Читать книгу Creative Synergy - Bunny Paine-Clemes - Страница 61

Take your project to someone you trust and ask for feedback. Try to get your ego out of the way and listen, dispassionately, for ways your work can be improved.

Lennon and McCartney did most of their best composing together. Sir Paul often discusses how they used each other as sounding boards, how his romantic tone was toughened by his partner’s sardonic irony. A favorite example of his is quoted by Barry Miles: “I was sitting there doing ‘Getting better all the time’ and John just says in his laconic way, ‘It couldn’t get no worse.’”²⁰⁸ Crick makes it clear that he and Watson cooperated in studying the double helix: “If either of us suggested a new idea the other, while taking it seriously, would attempt to demolish it in a candid but nonhostile manner. This turned out to be quite crucial.”²⁰⁹ Like Lennon and McCartney during their great creative period, the DNA team all but lived together:

Over a period of almost two years, we often discussed the problem, either in the laboratory or on our daily lunchtime walk . . . or at home, since Jim occasionally dropped in near dinnertime, with a hungry look in his eye. Sometimes, when the summer weather was particularly tempting, we would take the afternoon off and punt up the river.²¹⁰

They also “tried it out” by building models. (See Chapter 7 for the value of creative pairs.)

Ghiselin advises that our first response to our work may not be an accurate measure of its quality:

A work may seem valuable to its creator because of his sense of stirring life and fresh significance while he was producing it. After that excitement is dissipated, its intrinsic value is its only relevant one even to himself. He must find out if it will serve to organize experience in a fresh and full and useful way. To that end he tests it critically.²¹¹

In other words, the work must be valuable as well as novel. A sympathetic critic can help.