What Is Creativity, Anyway
In the last article we talked about the fact that you are probably far more creative than you think you are. That’s all very well, but it raises a fairly obvious question. What exactly do we mean by creativity? Ask ten people and you could easily get ten different answers. Painting a picture? Writing a novel? Composing music? Inventing something? Coming up with a brilliant new business idea? Yes, all of those involve creativity, but I think they only tell us part of the story.
We tend to associate creativity with things that are obviously creative because they are easy to recognise. We can see the painting, read the book, listen to the music or admire the design. But creativity is much bigger than the things we traditionally label as creative. In fact, I would go so far as to say that many of the most creative things you have done in your life have probably never been recognised as creativity at all.
Perhaps We Make Creativity Too Complicated
There are plenty of definitions of creativity around. Some are quite simple and others seem to require a degree in psychology before you can understand them. We don’t need to make things that complicated. For the purposes of our journey together, I would like you to think of creativity as the ability to imagine something that doesn’t exist and find a way to make it real.
Notice that I haven’t said it has to be something completely original, brilliant or revolutionary. We’ll come back to originality later because that’s an interesting subject in itself. For now, the important part is the journey between imagination and reality. Something occurs to you, you think about it, play around with it, perhaps change it half a dozen times and eventually something exists that didn’t exist before. That’s creativity at work.
You’ve Probably Been Doing It for Years
Think about the last time you had to solve a problem, first you discovered that the obvious solution wasn’t going to work. What did you do? I doubt you simply sat there indefinitely waiting for somebody to rescue you. You probably tried something else. Maybe you improvised, borrowed an idea from somewhere completely unrelated or tried something that seemed slightly ridiculous at first but turned out to work rather well.
I’ve had plenty of occasions when I’ve been trying to do something on a computer and the software simply refuses to cooperate. You can spend ages looking for the “correct” way to do it or you can sometimes find another route to the same result. It’s known as a “Workaround” It may not be elegant, and it may not be the way the manual says you should do it, but if it works, you’ve solved the problem. You have looked at the situation as it is and imagined another possibility.
We do things like this all the time without attaching the word creativity to them. Perhaps you’ve worked out how to repair something without having exactly the right part. Maybe you’ve found a better way of organising something or adapted a recipe because one of the ingredients wasn’t in the cupboard. These aren’t likely to win you an award for creative achievement, but the same basic process is taking place.
Creativity Isn’t Just About Making Things
Creating doesn’t necessarily mean producing an object. You can create an experience, an atmosphere, a solution or a new way of doing something. Think about somebody organising a surprise birthday party. They imagine what would make the occasion special, choose the place, food, music and decorations, perhaps organise a few surprises and bring everything together. Individually, none of those things may be particularly original, but together they create an experience that didn’t exist before.
You can create a story, a joke, a garden, a game, a new routine or a different way of doing an old job. You might create a more welcoming room simply by moving the furniture around. You could create a better way of explaining something that somebody has struggled to understand. You can even create a conversation by asking a question that takes it somewhere neither person expected.|
Once you start looking at creativity this way, it becomes surprisingly difficult to get through an ordinary day without using some of it.
But Surely It Has to Be Original?
This is where people can frighten themselves away from creativity. They have an idea and almost immediately think, “Somebody has probably done that before.” Well, they probably have. There are billions of us on this planet, and we’ve been creating things for a very long time, so, unless you are a nuclear physicist or an unrecognised genius, the chances of having an idea that bears absolutely no resemblance to anything anybody has ever thought of before are probably fairly slim.
Imagine telling a novelist that they can’t write about love because somebody has already done it. They might have a bit of trouble finding another subject. Or imagine telling a cook that they can’t create a new recipe because all the ingredients have already been used. We don’t apply that standard to other people’s creativity, so why should we apply it to our own?
Creativity doesn’t necessarily mean creating something from nothing. Very often we create by combining things that already exist in a way that is new to us. We adapt something, rearrange it, improve it, add something, remove something or use it for a purpose its original creator may never have considered. Sometimes all that is required is the willingness to ask, “What would happen if I did it this way instead?”
