The Syncreate Podcast: Empowering Creativity
Welcome to Syncreate, where we explore the intersections between creativity, psychology, and spirituality. Our goal is to demystify the creative process and expand the boundaries of what it means to be creative.
Creativity. It’s a word we throw around all the time, but what does it really mean? On the Syncreate Podcast, we share stories of the creative journey. We talk to changemakers, visionaries and everyday creatives working in a wide array of fields and disciplines. Our goal is to explore creativity in all its facets, and to gain a better understanding of the creative process – from imagination to innovation and everything in between.
The Syncreate Podcast is hosted by Melinda Rothouse, PhD. She helps individuals and organizations bring their creative dreams and visions to life through coaching, consulting, workshops, retreats, and now, this podcast. She's written two books on creativity, including Syncreate: A Guide to Navigating the Creative Process for Individuals, Teams, and Communities (winner of a Silver Nautilus Award for Creativity and Innovation), with Charlotte Gullick. She's also a musician (singer-songwriter and bass player) and photographer based in Austin, Texas.
The Syncreate Podcast: Empowering Creativity
Episode 55: Creative Spark Series - Experimenting Across Media with Melinda Rothouse & Charlotte Gullick
In this installment of our Creative Spark mini-episodes, we explore the possibilities that can emerge from experimenting across media in our creative work. For example, if we’re writing a poem, what if we expressed it as a dance? Or if we’re composing a song, how would it translate into a painting? Exploring our ideas across media can open up new possibilities, which can inform and deepen our primary project. This episode, like the mini-episodes that preceded it, includes insights and prompts from our book, Syncreate: A Guide to Navigating the Creative Process for Individuals, Teams, and Communities.
For our Creativity Pro-Tip, we encourage you to explore your current project or idea in a different medium, or even multiple media, and see how it informs the work.
Credits: The Syncreate podcast is created and hosted by Melinda Rothouse, and produced at Record ATX studios with in collaboration Michael Osborne and 14th Street Studios in Austin, Texas. Syncreate logo design by Dreux Carpenter.
If you enjoy this episode and want to learn more about the creative process, you might also like our conversations in Episode 22: Creative Play, Episode 29: Iteration, Episode 35: Navigating the Creative Wilderness.
At Syncreate, we're here to support your creative endeavors. If you have an idea for a project or a new venture, and you’re not sure how to get it off the ground, find us at syncreate.org. Our book, also called Syncreate, walks you through the stages of the creative process so you can take action on your creative goals. We also offer resources, creative process tools, and coaching to help you bring your work to the world. You can find more information on our website, where you can also find all of our podcast episodes. Find and connect with us on social media and YouTube under Syncreate, and we’re now on Patreon as well. If you enjoy the show, please subscribe and leave us a review!
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Melinda: Welcome to Syncreate, a show where we explore the intersections between creativity, psychology, and spirituality. We believe everyone has the capacity to create. Our goal is to demystify the process and expand the boundaries of what it means to be creative. We talk with visionaries and changemakers and everyday creatives working in a wide range of fields and mediums, from the arts to science, technology and business.
We aim to illuminate the creative process, from imagination to innovation and everything in between. I'm Melinda Rothouse and I help individuals and organizations bring their dreams and visions to life.
Charlotte: I'm Charlotte Gullick and I'm a writer, educator, and writing coach. We are the coauthors of a book on the creative process, also called Syncreate. At Syncreate, we're here to support your creative endeavors. If you have an idea for a project or a new venture, and you're not sure how to get it off the ground, find us at syncreate.org.
Our book, also called Syncreate, walks you through the stages of the creative process so you can take action on your creative goals. We offer resources, creative process tools and coaching to help you bring your work to the world.
Melinda: Hey everyone! Thanks for joining us today. We are going to be talking about experimenting across media. So, many of us, if we have a particular, you know, creative genre that we like to work in, we can sometimes get into a rut of only working in that one genre. And so what we're going to be talking about today is how can we branch out into other media just as a form of exploration and experimentation, but also as a way of, kind of exploring how, you know, an idea translated into different media can then inform our primary medium or perhaps could lead to a multimedia project in a way that we've never tried before.
So, for example, perhaps you're writing a poem. What if you tried to express those same ideas with movement in some kind of a dance? It seems a little out of the box, but who knows, maybe there's something, you know. The body has so much somatic intelligence and wisdom, and when we start to move and make different gestures, it can actually open up new insights.
