What is creativity?
Creativity is writing a novel.
It’s performing a poem.
It’s designing a building that appears to float on a cloud.
STOP!
If we accept these narrow and lauded examples of creativity, I feel we distort the actual definition of creativity, which just means to come up with something new. There’s no widely accepted scale of grandeur to determine whether one new idea is creative while another is not.
Let’s broaden your definition of creativity, in fact, make it so big that it includes you! I would love it if you heard your internal doubt (“but I’m not creative”) and then pause and push back just a bit because…
Creativity is human nature
I believe human nature is rooted in creativity: the ability to see a situation, think about it, imagine possible alternatives, try them out, and come up with a solution.
Whether that is applied to creating a stand-up comedy routine or figuring out how to rearrange the dishes in the dishwasher to fit the last few dishes, humans can imagine alternatives. (I LOVE this game! I rock this game!)
And so it is with writing (no matter what your teachers told you!)
Why bother with creative writing?
Creative writing is just sitting down with a pen and paper (or whatever your chosen tools) and putting words together in new ways. What’s glorious about that is that creative writing lets us see situations in new ways, and some of those ways can feel uplifting, joyful, empowering, gracious, hilarious, touching, healing.
In Creative Writing for Therapeutic Purposes (CWTP), we learn how to trust that our writing is not being judged for its correctness, its emotiveness, its unique attributes or rhythms. This builds trust and allows us to get closer to our own heart, closer to the essence of our words on the page.
If you’ve felt for a long time that you’re not creative, changing that belief is hard. Hard, but possible. Possible AND worth it!
What if you could undo all the assumptions held about what creative writing actually is (and who gets to decide). And if you’re willing to do that, to test the waters and tell that voice that says “but I’m not creative” that you’re just going to see, well, I believe you’ll start to remember what it feels like to trust yourself.
A simple creative test
OK, well, there’s no test, and simple doesn’t always mean easy, but in just three or four words as a goal, I think it’s a nice place to begin.
A few years back, Reddit user dirtknapp asked: “what would the person who named walkie-talkies have named other things?”
The resulting thread was fun and hilarious. Someone collected them into a meme that made its way to me a few weeks back and I laughed so hard.
What all those who commented on dirtknapp’s post did was come up with what poets call “kennings,” alternative, longer and less direct names for objects. I had tried writing some of my own at the beginning of my CWTP schooling after learning about how writing to specific forms or rules can be therapeutic.
My first kenning (at least knowingly attempting a kenning) was to describe the baby crib I had been sleeping on in the living room while my partner was hibernating with a bad round of COVID in our bedroom:
- COVID-carer embracer
- Tired Mom holder
Why is renaming something therapeutic?
What I’d read from the poets who shared their experiences using different forms of poetry in ways that evoked wellbeing was the following:
While following some simple literary guidelines or rules, like a poem’s rhyming patterns, for instance, can perform a kind of magic with the mind. When we occupy our minds with a specific task, we are also secretly occupying our inner critic. We distract it with a little rule it wants to follow so our creativity can stand up without being criticized back into hiding.
When we occupy our minds with a specific task, we are also secretly occupying our inner critic.
So, by considering an everyday object like a mattress or a bicycle and giving it a new, more meaningful, more personal name in just two or three words, we can give our creativity a chance to get silly and hopefully quiet that voice that keeps telling us we’re not creative.
There are other levels of benefit when we play with renaming or even naming something for the first time.
A tutor once asked us to consider what happens when there is no word to describe an act we perform in the world, a job we do. Or what if that title is so all-encompassing that the details get lost? The struggle, the hardships, the desires all disappear under one banner so large we can feel unseen.
These unnamed or broadly named aspects of us can also lead us or others to invalidate aspects of who we are.
You might have already experienced what it feels like to find the exact right word to describe something like an emotion. Maybe you’ve heard a friend say something that perfectly described how you were feeling, and you felt a physical relief. Maybe you sigh, your shoulders relax, maybe you smile wide and say, YES! That’s exactly it!
Landing on the right words helps us feel connected, less alone.
There was validation for me in naming an ordinary old thing like the crib mattress and shaping it into its new situation with new words.
That week I spent on the living room floor was filled with anxious exhaustion and I wound up barking at my kids for who knows what anymore. I was trying to study and work and mother and nurse and I felt some negative emotions, some sense of overwhelm and shame. And one night, when the house became quiet, I lay down on that mattress and attempted another kenning.
The mattress became:
- Yelling-mom forgiver
- Anxious-new-student procrastination rectangle
- True memory foam
Now you try!
You can do this, too.
Pick an object or a job title or something that doesn’t have a name that totally should have a name.
Write it down and give yourself 10 minutes (or 7 or 5 or 2) and see if you can write a kenning of your own, something to make you smile, something to send to a friend to brighten their day, something to offer yourself grace.
After you write for a bit, notice what it feels like to see your object in a new light. Listen to the voice in your head. Is it offering you kindness? If you’re judging your writing, don’t beat yourself up. You’ve had a lifetime of training in telling yourself (or others telling you) that it’s not quite good enough. So until you can trust yourself, I want to tell you this:
You are good enough.
AND
You Are Creative!
You might need time to get reacquainted with your creative self now that you know that creativity is just about new ideas, not Nobel prizes for fiction.
Until next time, take care of that tender, creative heart of yours,
Tara
Resource
If you saw my Instagram post about grounding, a practice that helps to take us out of our swirling anxious thoughts and reconnect with the moment, here’s a list of several other grounding techniques to experiment with.
If your attempt to write a kenning or rename something that needs renaming left you feeling surprising feelings, maybe even triggered, you might want to experiment with one of these approaches – they take just a minute or two but the effects can be just as quick.
