What Does “Creative” Mean?

A long time ago but in this same galaxy, I had a college roommate. She and I once had an interesting conversation about creativity:

Roommate: I’m not creative.

Me: What do you mean you’re not creative?

Roommate: I can’t draw like you. Or write.

Me: That’s not true. You are, too, creative. You do draw and write.

Roommate: But not well. Not like you. I’m not creative.

Me (a little frustrated): That doesn’t mean anything. You don’t have to draw or write to be creative. That isn’t what “creative” means. Your (sociology) work is creative, too.

Roommate: Right…

I, as my nineteen- or twenty-year-old self, couldn’t quite find the words to explain to my roommate that she was creative. We carried on with our work, she working through some sort of statistical analysis of a people group in a third-world country and me figuring out what exactly an invisible line drawing was supposed to be and look like. While I remained convinced that she was creative, she wasn’t, and I didn’t know how to change her mind.

I feel similarly when my youngest brother, who’s looking to become a coastal engineer with a focus on maintaining and improving coastlines, says he isn’t creative. I understand the impetus; he grew up with an older sister and brother who always had some sort of story in play whether it was one in which we were the actors or one in which our Legos or action figures bore the brunt of the tale. My younger brother and I were what is typically associated with the word “creative”: we worked with the arts. My youngest brother rarely did unless he was forced through a school assignment or was acting out whatever role we bestowed upon him. Thus, he began to associate “creative” with storytelling and art and to disassociate the term from himself and his skills, namely math and science.

When I listen to him talk about either of those fields, though, I hear the excitement build in his voice. I hear the fervor as he talks about some sort of machine he’s testing that could help prevent salt water from contaminating fresh. I want to punch him in the arm when he ruins yet another film for saying that the action sequence isn’t scientifically possible even as I’m amused by it: my brother is creative. He just doesn’t know it or can’t recognize it because he’s been lulled to sleep by stereotypical creativity. He sounds like me when I start to riff on literature or art or whatever else interests me. He is, too, creative.

“Creative,” to me, is a way of approaching the world. It isn’t necessarily tied to one field of study. It most certainly isn’t associated with the arts alone. “Creative” is about saying “I don’t know” and finding or being found by the answers once that space is opened. To be creative is to at once be a problem finder and a problem solver. “Creative” has more to do with being open to unexplored ways of thinking and seeing. It’s about developing a different perspective and identifying different problems rather than being content with devising solutions to already-proposed problems. Those problems may still need solutions, but sometimes the problems themselves need to be rethought. A creative brain goes after that. A creative brain needs that. It needs to be challenged, or it quickly tires or withers. It is at its most active when considering how a thing works and how to tweak that thing, and it doesn’t matter if the thing being explored is a rhyme scheme, the latest scientific discovery, or a new business model. Creativity is found in all those things. To find real solutions related to any of those things, creativity is required.

“Creative,” then, is a matter of perspective rather than of working within a certain field. To be creative, as Lia Purpura says in On Looking, is to “release a space, be a new pattern laid…[C]learing a space is like crafting a question.” But, oh, what questions when that shift in perspective occurs! They are amazing things. They are blow-your-mind things. They are “creative” because they ask a person to view the world differently. They ask that a person open his or her eyes a little wider so that he or she might see, might taste good and different things.

To put the answer in a different way, I turn to Wislawa Szymborska. While she uses the word “inspiration,” “creativity” or “creative” could be substituted easily:

[I]nspiration is not the exclusive privilege of poets or artists generally. There is, has been, will always be a certain group of people whom inspiration visits. It’s made up of all those who’ve consciously chosen their calling and do their job with love and imagination. It may include doctors, teachers, gardeners – I could list a hundred more professions. Their work becomes one continuous adventure as long as they manage to keep discovering new challenges in it. Difficulties and setbacks never quell their curiosity. A swarm of new questions emerges from every problem they solve. Whatever inspiration is, it’s borne from a continuous ‘I don’t know.’

…This is why I value that little phrase ‘I don’t know” so highly. It’s small, but it flies on mighty wings. It expands our lives to include the spaces within us as well as those outer expanses in which our tiny Earth hangs suspended. If Isaac Newton had never said to himself, ‘I don’t know,’ the apples in his little orchard might have dropped to the ground like hailstones and at best he would have stooped to pick them up and gobble them gusto.

To be creative is to clear a space. It’s to shift a thing. It’s to craft the question and to find answers not only to that question but also to questions raised by those very answers. It’s to embrace the world of “I don’t know.” It is not to be an artist or a writer or a musician although those things can be “creative.” It’s more complex than that. Creativity is everywhere and in everything, but it’s only found in and by the people willing to, as Samuel Taylor Coleridge would say, “suspend disbelief” in order to consider answers no matter how sane or zany they seem to be. That’s what creativity is. That’s what “creative” means.

Image: Jeff Daly (CC BY NC SA 2.0)