In this highly distractable society we need, more than ever, to improve our ability to focus. It is focus, as Daniel Goleman asserts, that is "the hidden driver of excellence." 

He states in his book 'Focus' that, “It’s not the chatter of people around us that is the most powerful distractor, but rather the chatter of our own minds. Utter concentration demands these inner voices be stilled." Making something original and creative takes sustained concentration, and as stated earlier, this does not have to be done in silent isolation. It is often done through challenge conversations and play. For many the focus, connections, and new thinking become more powerful. The best part of Peter Jackson's "Let it Be" edits is the demonstration of just that happening live in front of you. But earlier when developing their initial melodies and lyrics they would work in isolation.  Writers have to have that complete uninterrupted space.

The writer's norm has always been to search out reclusive retreats. Orwell went to Barnhill on Jura where he made it his home, but besides his son and his sister, many writers and friends made the burdensome two-day journey. He had company and collaborators.  Conversations with editors also contributed, or not, in readiness for publication.  

The point is that the best work often involves a mix of meditative reflection and note-taking combined with conversations with critical friends. That is the balance we like to strike at here CrE8ive Place - spaces to focus better and work in an environment that is right for you...where you make the choices...where you have the choices. We can help you to do this at CrE8ive Place. Writers, comics, artists, musicians, scientists, designers, inventors. The list goes on.

Each one has a common creative process. Firstly, there is a crystal-clear focus on a subject or phenomenon, witnessed first-hand, culminating in a new idea and the strong emotions attached to what it could mean.

If it is of value a coherent and original vision should take shape. It is applied and tested and retested. The experimenting is persistent until it is right and that is often determined, correctly, by gut. The increased concentration and use of higher-level skills are a bi-product. And there we have it! "Elemental." 

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LS Lowry knew the "Father and Two Sons" in this 1950 work. He knew them as he knew himself (some critics described the boys as partial self-portraits). He knew what they had endured. He understood them. As Orwell did in his political novels.

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One could consider two of Goleman's focus elements at play in  Lowry and Orwell's works:

1. Both had deep emotional connections to the subjects. The hopelessness and isolation of the characters are both appreciated and communicated.  There is a strong relationship between the pain and the desolation reflected by an empathetic artist and writer. They had what Goleman describes as "other focus" attuned and connected to the people.

2. Through personal and interpersonal experiences over time both Lowry and Orwell built personal histories and views of the world around them. This "outer focus" enabled them to relate their subjects to the wider world and their own wider experiences.

When writing "The Road to Wigan Pier" Orwell offered this perceptive, connected observation. 

"The train bore me away, through the monstrous scenery of slag-heaps, chimneys, piled scrap-iron, foul canals, paths of cindery mud criss-crossed by the prints of clogs. This was March, but the weather had been horribly cold and everywhere there were mounds of blackened snow. As we moved slowly through the outskirts of the town we passed row after row of little grey slum houses running at right angles to the embankment. At the back of one of the houses a young woman was kneeling on the stones, poking a stick up the leaden waste-pipe which ran from the sink inside and which I suppose was blocked. I had time to see everything about her - her sacking apron, her clumsy clogs, her arms reddened by the cold. She looked up as the train passed, and I was almost near enough to catch her eye. She had  a round pale face, the usual exhausted face of the slum girl who is twenty-five and looks forty, thanks to mis-carriages and drudgery; and it wore, for the second in which I saw it, the most desolate, hopeless expression I have ever seen. It struck me then that we are mistaken when we say that 'It isn't the same for them as it is for us,' and that people bred in the slums can imagine nothing but the slums. For what I saw in her face was not the ignorant suffering of an animal. She knew well enough what was happening to her - understood as well as I did how dreadful a destiny it was to be kneeling there in the bitter cold, on the slimy stones of a slum backyard, poking a stick up a foul drain-pipe."

Their work was of the time and from places in the north, viewed through a highly personal lens. Orwells work, at least, is consciously political, appealing to the viewer or the reader to think again. Few writers in modern times, only matched perhaps by DH Lawrence and Dickens before him perhaps,  provided the revolution required to challenge the fixed-thinking of the times on working classes.