I’ve heard a concerning amount of people describe creativity as an innate talent, an all-or-nothing gamble where either you are born with that spark or you can never hope to achieve the heights of imagination others can.
I can’t stress enough how false this statement is. Creativity is a muscle you can strengthen, something you can learn and iterate on. The reliable way to get better at something is to start by being really bad at it.
An easily forgotten detail about learning something new is that the medium you are working with plays a larger role in the process than you might think. Digital creative technologies have become engrained in how we think about writing, note taking and types of art. Google Docs and Microsoft Word might as well be shorthand for places to brainstorm and store writing drafts. Adobe’s Suite is seen as the cream of the crop for envisioning and plotting out elements for art projects. I can’t refute the power of these tools, but I believe they are directly opposed to learning how to be more creative. Turning to pen and paper and using digital mediums as little as possible is the best way you can start building up your original ideas.
My backpack is home to four small notebooks that I fill with todo lists, class and meeting notes, scribbled brainstorming sessions, both smart and dumb thoughts I’ve jotted down and anything else that catches my attention. Besides being a handy place to write things down, they are a repository of unused ideas and observations. When I sit down to write, instead of trying to dredge my memory for something I thought of a week ago, I have a rough version of it in front of me.
Making art or doing any other creative exercise in a digital medium is at odds with the destruction that those programs enable. It is absurdly easy to remove anything you don’t need without a second thought. Don’t think you’ll use that awkward sentence that you typed during brainstorming earlier? Just delete it! What reason is there to keep that slightly cringy rough draft document when the final version is nearly finished?
Removing every misstep isn’t the way to do things. Our memories are fickle and erasing everything that doesn’t work means that you can’t easily reference them again. Writing in a physical notebook solves this problem.
I believe reinterpreting your own ideas is the best way to exercise your creativity. Since everything I write down is in pen, the option to erase isn’t even on the table. This means that if I wrote a poorly thought-out sentence during a brainstorming session, I have to think about that idea again. On pen and paper, I get a chance to rephrase things at every step of the process and get deeper into thought about the core ideas I want to convey.
Working in a digital creative medium is like carving a sculpture from a block of marble, where you slice away every single unwanted idea, no matter how good they are, until you have a final product. Physical creative mediums are more like messing with clay, where you take a malleable lump of ideas and find a way to work and improve them into a form that fits each idea.
Speaking from eight years of experience, pottery is also an excellent way to learn another key tenet of creativity — failure. Giving yourself the grace to fail and make mistakes is the best way to learn and working with a physical medium, including writing on paper, makes each mistake permanent. For each finished piece that I’ve made, there are three that failed before they even reached the kiln.
Permanent mistakes will force you to unlearn the evils of the undo function. You can’t undo writing a messy sentence in pen; you have to decipher what you wrote and think through it again. You can’t undo the effects of pushing a bit too hard on a wet clay bowl and collapsing it.
This seems intimidating, but it will teach you to focus your attention throughout the creative process. If you don’t want to repeat those mistakes that cost you time and effort, you’ll learn and think more while you are writing or making art. The undo function in digital mediums trivializes this part of the learning process.
No lasting mistakes mean you’ll never learn to do things right the first time around. If you are taking notes, writing or making art digitally, what you think of as “getting better” at being creative is actually learning how to better navigate the program or becoming more familiar with art basics like spacing and color theory. It doesn’t necessarily mean you’re increasing your ability to think of a creative goal and make meaningful progress on it. Starting on paper, even just to sketch out the roughest of ideas, is the most direct way to build that skill.
The locus of human creativity isn’t found in a finished product. The great writers and artists of history might have made masterpieces, but they are the results of intense practice and creative thought that you can’t see. The hastily scribbled notes in your books and ideas on sticky notes that you’re tempted to throw away are where the soul of imagination truly lies.