Or perhaps we're working on a song. What if we tried to share again those same ideas in a painting? What would that look like and how might that inform the song, the lyrics, the music itself, or a play, perhaps we're working on a screenplay or directing a play, and I've actually done this exercise with a number of my writing clients where, how could you summarize the entire play, or a chapter from the book that you're working on as a haiku? Because it's really short. It's really succinct, and it kind of forces you to distill it down to its essence. So yeah, go ahead.
Charlotte: So just thinking about how this approach to, how can we experiment with what we're working on is, relates back to convergent and divergent thinking, which is something you talk about a lot at Syncreate. And I think sometimes we can, get so focused or hyper focused in a particular medium that to play with another one can bring us to a divergent and maybe like the 10,000ft view of the project.
And so I think what you're asking people to do is to, to think about the, the project, the essence of the project in new ways and divergent ways so that they have a more expanded understanding of the project and maybe that it ultimately, oh, what I thought was a poem is really a painting or vice versa.
But we're saying that there are so many ways that we can, engage in creativity so that our primary medium is a more informed and again, more joyful experience.
Melinda: Yes. Yeah. And even if it's a medium that you're unfamiliar with, right. Like in our book, we, we say like go take a pottery class, even if you've never done that before, because it's just building a new skill.
And again, there might be insights there working in this different medium that you can bring back to your primary medium. And also I know of like painters who have started to explore with like collage and three dimensional works so that their work goes from being kind of that two dimensional canvas to a more three dimensional experience, which really enhances the work depending on the context. Yeah.
Charlotte: Get thee to a pottery!
Melinda: Yes. And so you were telling me about an example that you were actually involved with at a local gallery in Austin. Tell us more about that.
Charlotte: So there was a visual artist who had an exhibit at, the, a gallery in East Austin. And I had a friend who's a writer and she was asked to match that, the, the sculptures to some written word.
And so we took some of my writing and got to, you know, print it out and put up with these other pieces. And so then you get this conversation happening across mediums, which is one of the things we were talking about. It was really cool to get to see not only my writing and relationship to visual art, but to see other people's writing and how you create kind of this collective, or mosaic of voices on a topic around climate change.
Melinda: Cool. And I remember I saw that show, but remind me was, was the piece of writing in response to the visual art or was it just, almost like a random pairing?
Charlotte: The theme, we were asked to look at our work already written that was around the theme and had to do like, relationship to the environment.
So I tend to write about salmon a lot, because where I'm from. And so it was a piece that was about like the intersection of, like, salmon and human culture. So it was really cool because I got to see it in a much bigger light.
Melinda: Yeah, I love that. And I love just that idea of, of, bringing people again, working in different mediums together on some kind of collaboration which, you know, certainly enriches whatever the project might be.
Charlotte: Yes. And I wanted to circle back on something you said about, kind of giving us a new perspective in, you know, when we, I teach writing, one of the tools that I have realized is available is drawing. it's really helpful in two ways, because if you can't, if you draw a scene and no one moves or there's no dialog, you might have a scene that is a little passive and maybe not engaging and sustain a reader.
So maybe you want to rethink it. After you draw it, you're like, oh, that person walked across the room. That's the only action that happened to this piece. Maybe you're flat, but you don't need any. Like you can do stick figure. So like it doesn't require artistic skill. What it's asking us to do is, lean into a different way of seeing our work.
And I think in writing, one of the gifts that comes with, drawing is that it removes the burden of language.
Melinda: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I love that. Yeah. So, so many good reasons to experiment in other media. And as we just were talking about in a previous episode, that sense of play bringing that beginner's mind.
Right? Maybe we're not as familiar or comfortable in this medium, but could we allow ourselves to play just, you know, like as when we were children and see what arises from that space?
So our Pro Tip today is to do just this thing. So if you have an idea or work in progress, try experimenting with it in a different medium or maybe multiple different media and see how it informs the project. See what insights might arise. And is there an opportunity for a multimedia element to this project?
Charlotte: Find and connect with us on YouTube and social media under Syncreate and we're now on Patreon as well. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe and leave us a review.
Melinda: And we're recording today at Record ATX Studios in Austin, with Charlotte joining in from the Hudson Valley. The podcast is produced in collaboration with Mike Osborne at 14th Street Studios. Thanks so much for being with us, and see you next time.
