Sometimes I read analyses of creativity. My experience is that they don’t help people be creative.
Reading Masters and Johnson is informative about sex. It will not give you the experience of an ecstatic act of love. Studying diagrams of waltz movements tells us what steps we should take. It doesn’t give us the feeling of a lovely dance. Reading instructions about improving your golf swing will not give you the fine feeling of a good drive.
The left brain can tell us about the right brain, but it isn’t using the right brain.
In short, intellectualizing about creativity doesn’t help. The intellect is the wrong tool.
If you feel momentarily out of touch with your creative mind, what do you do?
- Stick straws up your nose, tape a bottle cap to your face, and pretend you’re a walrus.
- Paint Easter eggs.
- Write nonsense rhymes.
- Go to a restaurant, watch people at a table beyond your hearing, and write their dialogue.
- Draw with colored pencils, even if (like me) you can’t draw.
- Sit at the piano and, without thought or planning, quickly make up a melody.
- Put on Louis Armstrong and dance around the room with an imaginary partner.
- Go to the Salvation Army and take a picture of an old shoe. Now write the life story of the person who wore the shoe.
- Oh, and most important, simply write until you feel your creative juices begin to flow. Let it happen and it will.
Do any thing, but …
- Ask yourself why you’re not feeling creative.
- Doubt yourself for not being creative that moment.
- Try to figure out why you aren’t.
- Read someone’s analysis of what creativity is. Especially a scholar’s.
Summary: Don’t think about it—do it.
About Meredith and Win Blevins
