The Creative Spark

If you ask a room full of six-year-old kids how many of them can draw, almost all of them will raise their hands. Ask the same question to a room full of eighteen-year-olds, and very few will respond affirmatively. So what has changed in that time? Are the younger kids delusional, or have the teenagers succumbed to the common notion that creativity is the province of some inborn ability? Is the development of our creativity really any different than developing any other skill?

Most of us tend to think of creativity as something someone either has, or doesn't have. This belief is reinforced in many ways. Most of us knew someone in school who seemed to be able to draw, play an instrument, or write, at a level far beyond their peers. It seemed to come from nowhere, really. And throughout our school years, we are taught in an analytical fashion that suppresses creative thinking. There's only one right answer. There's one way of solving a problem. By the time we finish school, our thinking about creativity is entrenched.

Due to natural genetic variation, we are not all born equal. Some people do have bodies that are better adapted to playing a sport at a high level of proficiency. Some people have a natural talent that enables them to translate what they see into a drawing. Some people have a musical proclivity that allows them to learn to play an instrument very quickly, and be an excellent musician from a very young age. Seeing these people, hearing about them, sitting next to them in class, we are intimidated by the natural ease with which they excel. Because we associate art and music with creativity, we view these prodigies as evidence of creativity being a "some folks have it, some don't" sort of thing.

But is it, really? Proficiency does not equal creativity; it is a tool through which we can express creativity, but on its own it is a skill, a craft. And the thing about skills is, they can be learned. Anyone who practices the guitar for two hours a day is going to become a good guitarist if they stick to it. It's the same with anything. Draw every day, and your artistic skills will inevitably improve. Sure, there's prodigies out there. But most people have to put in a lot of time practicing to develop a skill. People don't just hop up on a balance beam and start turning flips. They don't wake up one day and run a marathon. They don't randomly pick up a guitar and play a Jimi Hendrix solo.

Of course, that's not something people always like to hear. We're always looking for some magic bullet that will allow us proficiency without effort. Thinking that creativity - or great skill - is something inborn only in the few, allows us to dismiss it as a possibility in our own lives.

Since I am a songwriter and a musician, I want to address this area more specifically. These days, if you have a computer, you can, with very little investment, produce music of a sonic quality that approaches that of a major studio. Production technology has advanced to the point where high quality audio can be produced without much in the way of skill. We have these incredibly powerful and easy-to-use tools. With only a very small learning curve, someone can open GarageBand and produce something that sounds very good. On the whole, I think this is great. I can focus on writing and performing music, without having to get the equivalent of a college degree just to understand how to make it sound good in a studio. But having all these great tools at our fingertips can also be a trap.

Spend some time on a forum like GearSlutz, and you'll quickly find a slew of people who are convinced that the only thing separating them from the hit-makers is some new piece of gear, a new plug-in, a better compressor. In my opinion, they are putting the cart before the horse. Like any other skill, the way to write better songs is by writing songs, over and over. The way to get great guitar tracks isn't to find better and easier ways to "fix it in the mix," it's to sit down and play your freaking guitar every day, for as much time as you can. There's no easy way. And it's no different with creativity.

Creativity is something we all have. It's a defining part of our humanity. But like anything else, it atrophies if we don't use it. If you want to write songs, you need to work at it. Write a song every day if you can. Don't worry if it's great, or if it sucks. Just do it. Pick a chord progression and come up with five different melodies that fit it. Take a chord progression from a song you like, and write different melodies on top of it. Don't worry about the quality of the melodies. Stretching your creative thinking is an exercise like any other. Yet when it comes to music or art, we are taught to think it's somehow different. Partly, I think this is because there's an ephemeral quality to it. The process isn't readily apparent in the product. When you see a table, the process of its creation is more observable. You recognize that, though you couldn't just hop out to your garage and build one, it is a skill you could understandably develop.

So when it comes to creative thinking, my advice is the same as Nike's: just do it. Do it over and over. Do it til you're sick of it, and keep doing it anyway. Don't be discouraged by the prodigies; there's always going to be some kid out there whose effortless mastery seems daunting. Just think of your creativity as a skill like any other. Don't give up. Just practice, every day.