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The Call to be Creative
I’ll bet a bunch of people reading this title will say to themselves (if you got this far in the post), “There’s no point in reading it 
because I’m not creative.”
You’re wrong.
Every one of us was born to be creative. But I understand the motivation to believe that you’re not.
For most of my life I thought I was not a creative person. I didn’t invent things. I was not a great painter. I didn’t turn the world upside down with my incredibly brilliant ideas.
So, I described myself as a person who wasn’t creative. At all. And of course, the more I said I wasn’t creative, guess what? I was only marginally creative. In spite of my denial, though, that tiny seed of creativity sprouted. And over time I stopped denying I was creative and I became even more creative.
So, if we were designed to be creative, why do we deny that we are? The reasons abound. First, we’re insecure. We think that, even if we try to create, we’ll fail. Or our creations will be ugly. Or insignificant. Or trite. (The list is a long one.)
Or we’ve been told we’re not creative or smart.
Or we compare our creative talents to other people and feel we’ll never match up.
If these descriptions sound like you, cut it out!
When I say you were designed to be creative, I mean it. You are divinely encouraged to continue the creation that G-d began. Insecurity or laziness doesn’t get you off the hook. Plus, not creating is really a drag.
So, let’s start this self-reflection all over again. Let’s assume that you are creative, that you must be creative because G-d believed that you were capable of continuing his creation. Even if you’re not religious, your brain is designed to take you in creative directions.
Next, stop saying you’re not creative. Never, ever say that again. Because it’s simply not true.
Then you can start expanding your view of how your creativity is uniquely designed for you. For example, I started looking around at all the beauty I’ve created. Are they masterpieces? No. Who cares? They are beautiful and fill my heart and mind with deep satisfaction and joy. What are the creative things I do? For one, I write. I’m no Ernest Hemingway but I love to write. I’m much encouraged that some people like my writing, so I write more.
And my writing brought me to the challenging and delightful experience of writing two books with my friend, @iwe. Then we started to explore the Torah, and those times are remarkably creative, learning times.
I don’t want to forget my other creative experiences. I knit. Sort of. Well, I do, but with mixed results. But you can’t tell me that my lovely shawls and the baby booties I knitted were not creative acts. I raise orchids, a hobby I acquired from my late, beloved uncle. Watching them grow, pruning them, fertilizing them and talking to them is a creative activity and reminds me of him.
I listen. I try to be present when I listen to others. The way I listen, respond to them (or not) is a creative action.
So that’s enough lecturing, ah, description of the ways I’m creative.
Why do I say we are “called to be creative”?
Because our world demands our creativity! We must become engaged and solve problems in creative ways. Our friends need us. Our communities need us. Our country needs us. We are called in so many ways to feed our creative juices in ways that will not only solve problems, but will also heal hearts, mend souls and provide new ways of thinking. There are limitless ways to pursue the creative process.
So, I hope that you will explore your own creativity.
Even better, share you own creative actions, however small, in this post; you can inspire others to dip their toes in the creative stream and join the rest of us. Be assured that no one is in a position to judge what you call creative.
So tell us, how are you creative?
Published in Culture
I think the urge to create is baked into the human soul. If someone does not create they are not fully alive.
The real barrier to creativity is a combination of a fear of failure and a fear of being “bad” at something. You have to be willing to pay the learning curve cost of doing a bad or poor job the first time you create something. I see it in a lot of ship modelers who, once they master one technique are unwilling to expand beyond it because it may not be as good as what they are comfortable doing.
Do Not Comment on the graphics’ quotation attribution here. If you do, it’s all we will talk about and we will never discuss Susan’s interesting idea.
Write your own article.
I am not speaking to condemn you all. Think of me as a recovering Compulsive Fact-Checker, and imagine that this is a meeting of Compulsive Fact-Checkers Anonymous, and I am encouraging you, Brother Reader, to stay on the wagon throughout the Conversation that is about to begin. This Conversation on Susan’s subject. Nothing else.
If you promise to be good, I will give you just one innocent nip from the hip flask that I just happen to have found in my pocket:
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/03/02/fun/
Print it off, read it, memorize it, and then swallow it and do not tell anyone anything about it.
You are such a dear man, @markcamp. Thank you for trying to rescue me and the post. Problem fixed!
O m’gosh, Susan. LOL!
If the
SovietsDemocrats win, you can get a job in the new Dept. of Propaganda.Once again, @susanquinn, you manage to write something that hits me right where I live.
