In second grade, my teacher gave us “creativity exercises” to do in class. This was in the mid-1980s, and a quick internet search reveals that creativity exercises for kids have gotten WAY more interesting since then. Or, at least, they’ve gotten more interesting than the ones I remember.
My teacher’s exercises relied heavily on black-and-white abstract shapes. We were supposed to fill in the details of a picture in a way that nobody had ever done before. I’m sure these activities were supposed to be fun, but I hated them. While my classmates busily drew and created their images, I simply stared at the blank spaces between the marks, wracking my brain for an original thought, and coming up empty.
It would be another twenty years before I learned to practice something that didn’t come easily. At seven, all the skills I had been asked to use fell into one of two categories: things that came so easily I didn’t remember having learned them, and things that seemed so impossible there was no point in trying. Reading and spelling both fell into the first category. Catching a football and memorizing my multiplication tables fell into the latter.
So, when I couldn’t come up with unique uses for those black-and-white drawings, I learned the wrong lesson. Instead of getting better at thinking creatively, I simply learned that I wasn’t creative.
This may come as a surprise to my parents—Hi Mom and Dad!—because I never told them. I was ashamed to admit it to anyone at all. Being terrible at sports I could shrug off. And somebody let me in on the great secret that nobody in the real world was going to take away my calculator. But creativity? I knew, even then, that creativity was important. I was so ashamed of my lack of creativity that I buried that false belief down deep in my psyche for decades.
I knew I wanted to be creative. Every job I’d ever imagined for my adult self had a creative component. It’s amazing how many life choices this kind of mistaken belief will impact. I didn’t take any visual art electives. I studied music, but never composition. I studied theatre, but never wrote a play. I never painted a set or sewed a costume without detailed and specific instructions from someone else.
I didn’t even take creative writing classes in high school or college. (Ahem.)
I worked in the arts for fifteen years, and never called myself an artist.
In my early thirties, I read an essay that differentiated between generative creativity and creative problem-solving. That was my way in, I figured. I still thought that I wasn’t a generatively creative person, but I was a problem solver. And a good one. I was a great editor, of both writing and ideas, as long as someone else put in the groundwork first.
I wish I could tell you that this is when I kept reading and learned that creativity is a skill rather than a quality. Honestly, though, that didn’t even occur to me.
So, how did I learn to get over my fear of generating creative work on my own?
I learned it by accident. The hardest, and most effective way there is: by having work that needed doing, and nobody around to do it.
Ironically, I learned this life-changing truth in the same work environments that ultimately lead to burnout. I was alone in the office every time I needed marketing copy for the theatre season. Grant application narratives. Eblast text. Fundraising letters. The work needed to get done, so I rolled up my metaphorical sleeves and did it.
And yes, some of it was terrible. Most of it was, at first. It would be years before I read Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird and learned her approach to terrible first drafts, but I lived the truth of it. Desperate to meet my deadlines, I got words on paper, and then made them prettier the second time through.
What I didn’t realize was that I’d started exercising a long-neglected muscle. I was practicing being generatively creative. That practice came in tiny spurts, and in activities that didn’t look anything like that long-ago series of black shapes on white backgrounds, but I finally lost my fear of the blank page.
Honestly, I’m still better at editing than drafting. My creativity muscle feels weak, especially if I get caught in the trap of comparing my off-the-cuff ideas to someone else’s. Now, though, I have the wisdom I wish someone had whispered in my seven-year-old ear: Keep practicing. Try again. You can do this.