Last night I felt a spark of creativity. Sadly I had nothing to direct it to. On the other hand, I felt like spending some quality time with Matt. Putting one and one together, I enthusiastically suggested: “Let’s do something creative together, anything you like: designing a board game, planning the perfect murder, a new clothing line… Anything goes, as long as it’s creative and together with you…”
Thinking I had just uttered my best plan ever, I expected a happy face and a never-ending list of ideas from Matt. But no such thing. Instead Matt’s face dropped.
“You know I’m not creative…” he began to whine.
“What nonsense, everybody is creative!”
“Not me, I’m not.”
“But I thought you enjoyed solving problems and such. You like being creative at the office, doing your ‘managing-the-department’-things…”
“That’s different.”
“What a ridiculous excuse…”
Turned out that he used to spent ages thinking about what subject to choose for school presentations, resulting in only just (or not at all) enough time to actually prepare, thus schoolboy Matt freezed more than once in front of the class during tragically bad presentations, humiliation on all sides. Trauma, trauma, trauma. Poor boy. And now it was me and my spare evening that had to pay for it. In the end we did decide to think up all that was needed to create the perfect cat’s paradise. It was a relatively clear and predefined creative task and therefore acceptable in Matt’s eyes. And it was rather nice.
However, it did make me think. Is creativity really such a gift? Either you have it or you don’t? Or is it, to some degree, something one can learn?
The way I see it, it can be modelled into a quadrant. One of the axes is for gift or no gift, the other for skills or no skills. This results in four kinds of people per specific discipline of creativity: those having the skills but not the gift, those having the gift but not the skills, those that have them both and those that have none at all. I suppose every artist and craftsman, idol and dreamer could be put in any of those four boxes.
Still, I believe somebody might have the gift, but without learning skills, it’s rather difficult to do something wonderful with it. If that wasn’t the case then where would all the Art Academies be? But then the other way around is also true. If you feel you just can’t perform, because you simply don’t have it in you, I suppose the only way to at least prevent yourself from freezing when presented with a creative task, is to learn a bit of skills.
Hmmm…
And that’s where I got stuck writing this column. I shut down my laptop and decided that I needed to talk with Matt just a bit more before finalizing my thoughts on the subject.
“Honey, my thoughts are jammed on this, what do you think about the matter?”
“Well, it’s not that I’m not creative at all. When it’s already clear what I’m supposed to create then it’s just another puzzle to solve. As long as I don’t have to come up with the initial idea then I’m fine…”
“So maybe I should rename ‘the gift’ and ‘the skills’ to ‘the spark of the idea’ and ‘the execution’?”
“Why don’t you look some things up on the web? See what others think about the subject?”
Subserviently, I did.
According to Wikipedia hundreds of different kind of thinkers have studied theories about creativity for centuries. Needless to say, the assumption I could grasp the concept of creativity in one single column was a bit farfetched.
“Why don’t you ask your readers? Two heads know more than one…” Matt voices his next solution.
And thus, Matt’s excellent skills in dealing with problems, trouble and issues come to rescue me from my own piece of text, for which I had the gift, the spark of the idea, to come up with in the first place, but for which I appear to lack the skills for a definitive execution. There could have been no better and no more ironic way to illustrate our differences concerning creativity.
My beloved readers, how about you? Are you more of an ideas generating bubble of thoughts or a skilled artisan when it comes to your job, spare time or approach to problems? And how would you define the concept of creativity?
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I think (sitting on the fence here) that it’s a bit of both. As a nipper, my favourite thing in all the world to do was to sit on my own and draw. I’d sit in front of my favourite teddy, and `hey presto!’ it would appear on the sheet of paper in front of me - courtesy of a few pencils or paint. My (twin) bro would often try to join in (I guess he’d see how much fun I got from sitting quietly by myself and drawing) but just couldnt - “I can see what I need to draw” he’d whine, “I just cant get it from there (gesturing to object he’s trying to draw) to here!” (gesturing to sheet of white paper in front of him ) I’d of course just look at him as if drawing was the easiest thing in the world and chortle a bit to myself. However, my drawing gift was definitely improved by the amount of, and practice at, drawing I did, and much like a skill one acquires through doggedly repeating a task over and over again, I would draw at regular intervals (just because I loved to) which improved my ability all the time. So, in essence, I’d say that my creativity probably started off as a `bare bones’ type gift, but through time and effort it became honed in to a skill. If that makes sense.
Left by London-Lass on Tuesday, April 15th, 2008