Creativity and a Writer's Courage
“…the practical mind is useful, but if it weren’t for imagination people wouldn’t have gotten very far; there wouldn’t be any electric lights, baseball, math and science, or art of any kind..’
“Without imagination, no one would make anything new. Imagination is as important as practical thinking…” Fr: Arthur Collins and the Three Wishes by Linda Rash Pilkington
On June 4, 1999 City Castles became an LLC. By 2000 we were http://www.citycastles.com on the Internet, and looking back, I’m not sure how I ever got us there because I barely knew what the Internet was, let alone how to get my company on it. It began, as most creative undertakings do, with an idea that was to be made into something-in my case–a product.
For me the product was the STOP FORM, a form for colleges and universities to aid their efforts for student retention. I had created and designed the form, and City Castles was the company that I built to sell it. But of course there had to be more then one product, and so everything else on City Castles came into being.
City Castles, and its products, were the result of my creative mind and my practical mind coming together to imagine, play, plan and struggle, and then to find practical solutions to bring into being what I had imagined–that finished product– that had begun as my idea.
After the initial creative struggle, the steps between idea and the product, were the hard parts for me. Those practical details of making an idea into a reality, the how, and the who, and the what do I do now? Took as much courage and struggle as the courage involved in artistic creativity that Rollo May wrote about in The Courage to Create.
May’s insightful 1975 book, recognized that all professions, as well as business and science also demand creative courage, but that creative courage is an absolute necessity for artists whether they are writers, painters, or musicians.
May believed that the artists who create new art forms change the world as they do it. He described the artist’s encounter with the problem, and then on through the process by which the creative solution came to the mind of the creator. And he gave a wonderful description of that “Ah Ha” moment.
May first described the periods of thought, the struggle for the right solution and the practical work of the creative person. And then, usually during a period of rest– the flash of inspiration, of illumination: the solution the artist had been looking for, suddenly, and joyfully, appeared.
That breakthrough in thinking is a recurring experience for writers of fiction; it is similar, but more profound than arriving at a good idea. The creative process, the searching for the “ah ha” moment constantly presents itself on page after page, because much of writing consists of solving problems.
Talent helps, serendipity plays a role, but that is not all, and artists know that, whether they have the courage or the humility to admit it.
Good writing isn’t just a matter of plotting, or of solving problems, there is something mysterious and beautiful about creativity, and creative inspiration, that guides the work and that comes both from within and from outside the writer. Some joke about the “muse” that brings them inspiration, but others, when caught in their most honest and solemn moments, admit, sometimes haltingly, that creativity is a gift from a most generous God.