Creativity Is a Way of Thinking

Lately, I’ve been wanting to sit in on some sort of Creative Writing class to figure out what exactly is taught there.  My curiosity has been peaked as I have always been under the impression that creativity is not something that can be taught.  “Creativity,” as John Cleese said, “is not a talent; it is a way of operating.” Although, I would amend this statement to say that creativity is a way of thinking.  I’ve been dwelling a lot on creativity as I’ve been coming across a lot of interesting questions on the internet that are relevant to creativity in writing.  That is, a lot of questions like these:

1. How do I come up with ideas for a story?

2. How do I come up with a plot?

3. How do I make a backstory for this character?

4. How do I think of characters?

5. How should I write a female character?

6. How should I write a male character?

7. How should I start a story?

8. How should I end my story?

9. Should Character A fall in love with Character B or Character C?

10. Am I doing this wrong?

The second worst answer you can give to any of these questions is that you need to sit around and wait for inspiration to happen.  That simply does not work, any professional writer will tell you that.  This is why I like the way John Cleese said creativity is a way of ‘operating.’ It implies something that is actively done.

Now, the absolute worst answer you can give to these questions is an actual answer.  Example: Female characters are supposed to exhibit these traits; males are supposed to exhibit these other traits; you should start your story in this manner; you should end your story by doing this….etc…etc…

The problem with these questions is that they suggest the one asking them is under the impression that there is one right way of doing something and they can learn how to do things that way.  The problem with giving these questions a hard answer is that it reinforces that way of thinking.  Creativity is being able find and implement several solutions to a problem.

If you know someone who is particularly creative, you’ve probably also noticed that they are not particularly concerned with wrongness.  That is, when they see a problem with a standard solution, they aren’t concerned that other solutions will be viewed as ‘wrong.’  When Copernicus pieced together the heliocentric model, he wasn’t concerned about being wrong even though the accepted theory of the time was the geocentric one.  Likewise, Nabokov wasn’t concerned about being wrong when writing a character who was attracted to young girls.  Zusak wasn’t concerned about being wrong when writing a book set in Nazi Germany that was narrated by Death.  Meyer wasn’t concerned about being wrong when she created vampires that sparkled in the sunlight.

 Creativity is when you stop thinking along the lines of ‘Should I…’ and ‘How do I…’ and start thinking in terms of ‘What if…’   You take all of your knowledge, all of experiences, all of your resources, and you piece them together to make stuff.  You dig deeper into the things that interest you.  You look at things with more than one perspective.  “Follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly” (Franz Kafka).  You take something interesting and you just play with it.  You add more to it; you twist it around; you break it into little pieces and rearrange them; you try to disguise it as something else entirely.  That’s how writers make plots and characters and do all these things you wonder how writers do.  They take something that interests them and start asking themselves ‘what if…’ and any other question that might pop into their heads and then they create answers for them.

What if… an American girl moved to England? What problems would she face?

What if… this girl didn’t actually move to England, but was kidnapped? How does this change things?

What if… her kidnapper wasn’t human? What was he?

What if… I made the kidnapper be the protagonist? Is he still evil?  Can I make people pity him?  Can I make people love him? Does he still lose in the end?

What if… the girl was a child when this happened?  How does this affect her?

They keep asking themselves different questions and they keep creating different solutions and then question their solutions and eventually all of these pieces are turned into a story.  It is this way of thinking that is creativity, and I think the biggest challenge to being creative is that we are taught not to think that way.  Think about the way things are in schools.  Information is often presented in a straightforward kind of way.  Students are ‘punished’ (usually by lowering grades) for giving wrong answers to questions.  Asking ‘why’ and ‘what if’ are usually seen as derailing the topic.  We are taught that 2+2 = 4 so when we are asked: What two numbers add up to four? we usually don’t even realize that there are literally (in this example) an infinite number of answers. 

So people, especially (in my experience) teenagers, who want to be writers often think in terms of ‘what should I…’ and ‘how should I…’ expecting to be given a series of steps or a set of rules they follow to produce whatever they are trying write.  Their stories are likely to become formulaic.  They see that this author wrote a story in this way and these other authors did much the same thing so that must be the way it’s done.  But the important thing to realize is, when it comes to writing, there isn’t a right way to arrange your ideas.  And that’s what works of fiction are essentially, an arrangement of ideas presented in a way that tells a story.  There isn’t a particular way you can acquire these ideas either.  You certainly can’t sit around and wait for them to come to you.  You have to create them yourself, and that’s probably one of the most difficult parts about writing for some people—adjusting to this way of thinking.  It’s not that you always have to think this way, it’s that you have to be able to.  You have to let go of the notion that your ideas are somehow wrong or bad.  You have that willingness to break ‘rules.’  You can’t look to other people to tell you how to write your story.  And I mean your story; I don’t mean the technical side of writing.  Everyone needs help with that part, but that’s what editors are for. 

Anyway, to those who have asked these sorts of questions, I’m going to tell you this:  There isn’t a right answer for any of these.  These are questions you have to answer yourselves with a lot of thought, a lot of patience, and a lot of time.  Think about what you know and what resources you have and apply them in ways you haven’t before.  Reframe the questions.  Look at things from a different angle.  Invent your own rules.

