Freshman year of high school, I stepped into Mrs. Sutton’s 9th grade English class. At late middle age, Mrs. Sutton fully embraced the eccentric hippie vibe: adorned with rattling bracelets, beads, and necklaces, she wore long kaleidoscope shawl dresses and worn leather sandals. A legendary figure at school: she taught high school English to one of the other English teachers. I heard hallway whisperings about her classroom antics and streaks of madness and wow, did she live up to them.
On a normal day, you might have found Mrs. Sutton at the front of the class with her eyes closed in bliss and hands held towards the sky, as if she were being carried by heavenly light. In a few moments, you’d find her announcing Shakespeare lines from the depths of her soul like a possessed artist: "O! for a MUSE of fire, that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention."
On other days, the sight of poor legibility from one of her students would trigger her: “What is this CHICKEN SCRATCH?! Why are you writing in chicken scratch!!”. For some reason my memory remembers it as “chickenshit”, but I think she used that for other kinds of misbehavior.
While Mrs. Sutton was verifiably crazy, she understood creativity at a deep level and knew how to impart this skill onto her students.
Her creativity methodology came in the form of “freewrites” written with pen and paper, always in cursive. The rules of a freewrite were simple: (1) 30 minutes of writing (2) your pen cannot leave the paper and you cannot stop writing. Mrs. Sutton didn’t care if you wrote the same word over and over for 30 straight minutes. Write whatever you want, just don’t stop writing. During freewrites, Mrs. Sutton resembled an angry drill sergeant, pacing up and down the front of class with hawkish eyes scanning for pauses in movement.
As a chickenshit high school student, freewrites seemed like a useless waste of time. Begrudgingly and out of fear for Mrs. Sutton’s outbursts, you would write and write and write. Sometimes, the same word or phrase is repeated for 20 lines – until a Muse throws a magic brick at your face and you latch onto something and start writing substance. Even on the worst days, no student ever wrote the same thing for 30 whole minutes.
So, imagine my delight when browsing Twitter and stumbling onto a collection of tweets explaining how the most successful artists of our time manage creativity:
- Billie Eilish talking about using constraints in her creative process.
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Ed Sheeran using the faucet analogy for creativity, how you need to empty the crap before you get to the good stuff.
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John Mayer demonstrates in real-time how he clears out the junk.
All of them followed Mrs. Sutton’s exact process: use constraints to unclog or clear the creative pipes by letting all of the crap flow out first, then you’ll eventually get to the good stuff.
Thank you Mrs. Sutton.