The Definition of Creativity (From A Man Who Struggles With It)

by Terence A Anthony

John Coltrane

Now and then I hear people describing creativity like the force from Star Wars; it’s for a select few, it’s a superpower, and it can’t be nurtured. But I digress. It is only seen as distant because it is often described as distant. Before I get bombarded, I would like to qualify all this by saying that I struggle coming up with ideas too. I do get creative blocks too. But I like to think that I understand that creativity is a process rather than just some innate talent. It can be nurtured and parts of the process are disciplines that can be taught.

I asked several friends recently how would they define creativity. Most of the responses I received were mainly "originality and it must be from the creator."

Let's break it down starting from originality. The problem with this description is that nothing is original. Everything builds off something. When cavemen conceived the idea of art they didn't come up with impressionist paintings on the walls of the Niah Caves. They started with the basics and all art after that are mangled versions of what the artist saw before. Sure, there are artists that came up with revolutionary techniques but they were never developed in isolation. The advancement of technology led to new colour palettes, of likes never seen before. Even if the artist were to create something that is such a departure from all conventions of art, they themselves need to learn how to draw or paint. Those skills were developed by someone else. Hence, no art is technically original.

Let's assume somehow originality really does mean something new. What about art forms that don't obscure the fact they're based on something else? Are the creators considered creative? Musical remixes take a finished product and present something new out of it. Is that not creative? Quentin Tarantino creates films that pay homage to older movie traditions like the Western, old school Kung Fu flicks, and even old racing films. Are his ways of creating these beautiful pastiches not creative? Are movie adaptations not creative? How about cultures with a consistent architecture aesthetic that emulates or remixes arches, roofs, motifs of buildings that came before them? Are these Balinese architects not creative? These art forms do not obscure the fact that they were derived from older art forms. Don't let me start on sample-based art forms like hip-hop, trip-hop, or even industrial. I would even argue the creation and the recontextualization of memes are creative endeavours.

The second description given by my friends was that art must be from the creator? Well, of course, every single invention or art form comes from a creator. But both descriptions of creativity have a common thread; it is to create something that the audience feels that there is a novelty to it. Or if it isn’t novel, it is something that is repurposed into a novel context.

So this leads back to the question; 

What is creativity?

Stephen King famously said if you managed to pay the bills with your writing, then you're "talented"

Creativity to me is the ability to imagine an idea, to plan out how to come close to the idea, and to execute the smaller tasks leading to the conception of the idea. Yes, that is right. Creativity is nothing more than planning and execution.

To demonstrate this, let's look at what scares creative wannabes the most: improvisation. To make things scarier, let’s deconstruct jazz improvisation. To the popular imagination, improvisation is creating things on the fly. It seems scary to people who don't know the art and they might be thinking that John Coltrane pulled music out of thin air. But every single jam session requires meticulous planning.

First of all, he and his band have to pick a base layer. This part is like building the foundations of a building. This is probably the key to his music. His improvisation worked around the chords. The scales and modal interchange he used were all preplanned. He then asked himself "where do I need to go from those specific notes?" The notes were not picked at random. Of course, there are accidental discoveries from time to time but they happened because it was meant to be explored within specific directions. The result is beautiful melodies created along an imagined path. They're not concrete but it's there.

The same when it comes to painting, just because ideas were "made on the fly" it does not mean Michelangelo wiggled a brush and out came Western civilization. One may start with a single tree with no idea where it's going but when adding things to the painting, one must imagine additions and how they fit.

Again, all of that is basically planning.

But Why Am I Not Creative?

Deafheaven. I don't actually have a reason to put them here except for the fact that I've been listening to their albums back to back recently. 

Again, let me restate, I am not as creative as I wish I am. That's probably because people like me (or you, if you’re reading this to grasp creativity) are bad planners or are impatient. Some of us want to reach our imagination so quickly that when it doesn't come out perfect we fall back and blame the lack of talent. The worst part of all, the arts tend to attract people who think that they’re talented, thus they should expect brilliance out of themselves. Many stop trying to figure out and breakdown the steps to the perfect art form in their head. We don't think about how to reach something. If you have an idea for a melody in your head and you can't seem to reach it with your guitar, figure out how to write that melody first. The people who know how to play music by ear are people who know what melody corresponds to what in their hands and frets. They've preplanned the steps. Now it's just a matter of assembling the parts like an IKEA cabinet.

But if you're stuck at the ideation phase, then consume more media. Again, nothing comes out of thin air. All the imaginative and creative people you've heard before are all people who are privileged enough to be exposed to all sorts of muses, lucky enough to have time to perfect their craft, and diligent enough to figure the context needed to assemble the art. The process of ideation is also an extension of planning. You plan out what you want to achieve and figure out what influences you want to pull from. Do it enough times, then you'll look like you were doing it on the fly too.

In short, to be creative, one must learn how to plan. If you’re a bad planner, then you probably going to be creatively bankrupt. Ever heard of the kind of people who say they have ideas but they need people to carry things out for them? While it’s true that you could delegate tasks to people, you still need to plan who does what. So if you have friends who think that they’re a person of “ideas” you need to grab their shoulders, shake them, and wake them up by asking them what’s the plan?