Creating Creativity

Creating Creativity

Perhaps one of the most frustrating elements of creative writing is creating creativity. If you’ve ever tried, you know what I’m talking about. More than one entire class has been devoted to nothing but helping the eager young minds spark or stimulate their creativity. These classes, of course, don’t work. There’s nothing that really stifles creativity worse than a classroom, after all. (But you will hear lots of the standardized methods such as, “Go to a thrift store and find a pair of shoes. Now, imagine the type of person who used those shoes.” Or, another jaw-dropper, “Make a little square with your fingers and look through it at something. Imagine what you’re seeing is a world…”)

The ironic part is, the stimulating part is easy! There are a wide variety of illegal hallucinogens that make the creation of twisted, abstract ideas more than second nature. (Don’t believe me? Just look where it got Edgar Allan Poe!) However, most of the writing world views this as cheating - something more offensive to the writing process than using cheat codes is to video gaming.

So that means you’ll have to rely on a very un-stimulated mind to create your creativity. When that doesn’t work well, it also means more un-stimulating classes will follow.

Over the vast expanse of history, nearly every possible form of creativity has been used to spark creativity. Early in the history of writing (I believe it was sometime back when cavemen ruled the caves) these methods were more primitive. Reading didn’t work (they didn’t yet have a written language), beating each other with clubs had the opposite effect, and putting poisonous spiders in the “girls” part of the cave proved too dangerous. Especially once the girls caught up with the creative individual.

For them, the world-altering, history-changing, mankind-evolving stroke came with the invention of fire. No doubt, they danced around it, worshiped it, and more than once, caught their hair on fire when trying to drink it. This strange, but ultimate breakthrough obviously is what so captured their imagination, and so inspired their minds, that they began to draw stick-figures dancing around fires on the walls of nearly every cave. (Let’s not contemplate about where we would be had they not undergone this evolutionary breakthrough.)

The point is, they had fire! They had something to obsess over. It caught every faculty of their imagination (all four of them) and encouraged them to express it through creation. And I doubt you can argue that since the cavemen, no one has been able to write on cave walls in the same manner.

So we can conclude that the creative feel of a story doesn’t come from the rarity of its use, as much it does from the fire burning inside the author. The point at which an idea truly becomes unique and authoritative, is when it penetrates so deeply into the author that it meshes with his feelings and messes with his perception of reality. At this point, the story will begin to take on its own, personal, or creative flavor. It will feel authentic, even if the setting or premise has been used before. (That said, if you go and write another book with Elves and Dwarves, I will seriously hunt you down!)

Write about what captivates you, write about the story, the characters; write whatever the fire inside you wants to express! It’s not hard, after writing a plot-draft of some hot new story-idea, to enhance the background (the idea, setting, or world behind the story), using a flaming imagination. It is hard, on the other hand, to try to create the unique idea without the story and without the fire. Logic never was inspiringly creative, although it can lay out a pretty dry set of twists and turns.

This sounds so amazing, so what could possibly be the bad news? Well, getting that deep into a story takes a real effort, one that has to be made whole-heartedly. If all of this proves too much for you, and you can’t stomach the thought of another class on creativity, there is still hope! You can always write another vampire novel!