Creativity involves
a lot of thought. Most of the work of writing is thinking: questioning,
investigating, exploring and researching, turning the idea round and round,
interrogating it from every angle.
There are many
different ways to think, but if you want to be creative you must allow
intuition and feeling to influence and guide your thoughts. Pure rational
analysis is fine for certain activities – maths, mainly – but won’t get you far
in real life.
Rationality can tell
you how to live: how to pay your
bills and keep the wheels turning, but it can’t tell you why.
Likewise, the
remembering and regurgitating of facts isn’t thinking. A well-stocked brain is
all well and good, but can you do
anything with all that information? What is google for anyway?
Real thinking is about
connecting and making sense of disparate facts. Creative thinking is about
making connections between things in novel ways. The only way this can be done
is by thinking for yourself. If you follow the crowd your creativity will be
limited to the tried and tested, and what is acceptable to yourself and others,
and the market.
To become fully
yourself you must define yourself apart from the group; you must be willing to
go out on a limb and challenge yourself, push beyond your comfort zone.
You don’t know who you
are until you come up against a limitation, either in yourself or in the
group/culture, and have to find a way through it. This may mean leaving old
parts of yourself behind as your thinking takes you into uncharted territory.
Can you think against
yourself?
What do you think?
Share your thoughts below… Next time: Choosing
First posted here: http://jessicadavidson.co.uk/2014/04/16/living-creatively-in-a-mad-world-thinking/
