I’ve been writing and talking to my students about what it actually means to be creative. The trouble with defining creativity (actually with defining anything but creativity in particular) is that it’s slippery. As soon as you try to pin it down it morphs into something else. There are several well researched definitions – Rob Pope’s introduction to his book called Creativity gives a fascinating history – and my students came up with their own versions recently. Some of them suggested it was a kind of divine gift, reminding me of Julia Cameron and Natalie Goldberg‘s work. Some of them suggested that we’re born with it; others that we have to learn it. At least one person said that creativity is an evolutionary advantage, enabling us (and animals) to make tools and use them flexibly.
We talked about how creativity might be about unlearning: that we need to accept that we’ve suppressed the urge to be creative somehow, and perhaps that came in part from our education or upbringing. It’s interesting that creativity is also born out of constraint – it’s not only thought of as a kind of total freedom or permission to daydream and imagine. It helps to have a pattern, a rule, a game, a method, a structure and to play within it.
I also spoke about that moment when your mind switches from rational mode into creative mode: try singing or dancing on your own, or reading a book where the writer plays with language – I suggested Beloved to my students – or playing an instrument, or getting your hands in some clay. When you do that you can feel a change, a kind of release: we could call that feeling creativity.
But does knowing that provide any practical advice for becoming more creative, or for sitting down at your desk, or in the park, or a cafe, or wherever you are and actually writing something? I suggested to my students – like I suggested in a recent article on Creative Learning – that it’s possible to think ok, last time I was creative, what did I do? Asking that question allows us to attempt to break down what being creative means on a personal level. I also suggested that wandering, dreaming, contemplating time, walking time, was part of the writer’s life – a part that (so called) non-creative people won’t understand. Julia Cameron talks about artists’ dates and I mean something similar here.
We need to get to a point where we can write without editing, without expecting to show what we produce to a reader, without crossing out, without caring about the product, only caring about the process of the writing itself, without even attempting to keep the words on the lines or to be neat or to spell correctly. Later on go back, read over what you have, type it, rewrite it, spell correctly, order it, structure it, make it tell the story you want it to – perhaps over several drafts. But at first, let yourself breathe and try simply moving your pen across the page.
Here’s the article I wrote recently on creative learning that appeared in ‘Creative Teaching and Learning Magazine’.