In praise of creating crap is an article by Annie Mueller that deconstructs what being creative is. This article acts like a dose of powerful antidote for me. It illuminates all the heavy ideas that I’ve apparently been carrying around for a while. It has to do with “being creative”. That phrase is mired with expectations. It is one of those sets of words that transcends literal meaning and becomes something quite abstract. It is not easily explainable, yet it also is quite potent.
Annie proposes to reset the meaning of the phrase “being creative” by redefining it in very simple terms: if you are a person who brings something into existence, you are creative. The first few times I read the post, I was a bit confused; I didn’t really understand her message. As I thought about it for a few days, I ended up stumbling into a bit of a crisis of my own. I wrote this to myself:
“CRISIS: it is no longer clear what being creative means.
Worse yet, it has never been known what it means.”
Thinking about this reminded me of a certain time in my life. Back then, I would judge myself based on the volume of my creative output. I wanted to master my favorite craft. I wanted to be recognized, to leave an impact, to have a legacy. However, I never was able to concretely define the fundamentals. What did it mean to have creative output? I said to myself that I should know; after all, wasn’t it obvious?
It really wasn’t. And this vagueness meant that the goalpost was dynamic, i.e. moving according to my whims. One day I was proud of finishing something, telling myself “finishing is what really counts”. The next day, I would have no energy to refine an idea and I would tell myself that “just showing up is what really counts”, disregarding my notions from the previous day. I was living in self-imposed cognitive dissonance. On a related note, Annie writes:
“[‘I need to be creative’ is] a heavy expectation, but it’s based on a vague goal. It sets a standard we can’t clearly see. Then it says: Meet that standard or you are not worth shit.”
Lately, I’ve been in Consumption Mode, though my interest towards mastery of creative pursuits hasn’t waned. Instead of working on my own skills, I’ve found myself watching others, living vicariously through them. I saw across disciplines that people, plagued by insecurity, were looking for a way out of their mental prison. I saw that they were trying their best and coming up with theories of all shapes, colors and sizes. From PewDiePie’s art journey through musicians sharing their stories about imperfection, through animators talking about myths that shape the understanding of their field, common threads began to emerge. Though my understanding of these threads is still very flawed, I will attempt to convey what sticks out to me the most:
Creativity is a very simple thing, yet we can’t help but gravitate towards complicating it.
As time passes, it becomes clearer that the creative process is very vulnerable to interference from imperfect emotional and mental adaptations that all of us are forced to pick up at some point in our lives. It’s fascinating how broad the spectrum of these adaptations are. On one extreme, we have renowned artists with “big egos” who control their intermediate environment with an iron fist. On the other extreme, we have creatives who are completely blocked, suffering from their inability to get anything out on the page.
Creativity as an act of bringing new order—and nothing else—is free from the problems of identity, value, employability, cultural relevancy, etc. This definition cuts through complications and places us closer to what could be the true meaning of the creative process: the joy of doing it.
Addendum: people online have also expressed the idea that creativity is something that human beings just do, much like how beavers build dams. I have my own thoughts about that, but I want to take some time first to refine them.