and cross-country in high school and competed in road races. The greatest benefit to keeping a treadmill journal is that it provides a good diagnostic tool if your project isn’t going well, because it allows you to track patterns in your approach to your work.

On the other end of the productivity spectrum, we have tech blogger Robert Scoble, who has finally reached the saturation point on the number of online gadgets he remains hooked into as he travels to Israel and elsewhere:

“Four weeks ago I had 5,250 emails in my inbox. Today? 10. What’s the difference? I’ve been on lots of airplanes in the past month….That taught me an important lesson.

Want to get something done? Turn off Twitter. Turn off Facebook. Turn off blog comments. Turn off FriendFeed. Turn off Flickr. Turn off YouTube. Turn off Dave Winer’s blog and Huffington Post. Turn off TechMeme.”

The comments that follow this post are wide-ranging and fill in the gaps that such a one-pointed pronouncement will inevitably leave. Some commenters out the value of Twitter, blogs, Flickr, et. al., to provide insights into work projects, make essential personal connections, etc. Some assert that those diagnosed with attention deficit disorder are actually more productive in an environment with multiple sensory inputs and what writer, speaker and consultant Linda Stone calls “continuous partial attention” to a number of things.

I know from my conversations with artists that nothing works for everyone, but I find Scoble’s disconnection confession interesting, given his profession. As a writer and editor, I find myself alternating between single-tasking and traveling the vast sea of Internet-facilitated information (inbound or outbound) for inspiration or research. When I’m trolling for ideas, nothing but multiple inputs will do; when it’s time to finish a project, focusing exclusively on the next step is the only way for me to get it done.

What have been your experiences with productivity? What works for you when it’s time to generate ideas, get started on your work, or get it done?

3. Finally, a post from film editor and media expert Norman Hollyn about an emerging content form—mobile phone public service announcements.

Hollyn will be working this week as a remote producer with a group of students who will be out in the streets of Atlanta, creating content for a PSA (public service announcement) for AIDS Awareness Day.

There will be five teams altogether, and students will spend an all-day session with representatives from the Centers for Disease Control and armed with this background, the teams will develop PSAs to be shot the next day. As the PSAs are being shot, Hollyn’s team of students will send their work back to Hollyn and a student editor, who will begin editing them together. The hope is to have two to three PSAs from each of the five teams.

The clips will be called Personal PSAs (PPSAs) because of the intimate nature of their capture and their cell phone distribution mechanism. Hollyn is excited about the potential for mobile content to provide local views of events that mainstream media outlets have struggled to provide in an era of budget cuts:

“The ability to migrate news and entertainment capture into the mobile arena is pretty exciting, and though it will inevitably raise the number of piano-playing cats out there, it can also raise our ability to see local events happen more immediately…the technology to do it with great visual quality is here.”

Do you have any concerns about the direction that this technology is going? Are you excited about the potential it offers you as an artist? Are you collaborating with other creative folk in any artwork for mobile distribution?

Today we interview freelance writer, blogger and political commentator Jill Miller Zimon. Jill has blended an incredibly diverse background in social welfare and law to become a sought-after author on political and other topics. She’s taken her passion for her family, her sense of humor and her willingness to find (or create) meaningful projects to carve out a writing niche for herself.

(Disclosure notice: Jill has written for me as a freelancer several times at publications that I edit. She’s good!)

Tell us about your creative pursuits, paid and unpaid.

Zimon: I suppose we could start with, “What is the definition of creative?” But I would say that my blog, for which I do not receive any remuneration at all, is my main creative pursuit at the moment. I’ve been able to branch out into political commentary, which I love. I’ve been on CNN and the BBC this year, and last year I was on the Cleveland public radio station more than a dozen times talking politics and regional issues.
My paid creative pursuits (are related to my) freelance writing. I write a family column and received my third award from the Parenting Publications of America organization for work in 2007 – for the first time, in the humor category!

Do you have any formal training in your creative discipline(s)? Do you feel training is important in creative development? Why/why not?
Zimon: I don’t have a shred of formal training in writing. But of course, since I made it through college and two grad school programs, I had to know how to write, at least minimally, and I would say that my law school and social work school curriculum really did help me learn to write.
(Undertaking) training to think creatively almost seems like an oxymoron, but I have participated in workshops that help me think about how to think or where to look or what to try for inspiration, for looking at things differently and then develop ways to describe what I seek to describe. So I would say that there’s an infinite number of ways in which we “train,” but not always in a classroom.
I feel very fortunate that people who have been through formal training have supported and mentored me over the years.

