Creativity is Messy
If you try to cleanup things up as soon as you get started, true creativity won’t happen. Figuratively, a blank canvas may be overwhelming or scary. Maybe some framework for innovation will help you get started but if there is too much process too soon, the creative juices will never start flowing or they will just dry up before the creation is barely started. Creation is for personal expression not a job some authority has given you. Social pressure, judgement, shame does not facilitate original thought or new productivity. In a group you need a safe space for brainstorming. Participants need to feel accepted, confortable, and free. Self-consciousness and judgement doesn’t work, even in your own mind. There are principles for innovation but not rules that could restrict the creative process. You may have heard “coloring without lines” as opposed to coloring books or painting-by-numbers.. Don’t confuse the developing of skills with creativity. Yes, improving skills, can provide enhanced tools for creative expression but don’t confuse practicing skills with original creativity. Whether it’s the first sentence in a paragraph, the first sketch line on paper, or brush stroke on a canvas, just keep adding to what you started at least until it takes a creative form. When your getting started, adding is better than revising, or junking it and starting over. Give yourself sufficient chance to get things flowing. The forgoing thoughts are absolutely not only related to writing, photogrpahy, performing, or fine art.
“Actually, creativity is the mental capacity to generate novel and useful ideas, more or less. It isn’t about art or design, writing or music. Creativity is, at its core, about ideas and how we develop, understand, and communicate them. Not just in terms of the arts, but in every realm of thinking and work.”
Tanner Christensen, Creativity Is Not Art