When I was younger, I was relentlessly creating things. I started making up tunes on the piano when I was about five years old. I was always drawing pictures, on any scrap of paper or blank margin I could find. As a teenager I began writing absurd, fragmentary fiction, turning to the typewriter whenever I was bored. I made films, experimenting with animation, and eventually moved on to videotaped comedy skits I produced with friends. I wrote a play that was produced in a local drama festival (I won the third-place playwriting award!). Then, in college, I started writing and recording songs, eventually recording several hundred of them and putting together several albums for friends and family.
But it all stopped. I stopped drawing after high school. I abandoned my filmmaking interest in college. I stopped writing fiction after I graduated. And I pretty much set music aside after my daughter was born. My only significant “creative” output during the last fifteen or twenty years has been a journal that I have never given up, and occasional blogging (or Ricochet posting). I still have much of my old creative output, boxes of drawings and writings going back to the ’70s, and I sometimes look through it and laugh and wonder where it all came from.
For a long time, I continued to define myself as a creative person, and assumed that I would eventually get back to those old hobbies. But eventually I started to ask myself whether I had any right to call myself a creative person if I don’t create. Maybe that was someone I used to be, but not who I am now. That was fine, I told myself; not everyone is creative, so I don’t have to be.
I tried to be OK with that, but the thing is, I still feel like it’s part of me. I think you’re right: we all must feel that drive in some way. Have you ever met a child who didn’t draw, and sing, and dance, and build stuff out of Legos and Play-doh? It’s there from the start, and it’s just a question of whether other stuff pushes it aside, if we let it.
Creativity, for me, always felt like my best shot at immortality: the more I create, the more of myself I express in a way that will outlive me. It troubles me to think that I might reach the end of my life with nothing to show for much of it.
A little over a year ago I bought a new digial piano and set it up in my office. It’s right there all the time, so it’s fairly effortless for me to sit down and play. And I have been starting to make up tunes again, like I did when I was five.
Who knew! I’m a woman of many creative talents!
@bartholomewxerxesogilviejr, even your comments are beautifully written. Actually what we leave behind can’t always be seen or measured: things we do, people whose lives we touch through our creativity. So you might consider how you define creativity for yourself; you might want to expand your perspective. For example, my husband decided to cook our dinners. At this point, he has fun experimenting with the recipes. That’s creative, I think. (Plus I don’t have to cook, unless he needs a sous chef!)
That is so wonderful! Once you start those juices going, more will flow from them. Keep going! Have fun!
Let me also suggest that you noticed this post because you were supposed to. Just sayin’. . .
I wish I had the time and mental energy to dust off the legos, or work on fiction again. I have recently resurrected one old hobby, though: photography. Had to set that aside years ago when broke – I couldn’t afford the film and developing. And thank goodness for Ricochet – an outlet for writing. This has to be my favorite photo from the last couple of months:
A RenFair captured in a single photo
Doing the exact same thing in the exact same spot for less money.
Sometimes you have to experiment to find out where your creativity lies. I didn’t know I could write until a friend challenged me to do so. Here I am years later, and I just published my tenth novel on Amazon . . .
Way to go, @stad. I knew you wrote novels, but ten?
Well, one is actually a collection of short stories, but yes . . .
Just before my daughter was born (more than two decades ago!) I was out for dinner with my brother, and I was having an early version of this conversation with him. I lamented the fact that I didn’t seem to have much time for creativity anymore, and that bothered me.
His replied that I was about to start raising a child, and that there could hardly be anything more creative than that. He was right, of course, and when I take a broader perspective I can find some comfort. I am lucky enough that even my day job affords me the opportunity for creativity, of a sort: writing a clever Python script to automate a documentation build might not have the romance of composing music or writing fiction, but it can be as satisfying.
I feel so … manipulated…
You crack me up!! Yes, your brother was right! We have all kinds of opportunities to be creative, in many places in our lives! You can’t beat creative satisfaction. [I’m still sitting here grinning . . . ]
I’ve been struggling to get started again. I’m overwhelmed most of the time. Shedding that inner critic is difficult. In some ways, I envy my kids because they create so naturally. Most of the time, I try to use my creativity to cope with the pain. It gets monotonous and discouraging.
I hope it’s okay to offer a suggestion, @shaunahunt. How about just writing down an idea on a piece of paper and putting it aside: you’ve just started! Another time jot down another idea, related or not; you can even do it on another piece of paper and throw the pieces in a file folder. Sometimes, as the saying goes, we anticipate having to swallow the elephant in one bite. Yet just having a peanut or two is just fine. I know you deal with a lot of pain; the pressure you’re putting on yourself probably isn’t helping. Anyway, good luck!
On behalf of the Ricochet Sub-Committee of Music Lovers: YaHOOO! Post us a chart of something you write that you think might be ok. Any format is ok; we’ll figure it out.
