Trying to be Creative

I find it difficult to summerise Creativity in a few blog entries, perhaps the only way for me to get my head around it is to drone on, hoping to perhaps come to some sort of conclusion about it; a form of self-enlightenment.

The one thing I definitely know is that some people are more prepared to be creative than others. Just among friends, there are those who are brimming with cool ideas for characters, games, stories and inventions, whereas there are those who just won't mention any of it. I often wonder why some people have such inhibitions about expressing their creativity; I'm sure they have plenty of their own ideas, they just don't want to tell anybody.

I hope the reason for this isn't because they're afraid of what others might think of their creativity. It reminds me of Ken Robinson's book, in which he says that the education system educates creativity out of us. Kids are shunned for their creative ideas; you had to do everything the way the teachers wanted it, they generally didn't allow any sort of creativity in anything. Everything boiled down to studying already-existing things (Even in art) and hardly any opportunity was given to expand one's creative mind. Maybe that's not how it is for everybody, but that's how it was for me at least.

With this sort of background, I understand how many people would feel ashamed of being creative, as well as perhaps being associated with a certain group of people or culture. It's just not the way things should be; creativity moves the world forward. I wouldn't have been able to write this, and you wouldn't have those MSN windows at the bottom of the screen if nobody had ever been creative. We wouldn't even have cheese for god's sake, cheese.

Creativity, I honestly believe, is something present in everybody. It may be focused in different areas; I think the things you are passionate about have a lot to do with how creative you are in what ways - someone who enjoys soap operas may have many creative soapy-style ideas, compared to an RPG-obsessive, who might have many creative ideas for RPGs.

There's a time and a place for everything, but creativity is one of those things that could add so much more spice to life. My stereotypical image of creativity-deficiency is a lonely man sitting in a cubicle farm, with endless paperwork...


In fact that reminds me of my time at GameCity in Nottingham. From my hotel room, I could see into an adjacent office block. Inside, squarely pictured through the window was blue-shirt man. He sat at his desk, with piles and piles of paperwork, pinned up notices, with an excel spreadsheet on his screen. He was there from the crack of dawn, 8am when I woke up, all the way until night time, 9pm when I got back. This was the case for the Thursday and Friday that I was there - I just hope that he hadn't been pulling those hours for the first three days.

He had the weekend off though.

But that strikes me as being the worst sort of lifestyle. His wages may have made up for it, but I've developed a lifestyle that revolves around creativity - an Excel spreadsheet just fuels the urge to burn things if I have to stare at one for over 10 minutes. Maybe blue-shirt man loves his job, but I can only see it from my point of view.

Creativity ho.