So, this is what I do

After a good deal of thought and a tremendous amount of soul searching, I have come to the conclusion that the absolute best form of occupation for me would be to become a writer. I came to this conclusion after good, hard look at my skills and interests, and realized they would best be utilized under aforementioned profession.

And also by taking the advice of one of my university professors, “Don’t think about what you want to be when you grow up, think about what you want to do when you grow up.”

In other words, don’t pursue a particular occupation because you want to be that thing.  It could very well turn out that that thing is not something you want to do at all.

Take, for instance, being a doctor.  How many kids have you heard say they want to be doctors when they grow up?  When I was in high school, I wanted to be a doctor when I grew up.  Why not?  It’s a respectable profession.  You can make good money.  I like weird stuff like AIDS and Ebola.  But there were two things I never considered: 

1. Why I thought I would like being a doctor.  

2.  What being a doctor entails.

Now I thought I knew the answer to number two.  I knew all about how hard you have to study and all about the MCAT and what you need to do to get into a good medical school.  I was fine with that.  I was willing to put forth the effort and I like learning stuff. But as I began to pursue this career, I realized something horrible.  First, most pre-medical students do not want to learn, they want to memorize. In fact, many of the classes required to get into medical school test you on how much you’ve memorized.  To be fair, that’s partly because some of those classes are so large.  But based on my observation, many pre-medical students are not concerned so much about scientific inquiry as they are with what they need to memorize for the next exam.

And that attitude really started to bother me.

There I was, sitting in a class with mostly pre-medical students and I realized that there was a fundamental difference between them and myself.

I was there because I wanted to be there.  I was there because I wanted to know more about a particular subject.  I was there because I liked asking questions.  I was there because I wanted to understand a particular process, not just memorize the steps.  Trust me, there is a difference.

I remember my Comparative Anatomy professor once asked me if I majoring in Biology because I wanted to be a doctor, and I remember the shock on his face when I told him that I was majoring in Biology because I liked the subject.

But most of my peers were there because it was a means to an end.  They were there because they had to be.  Few were there because they were genuinely interested in the class.

And I know this happens in other career-oriented majors.  I took an Economics course as an elective and the same mindset was present among the business students as well.  They were there for the degree, not the education.

I have a friend who majored in Communication and encountered the same attitude in his classes.

I have witnessed the same in my English major acquaintances who plan on becoming career writers.

And I started to get a bit bummed out by it.

That was when I started to think about whether or not I wanted to do this whole medicine thing.  I liked learning; I liked science; I didn’t really like the mindset of the people who would be my colleagues or of the people who would be determining whether or not I was qualified to study Medicine.  I didn’t really like the fact that I would have to submit myself to a bureaucratic system.  I didn’t like the fact that I would be having insurance companies telling me how to treat my patients.  I didn’t like the fact that I would have patients telling me how to treat them, or the fact that I would have to constantly be on guard for malpractice suits, or be constantly subjugated to government rules, regulations, standards, practices, ethics, or any other committee that would determine how I could practice medicine.

Not that those are bad things, I just have problems complying with a ridiculous amount of regulations.

Which is one reason why writing would be good for me: I will not be working under anyone’s authority but my own.  At least, more so than I would in other professions.

This is when I really started to take my professor’s advice to heart.  I sat down and thought of all the things that I’m good at, I like doing, and the conditions under which I would be willing to work/live.  I came up with the following:

1.  I am generally unhappy when I have to work under someone else, especially when that someone else not as well informed about my job as I am.  (Imagine, for a moment, that you are a scientist trying to save an endangered species and then this group of people who know absolutely nothing about science or your work comes along and un-endanger your species.  Oh wait, this has happened before. See what I mean?)

2.  I am pretty good at applying things I’ve learned in weird ways.

3.  I enjoy writing things.  Be it an essay, a blog, or a work of fiction.  But not poetry.  Poetry can go fuck itself.

4.  I know the difference between ‘affect’ and ‘effect.’

5.  I am fascinated by the use and origin words, languages, and their rules.

6.  I like spying on people.

7.  I usually have whiskey and cigarettes hidden around my house somewhere.

8.  I am used to not having money.

9.  I read a lot.

10.  I’m good at lying.  And I mean that as both deception and assuming a horizontal resting position.  I do both quite often.  Sometimes simultaneously.

And having considered all these things, I realized what I really wanted to do was something I couldn’t achieve by simply going to a university and majoring in a certain thing.  It was something that I would have to create myself.  It was something that I could do regardless of what job I might hold.  One of the benefits of being a writer is that agents and editors don’t require you to spend years subjected to creative writing programs to become ‘qualified’ to create, they don’t ask for your university transcripts, or what your GPA was, or what professional certifications you hold, or, I don’t know, what your GRE/MCAT/LSAT/GMAT/whatever-other-tests-are-out-there scores.  Regardless of all the problems with which the publishing industry is currently riddled, there’s still one thing going for them:  It is what you finished, that they will look at, not whether or not you took the ‘proper’ steps to get there.

Which gives me the freedom to pursue an education in the sciences and make up shit people will never read.  It’s kind of nice to know no matter what job I might hold, I’ll always be doing what I want to be doing.  No one will make me stop writing.  And the funny thing is, if it hadn’t have been for that professor, I would have abandoned medicine and would now be frantically thinking of other things for me to be.  But now I don’t really care.  I know what I’ll be doing; anything else just helps pay the bills.