(Sometimes I just jot down numbers: 1 for Do, 2 for Re, and so on. I put “.” for beats (time values). So Happy Birthday would be “5 . 5 6 . . 5 . . 8 . . 7 . . . . .”)
Edith Schaeffer wrote The Hidden Art of Homemaking in 1973, arguing that art, creativity, was not the monopoly of professional artists, but is an expression of our nature, made in the image of our creative Creator.
My creative impulses have run mostly to consumable and imbibable art, if you will. Back from the newly unified Germany, with a quick year in Korea, I decided American beer of the early 1990s just was not acceptable. I determined to make my own Bavarian beers and bought The Joy of Homebrewing, with its tag line “Relax and have a homebrew!” Sure, the lid blew off my primary fermentation container, but it turned out delicious and I hardly bought a beer for the next decade. More recently, I aged various spirits in a small barrel, with generally good results. Then I got into infusing vodkas, with everything from Russian Caravan tea to fruit to herbs.
Of course, man cannot live on beer alone, and I hated institutional cafeteria food, so I started cooking in earnest as soon as I left home. Crepes, wok, baking, slow cooking, grilling, steaming, some from my mothers’ 3X5 card collection of recipes, some from a few cookbooks, and some from clipping over the years. I still have the clippings for a flaky pie crust and for two very different desserts: flourless chocolate cake and poached pears with raspberry sauce.
My first big purchase as an adult, after a good used car, was a manual 35mm camera with a decent aspherical wide to zoom lens. It survived bouncing around in my M113 tracked vehicle, a jeep, and early HMMWVs (Humvee). I have a handful of shots that were good enough to blow up and frame. With the advent of cell phone cameras, I put my digital 35mm in a closet until a Ricochet member wrote an inspiring piece on the current state of stock photography, that encouraged me to dust off the DSLR, recharge the battery, and go out to capture events that a cell phone camera just cannot grab.
Thank you so much! That’s a great idea.
This is a pivot point for something I thought of as I read this post: Statists hate creativity. Creativity is the antithesis of control — particularly thought control. Propaganda is not creativity, it is the means by which the creative impulse is controlled and channeled into the hive mind. It is also why eventually propaganda fails. The creative juices are ultimately drained from the creatives involved in propaganda and thus it becomes tired and predictable and loses power over that inextinguishable human trait — individual thought. If you have individual thought you are “creative” whether it is expressed in ways that others would label it so.
Wow! I knew you were talented, but what mastery! Outstanding, Clifford!
Exactly! So true. Thanks, Rodin. All the more reason to keep our creativity flowing.
Also, I drink a lot of beer. That makes it hard not to be creative . . .
I go through different runs of creativity. The most consistent of which has been my cooking. I do the majority of cooking in our house, mainly because I love to eat but also because I enjoy it. I rarely use recipes and even when I do they’re more for inspiration instead of a strict roadmap.
Even in my cooking though I go through periods where I feel a lack of creativity. After a few days my appetite returns and with it my creativity.
My husband follows recipes, now that he usually cooks dinner, but more and more he’s experimenting as he learns “what works”–seasonings and other ingredients that blend well. He’s having a great time. Good for you, @prestonstorm!
You are just composing music with a much more impact
I have some weird hobbies that revolve around art/creativity.
I have a friend who collects Marvel figures and he commissions custom figures from me which requires a lot of sculpting and painting. I’ve been doing it for a while now and have bene able to make quite a few bucks on the side. I’m also working on my own project. I picked up a set of Lewis Marx Co. US President figurines from the 50’s and I’ve been painting those. The originals were mass-produced toys from half a century ago, so you can imagine the painting wasn’t exactly precise. However, the sculpts are actually quite good and with some painting know-how, they look really nice. I managed to pick up custom 3D-printed versions of all of the post-50’s presidents that Lewis Marx Co. never made, right through Trump, and I’m painting those as well. 3D printing is a skill I really want to learn.
Here’s a couple I’ve completed, Chap Stick for size comparison:
Awesome! The painting on them is beautiful! You must need a lot of patience to do it well. Especially those gold buttons! Thanks, @jamessalerno.
From time to time, I write fanfiction based on actual Ricochet personalities, as if you all were characters in an old time radio show. Usually, they’re just written, not performed, so they’re named Ricochet Silent Radio. But here’s one we recorded in 2017, Who Killed Invisible Television.
Does it have Kubrick-like levels of perfection? Obviously, no, but it was fun.
You all do a fabulous job with these plays, @garymcvey. It must be a huge amount of work, but we all benefit from reading them. So anything else coming up soon?