Your Experiences Are Part of What You Create
There’s another reason I don’t think you should worry too much about whether somebody has had your idea before. Nobody else has arrived at this particular moment with precisely your collection of experiences. You’ve read different things, met different people, made different mistakes, learned different lessons, developed different interests and noticed different things along the way.
Give ten writers the opening sentence of a story and ask them to finish it. I doubt you’ll get ten identical stories. Give ten photographers a camera and send them into the same town for an afternoon and they won’t all come back with the same photographs. They have been given the same starting point, but each will notice different things and make different choices.
The same applies to you. An idea doesn’t exist in isolation. You bring yourself to it, and your experiences, knowledge, interests and personality all have an influence on what eventually emerges. That doesn’t mean everything you create will automatically be unique, but it does mean you have something of your own to contribute.
Creativity Needs Something to Work With
There’s another myth worth getting out of the way. Creative people don’t necessarily spend their lives sitting around waiting for magnificent ideas to suddenly appear. Perhaps some do, but I wouldn’t recommend it as a particularly reliable strategy. Creativity needs something to work with, and fortunately the world provides us with an almost unlimited supply of raw material.
Everything you see, hear, read, experience, learn and wonder about gives your imagination something to work with. A conversation can spark an idea and so can a mistake. A problem certainly can. Something that irritates you might have you wondering whether there is a better way. A book can send your thoughts in a completely unexpected direction, or you might see somebody doing something and think, “That’s clever, but wouldn’t it be even better if…”
There it is again. That little “What if?” we met in the previous article. It’s such a simple question, but it has probably been responsible for an extraordinary amount of human creativity.
Creativity Isn’t Always Comfortable
There is a temptation to imagine creativity as a wonderfully pleasant process where ideas flow effortlessly and everything falls neatly into place. Sometimes it can be, when that happens enjoy it, but usually it can be “a bit of a challenge” otherwise known as a, expletive! nuisance. An idea won’t quite work. Something that seemed brilliant yesterday looks decidedly ordinary this morning. You reach a point where you don’t know what comes next, and the temptation to abandon the whole thing can become very strong.
Then perhaps another possibility occurs to you. You change something, remove something or approach the problem from another direction and suddenly you’re moving again. If everything worked perfectly the first time there wouldn’t be much creating involved. You’d simply be following instructions.
I think that’s part of the enjoyment of creativity. You don’t always know exactly where you’re going to end up. You can have a destination in mind, certainly, but you’re allowed to explore a few interesting side roads along the way.
There Isn’t a Right Way to Be Creative
Before we go much further, I think this is worth saying. I’m not going to give you a formula and tell you that this is how creative people behave. Some people like structure while others prefer to wander around an idea and see where it takes them. Some need peace and quiet while others get their best ideas surrounded by noise and activity. One person may carefully develop an idea for weeks while somebody else suddenly thinks, “I’ll give this a go,” and starts immediately.
Neither approach is necessarily better. Over time we’ll experiment with different techniques and ways of encouraging creativity. Some you’ll enjoy and some you may find completely useless. That’s fine. Keep the ones that work for you and forget the ones that don’t. This is about developing your creativity, not teaching you to imitate somebody else’s.
So, What Is Creativity?
Perhaps we don’t need to make it any more complicated than this. You imagine something that isn’t there, explore the possibility and then do something with it. It might remain an experiment or eventually become something useful, beautiful, entertaining, interesting or simply enjoyable. It might be something only you ever see, or something you eventually share with thousands of people.
One day it might even become something you can sell, but let’s not rush there. At the moment we’re much more interested in discovering what happens when you give your imagination a little more room to play and start taking some of those thoughts and possibilities seriously.
After all, every creation has to begin somewhere. Before there is a finished book, painting, invention, product or anything else, there is something much less substantial. There is an idea, an image, a thought or perhaps just the faintest suggestion of a possibility inside somebody’s imagination.
So how does something that exists only in your imagination begin its journey towards becoming real?
That’s where we’ll go next.