by Joshua Kern

Created on: March 13, 2010

The white rabbit peeps out of its hole, hairs on edge. It knows it’s not safe out there, but it also knows there’s a field full of delicious, uneaten grass. With a twitch of its whiskers, it waddles out of the earth just far enough to get a full panoramic view. All around, there are verdant hills of wildflowers and hazy oak trees, blue jays chirping in the spring air, and a 10-year old in a tuxedo swings a shovel at the rabbit. CLANG! Our rabbit darts out of danger just in time, sprinting deep back down into the depths. Like any sensible rabbit, he won’t be venturing out for a while. What the heck am I talking about?

Our brains have 2 modes in writing; two gears, if you will: the creator, and the editor. The creator represents our ideas, our imagination, and our train of thought. It’s the part of our mind that makes connections, metaphors, ideas, and it loves to run around like a 3-year-old. The editor is concerned with the grammar we learned in English class, and is always concerned with what other people will see when they read our work. It fixes problems and tells us which ideas are logical and which are illogical. Our creator, in theory, should work together with the guidance of our editor to come up with insightful, coherent pieces of writing. But, in practice, most people (myself included) don’t have a healthy relationship between the two. We may have an initial spark of inspiration that sits us down to write a story, poem, or article, and we may get into a bit of a flow. But, what happens next? We look back over the paragraph we’re writing to make sure it looks right, or we stop because we don’t like the direction the writing is going. Soon after, we put some wear and tear on the backspace key. Pretty soon, we’re just looking at the paper or the computer screen, wondering where the last 15 minutes went. Our creativity stops, like some sort of brain pipe is clogged up. But, as any neurologist can tell you, creativity is a conscious thought process, not a series of tubes. We should be able to control it just like any other conscious thought process. Why should this creative constipation happen, then?

When you’re in 1st grade learning to write, from the get-go, you have people telling you “You’re doing it wrong”. Teachers are good-hearted when they tell you this (mostly), but people don’t realize what this does to the mind. When a kid experiments with their creator, they get

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