What's up with Whatsit

Creativity

Emily was talking yesterday about the fact that she is better at math than at language. What got us on the subject was that she is taking the same test that my students at school are, and the test is divided up into Language Arts for two days and Math for one day. All of my personal kids are fairly straightforward thinkers - they think in a straight line, so to speak, and creativity isn't their forte. Yet.

I was telling Emily that one way to inspire creativity was to have somebody give you a writing prompt. For example, if somebody said to write a story with three certain things in it, like maybe a wheelbarrow, a shooting star, and a little girl with red hair. She said she could do that pretty well, since her teacher had given them writing prompts before. It was thinking up ideas that she had a hard time with. She is pretty young yet - eleven.

I was in college before I found myself able to think creatively, and then it burst out with a vengeance. Mine tends to come and go, for some reason. If I'm under a lot of stress, I clam up. Not just verbally, my writing clams up too. This happened to me recently, which is why I took a break from my blog. I kept finding myself just sitting there staring at the blank screen. Which I really got tired of pretty quickly, but my mind wouldn't go as far as to figure out something to do about it.

I got pretty sick of my non-creativity. It's boring to me not to have my creative juices flowing. Doing a blog every day is my exercise in going back in the other direction. Right now, I'm just doing a blog. Making it interesting is the next step.

The point is that with Emily, I found myself trying to explain creativity. Also, I used to try to explain creativity to one of my old co-workers at the juvie jail - a math teacher. It's not exactly explainable. What I told the co-worker was that writing a good story involved looking at something from a different angle: just take one step to the left and see what the difference is, then write about it.

Not a very good explanation. Trying to come up with a creative explanation for creativity is hard.