Creativity

Like most schools that I attended, students were often grouped by interests that they shared. In high school, populations of students accumulate around extracurricular activities. Band members grouped together with other band players. The newspaper/yearbook students all collected together usually in the journalism teacher’s room. Even our debate team found a cohesiveness. College presented a more organized version of populations in which students were gathered by various majors and minors.

In high school and later on in college, I found it very difficult to find a wolf pack which I felt kinship towards, though I spent a little bit of team in each of the above groups. An aspect of my personality always ran ragged against the group’s tenants. For example, I disliked marching instead only wanting to play the music itself. I never had focus enough to do anything meaningful in journalism though I managed through out a couple of articles with photographs which went into the school paper. The closest fit seemed to be the debate team, though, I fell more to doing a little bit everything in that group, debate, speeches, reading of short stories, never really finding it all that interesting.

In college, I had classes with people who had similar interests to me, literature, art, drama, I still found myself French fry in a bag of tater tots, cooked together, but not really clear about how I ended up there.

Looking back on it now, I believe perhaps what caused such a disjointed experience in these schools was the need to distinguish myself from everyone else in the circles I ran, a kind of default contrariness, instinctively exercised. (My wife says that my contrary nature is ingrained in me, a part of my genes, which cannot be removed by modern science.)

By necessity, my contrary nature required that I culture and nurture my creativity side, to seek out different means of expressing various messages and themes that form in my head. I am not so egotistical to believe that I was the only one of a few in these schools which visited by rich meaningful thoughts, great ideas, or deep and varied themes.

I think however that during a time when most teenagers are trying to find ways to blend in with their peers, that the odd piece is often separated from the pack and ridiculed, left alone out in the wild to die, while the pack shares in the spoils, I relished in being the lone wolf, the one on his own, finding a way to survive socially outside the various packs.

One of the great pieces of literature that I enjoyed was the Lord of the Flies. I took great pleasure in the character of Simon, the loner, the thinker, the one character closest to who I was at that time. I think my classmates saw that in me as well, though my recollection of our discussions of the book is fuzzy at best.

All of this is to say that the act of creation is very important to me, even today, when I become haunted by a number of ideas which I feel need to be written out, drawn, composed, drafted, photographed, or otherwise made manifest. This impetuous to create, this is what I think set me apart for some time.

However, I have noticed in last five or ten years that there has been a trend, not just among teenagers, but of persons of all ages, to express their creativity whether it is in the manner they dress or compose their hair, or in the kinds of music they listen to or the books they read, the movies they see. You see it in the way people name their children or eschew traditional life choices, like when and how many children to have, where to live, what kind employment to take. It is frustrating to me because something I felt set me apart from the masses for so long suddenly became the thing that makes me ordinary. I wonder to myself, “How did this happen?”

I think the answer is two-fold.

I think creativity is a product of access. I mean this in the broadest possible sense. A prime example of this media such as movies and music. So much of a teenager’s identity is wrapped up in what movies they watch and music they listen to. Certainly, music instills meta-messages in the listener who adopt the music’s messages as their own. Sometimes, teenagers will wear a T-shirt of band without ever having heard a single song about the band, relying instead solely on the notoriety the has garnered.

I remember the earliest signs of my inclination towards creativity occurred when I was in middle school, attending a band camp during the summer break. The camp was on Texas Tech University. A music store was just off the main campus, and I went there to find music that I heard on a Mtv program called 120 minutes which featured alternative music videos. I specifically was looking for a tape by the Sugarcubes, something I wouldn’t find at the Walmart where our family shopped or at Target or any other store near where I lived.

But I found it in a record store near a university, and a seed was planted. In high school, I discovered that there was an independent record store about an hour’s drive away which carried the same type of music, and I spent a lot of money, probably too much money, I music I couldn’t get anywhere else. But it required effort. It required driving a great distance from home, assuming I could find a car to take me there. It required staying up at night to do my “research” watching Mtv at an hour when most of my fellow students were in bed.

