Creativity and the thinking that gets in the way.
As you’ll see from the about section of this website, writing fiction was something I wanted to do for years before I actually began having a go. Here and there I made a few notes or tried to plot out a story or come up with characters, but I never got as far as actually writing. My memory may be hazy, but it feels as if the change from not writing to writing happened overnight. This change largely, if not completely, came about from a shift in perspective and it’s only in hindsight that I can see how important that shift was.
As is common in contemporary Western culture, I had come to learn of creativity as something people ‘did’. From this vantage point, I looked out at a world where (other) people spent time ‘being creative’ by taking part in specific acts of creativity, be that drawing, painting, dancing, writing, cooking, and so on. However, just before I began my first book, and at some indefinable point, I came to understand creativity as something human beings are.
This might sound like a small distinction, but the difference was seismic. I saw that human beings spend almost all of their waking hours narrating a story of their experience to themselves. This story is sometimes in the form of words (inside our heads / spoken to others) and it’s sometimes in the form of silent assumptions. Either way, it is something we are both creating and holding in place through continual re-creation, and which is then expressed through our behaviour. In a sense, creativity is not so different to, say, breathing: we breathe all day long, but most of the time we don’t notice we’re doing it. And, in the same way that breathing is a flow of energy, human beings are a continuous conduit of creativity. We can’t be a human being without this flow of creativity.
The impact of this goes way beyond writing but, for me, as an aspiring fiction writer, one consequence was that the part of my story in which ‘other people had permission to write fiction while I did not’ fell away and it made sense to just … write.
As mentioned above, this wasn’t something I was conscious of at the time; I didn’t actively make the choice to write, I simply found myself writing. This change set in motion a whole other unfolding for me around what stories are and how they come into being, which is something I will cover in a future post.
The reason for writing this piece now is not to suggest that any aspiring fiction writers need to see what I saw, but to show how a change in understanding can have such a profound impact on what makes sense to us and, by extension, how we act, and what seems possible. For me, the possibilities around writing leapt from tiny to expansive overnight and, best of all, it felt nothing but ordinary.