Two childhood memories:
One: “Our family is not creative!” I remember being told this in response to my frustration with my ineptitude with paints and pencils.* I’m sure the intention was to encourage and let me know that I was not alone – that it was not important. But the effect was that I grew up believing that I could produce nothing of any worth, even to myself, in the creative line. To this day, I have a visceral pit-of-the-stomach reaction to any suggestion that I should express myself through any artistic medium.
Two: “Write a story – it can be about anything at all, let your imagination run wild!” said my English teacher. Imagination was something else I knew I didn’t have, and any attempt to write a story led me into an inescapable paradox: For every idea in my head of a storyline or character, I knew its source in something else I’d seen or read. This meant it had to be rejected as not a product of my imagination and thus unsuitable for inclusion in ‘my’ story. But I didn’t have any other ideas. Hence story-writing was impossible.
In the intervening years I’ve seen how my wife teaches primary school children to write stories. They work from existing stories, imitating, deliberately using them as inspiration for their own stories. I wish I’d been given this model when I was young, to displace my exclusively ex nihilo understanding of creativity.
I’ve ‘created’ in this way all along, when I play the piano. People have heard me play and commented on my creativity, but internally I rejected this because I knew where the phrases that I played came from and how I’d practiced them. ‘Creativity’ still had to be an event of creating something out of nothing in the moment.
Now, just recently, I saw a quote by John Updike circulating on the internet. Tracking its source down (with some help from Nigel Rees of ‘Quote… Unquote’ fame) it seems Updike said this in 1968, which means that it could have changed my understanding of creativity at any point in my life. In a University of Texas seminar, Updike is quoted as saying:
‘Creativity is merely a plus name for regular activity; the ditchdigger, dentist, and artist go about their tasks in much the same way and any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it better.‘
There are lots of things that I’ve done which I’ve cared about doing better, including baking bread, writing essays, car driving, tracing electrical faults, raising children (in no particular order of importance). So possibly I’m more creative than I ever thought possible!
*This may not have been what was actually said, but it’s what I heard and internalised.
Thank you