What habits do you cultivate to facilitate your creative “flow”?
Zimon: Write everyday. That’s an oldie but goodie. Doesn’t even matter if it’s a letter that you never send or an e-mail that gets saved as a draft. I have, probably, hundreds of partially completed essays or rants that I may or may not use some day, but most likely, writing them led me to something else.

What advice would you give to a “blocked” artist in your discipline to free up their creative energies?
Zimon: This is a difficult question that lacks a simple answer that works universally. Sometimes it’s spending an hour on the phone laughing with a good writing buddy of mine that gets me unstuck. Sometimes it’s a hug from one of my kids; sometimes it’s a deadline looming – for something else! – that gets me going on what I need to do immediately.
Eating a cookie, brownie or M&Ms does not usually help, but I often try it anyway – just to see if it still doesn’t work.

Which artistic project that you are working on excites you the most right now?
Zimon: A friend of mine who is a formally trained journalist and I are working up a proposal for a new grant program that is intended to help women in new media. We’ve wanted to work together on something for a long time now and this project gives us a great chance to see if we can do that. We hope to use some very innovative software as a tool to propel investigative research into new directions.

How do you select your creative projects? What elements of a potential project tend to intrigue you the most?
Zimon: I have a one-word answer for both questions: time.
I think about how much time I think the project will require in order for me to do it the way I want to, which will be the way the person asking me to do it hopes I will. I’m always concerned about over-committing and I tend to provide reasons why I might not be right for a project, just to be sure the person or people with the project are sure they want me and I am sure that it’s something I will be okay taking on. Setting up and understanding expectations from the get-go, and being on the same page as the people for whom you’re doing the work, is the number one priority to me when discussing a project.
Other elements range from being able to work on something unlike anything I’ve done before or, the opposite – working on something that is a passion of mine but with which I don’t often get to work (like the juvenile court system).
I want to feel good about the people for whom I’m doing the work and, no surprise for a freelancer, I like the pay to be commensurate, as best as possible, with what I’ll be producing. But that’s not always possible, and there’s always the not-for-profit work I’ll take just because it’s different and important.

We have a bumper crop of creativity-related links this week; everything from inspiration for late bloomers to some very special puppets (just keep reading…)!

1. Need a boost when you look at your resume or creative output and feel like you have more years than works behind you? Go read this list posted at the Creative Journey Cafe about 10 famous creative late bloomers.

I’ve mentioned Julia Child’s late start (learned to cook at age 37; wrote her first book at 49 and didn’t have her own TV show until her 50s) to people before, but I had no idea that Al Jarreau, Stan Lee or Laura Ingalls Wilder came into their own artistically so late in life (late 30s through mid-60s).

Artists with staggering talent often get off to a fast start quite young, but maturity and persistence are the keys being productive at any age.

2. The good folks at Idea Champions have posted a great list to their blog, The Heart of Innovation, “100 Simple Ways to Be More Creative on the Job.”

The tips are all one-liners, but they inspire further thought and action. I’m especially thrilled by their suggestions to take a daily brainstorming walk and to assign a “fun fairy” to each business meeting!

If you’d like to join the conversation, the bloggers are promoting a contest based on the same theme as this post. Just visit the post and hit the comments button. Prizes will be given for most intriguing suggestion, funniest tip, tip most likely to start a revolution, tip that the bloggers most wished they had thought of first, and the suggestion offering the biggest bang for the buck.

3. The Morning Porch features a daily microblogging post by writer/photographer Dave Bonta, who also macro-blogs at Via Negativa.

Reading Dave’s beautiful tweets about what he sees and hears from his front porch first thing in the morning made me think: perhaps Twitter/microblogs have use as practice in poetry? Haiku? One-sentence journaling? Such sites provide an exceptional challenge to pare your writing down to the bare essentials, certainly.

4. The Mindhacks.com blog had a fascinating post recently about releasing creativity in a decaying brain.

The blog post links to a New York Times article and a study published in the journal Brain about patients suffering from fronto-temporal dementia, who can exhibit breathtaking leaps in creative expression, even as their ability to do such left-brain-dominant tasks such as adding single digit numbers or remembering the definitions of words declines.

The post is a thought-provoking look at how the brain facilitates creativity, and how creativity can be stimulated even under the most unlikely of circumstances.

5. BONUS! If you need a little play therapy to get your creative juices flowing, the Mindhacks blog also has a great post pointing the way to some howlingly funny little psychoanalytic finger puppets produced by Uncommon Goods. Your digits can role play Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Anna Freud or a couch.