04
May
Creativity and me
I am not a creative person. A number of people insist to me that I am and will even cite turning my room into a cave as an example, but they fail to persuade me.
A creative person is not someone who has the occasional neat idea. A creative person is someone who takes those neat ideas and expresses that idea in some medium. The implementation doesn’t have to be good, quality of the implementation is a technical skill that can be learned by anyone. Of course, how that skill is applied will very from person to person like finger prints, but the basic skills of working in a given medium are learnable.
In playing jazz I can’t improvise. I can’t think of a story line to write. I can’t think of something to draw.
Sure, I have the occasional idea. Sometimes I put enough dots on a piece of paper that I can see a shape and put more dots in to make the shape more noticable. I have on a handful of occasions thought of fun ways to wrap gifts. I have even made a few things from chicken wire. That doesn’t make me creative though. Creative people do this realization of their ideas on a regular basis. Not that they realize all of their ideas, but their density of idea realization is quite high. When one idea is completed, there is another one waiting to get started.
I can perform “creative” tasks given directions, but I’m not the one to come up with those directions or what to make.