On Creativity

Last month a young woman told me she was pursuing a PhD in children’s literature instead of an MFA because she “wasn’t creative enough” to write fiction. She reminded me of a time when I thought I wasn’t creative enough. A time when I preferred orderliness to messiness. A time when I was good at regurgitating facts and taking tests. A time when I didn’t understand or appreciate the nonlinear nature of the creative process—a process that isn’t easy to judge with an alphabetical grade: A minus, B plus.

Creativity is messy. It involves trial-and-error. Play. Experimentation. En route to the finished piece, a lot of work product gets thrown out. A whole lot—volumes more than what appears in the final manuscript, the final painting, the final musical score. The creative process is time-consuming and all-encompassing and often a singular activity, and I now pour hours of myself into it every week. It’s the most rewarding process I know. To create something from nothing is life-affirming and life-changing.

Although the goal might be the finished product—the book, the painting, the musical score, the play—the joy is in the process, itself. There are lots of books out there about embracing the process. The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron is one I’d recommend. When I read it, I thought some of her suggested activities sounded lame, but I did them, anyway, and the results surprised me. The activities loosened me up. My writing started to flow. It wasn’t polished writing, but at least it was flowing. Later I would figure out how to polish it.

When a person tells me she is not creative enough, I don’t buy it. We’re born to create. People who think they’re not creative enough probably have too strong of an internal editor or critic wagging a finger at them. Too much of a need to please some sort of parental figure or teacher. When we let go of that need to please and create for the sake of creativity, we discover infinite possibilities within. As Annie Dillard reminds us, such things “fill from behind, from beneath, like well water.”