Three Lessons In Creativity
Creativity Lessons
If you would have asked me about a year ago if I was creative or not I would’ve said absolutely not! Fast forward to today, if you ask me the same question, I would say ‘yes’ without hesitation. If I didn’t have a creative streak in me, I wouldn’t have started my blog and I wouldn’t continue to write online.
Here are three of the biggest lessons I’ve learnt about creativity through writing…
Creativity Can Be Boring
Creativity, most of the time is actually very mundane and not very glamorous at all. Robert Greene puts it perfectly, he says ‘Creativity is a function of the previous work you put in. If you put a lot of hours into thinking and researching and reading, hour after hour — a very tedious process — creativity will come to you’. The more time and effort you put into your work, like the endless hours you spend reading and researching, the more creative you’ll be. If you’re constantly surrounding yourself with good quality content, you can’t help but become more creative. Robert has gone on record saying that he reads 300–400 books as part of his research process, before he beings writing his books. We can’t even fathom how boring that must get!
Creativity Is Stolen
Creativity doesn’t come out of thin air, creativity is stolen from other people. Nothing is ever totally original, everything is created from what came before. Creative work is basically just a big mish mash of different ideas from other people’s work which is then formed into your own.
I love the quote from Marshall Mcluhan regarding writing books. He says, ‘A successful book cannot venture to be more than ten percent new’. For example, this post I’m writing now is being created by stealing other bits and pieces from other people’s work i.e. books, blogs, articles etc. It’s just the way creativity works. Is it wrong to do so? No. It’s a crucial part of the creative process.
If we don’t learn how to take ideas from others, it’s so much more difficult to produce your own work. Salvador Dali, the great artist, puts it perfectly when he said ‘Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing’. From personal experience the more I read and research, the more ideas I’m able to take away the better my writing becomes.
Stay In The Groove
In Steal Like An Artist, Austin Kleon says ‘You have to stay in the groove, when you get out of the groove, you start to dread the work because you know it’s going to suck for a while — it’s going to suck until you get into the flow’. Once you get out of the groove of doing creative work, it’s difficult to pull yourself back and establish the groove again. Staying in the groove doesn’t necessarily mean spending hours on end every day working, it means slowly chipping away and trying to be as consistent with your work as possible. Whether this means working for five minutes a day, or five hours a day, it doesn’t matter, you do what you can when you can to stay in the groove. The most important thing is doing what you can when you can.
I’m no expert in creativity, I’m just sharing the lessons I have learnt over the past nine months or so as a new writing hobbyist. Hopefully these lessons can help you out with your creative endeavours — or your life in general.