I had access to this music when other students I went to school did not. Or, stated another way, many students I went to school with were not interested in putting in the work to discover this new music because it cut into time they spent doing other things that they were interested in. So they didn’t have access to the music.

The same could be said about the movies I enjoyed watching as a high school student.

Today, the internet has made anything, especially media, easily accessed and at a moments notice. Services like Google music, Pandora, and Spotify not only allow someone to find practically every song ever written, they often provide their listeners with music that the listeners were never aware of. They do all the research for you. The same is true for movies and television shows.

I recall when I was in middle school how cool it was to watch Nausicaa and the Valley of the Wind, and odd little movie, anime at its best. Certainly, in those days, very few people had ever even heard of the movie, let alone the genre of anime. Today, almost everyone has heard of anime, and there are legions of fans. In fact, in every bookstore I’ve ever been to, there is a whole section of manga, anime in book form, where teenagers gather and pour through multiple volumes, page after page.

The point is that with access to all these new forms of media, a person’s exposure to different ways of seeing things through different has greatly expanded.

The same is true in the fact that the selection of different goods has increased allowing for greater distinction between items. Individualization in the clothes one wears, the car one drives, even the phone one carries, allows purchasers to distinguish themselves from other consumers. It is a means to express one’s way through purchasing.

In fact, stores depend on that, tailoring their shops to a certain style. At Hot Topic, you’ll find punk rockers and goth-types by dark and dangerous clothing. At Pac-Sun, you’ll find surfer-types buying muscle shirts and ragged shorts. The list goes on and one. Accordingly, having access to all these things permits greater variation and lays the framework for the expression of creativity among a greater population of people.

The second factor which has an affect on creativity is courage. Expression requires courage, without a doubt. Every word spoken carries not only a message conveyed in the words utilized, but also the context in which they are said as well as who are saying them. Every sentence possesses subcontext which might reveal something about who the expresser is, might reveal something about are internal self, the one we keep hidden behind the clothes, and make-up, and the little jokes that we make.

Think about how we feel when we make something, a doodle, a piece of writing, a painting, a photograph, and we release it to the public, whether it is a loved one or maybe a stranger, we are always keenly aware of that expression, a part of who we are, being susceptible to being judged by that loved one. The sensitivity that we receive the message is heightened because the nerves are exposed, the art is raw and in the open air. Even if the message is blandly neutral, the lack of any real meaningful criticism or praise hurts the us as much if not more than if the remarks were bitterly derisive.

Every of artist by nature must be secure about who they are as a person. The artist is their art. A recording artist adopts a persona and lives that persona through his music. In the seventies, David Bowie became Ziggy Stardust, the androgynous alien, naive and innocent. The music written by David Bowie, performed by David Bowie, was an extension of David Bowie. And each criticism of his persona and music probably cut to the quick. The same is likely true of Lady Gaga as well.

There is a lot bravery in what David Bowie did, what Lady Gaga does, placing themselves in the public for all to judge, and they are rewarded for it. These artists are creative because they exercise their creativity; they act on the ideas that formulate in their mind, the juxtaposition of ideas, the odd pieces which accumulate around a core.

As you go back in time, the tolerance that society had for such creativity shrinks. The societal norms have loosened as the world gets older. Performers and artists such as David Bowie and Lady Gaga are the reason for the relaxation of the societal strictures. Stated another way, society has grown more courageous, bolder, in the manner in which they express themselves.

Tattoos are common. Dyes hair with odd cuts are ubiquitous. Everyone is a photographer with the availability of cell phone cameras, a number of apps exist permitting short expressions to be released to the public for all to view. In fact, such public displays of expression require creativity in order to garner attention.

Also look at reality television which requires a certain amount of outrageousness in order to get ratings. (Of course, some might argue this is not creativity at all, and, I would be hard pressed to argue with them.)

Because access and courage are now so common, because creativity is something available to everyone, to set myself a part from the “rabble” requires something more, requires me to find a different pool. What is that pool? I suspect that it may be focus and determination, may be consistency and dedication. In the past, the occasional output was sufficient. Now, creativity requires the exercise of my creative side.