I loved college. Great professors. Great content. Great learning environment. But I’ve been thinking, did it kill my creativity?
I’m a licensed social studies teacher so you can probably imagine what much of my college coursework looked like. Read thought-provoking and highly academic book or article. Respond to said book or article with a thesis-driven essay. Discuss said article or book. Realize your response essay was completely off and that you were very confused. And repeat.
I know that doesn’t sound all that amazing, but I learned so many amazing things. It was really something special.
But what about creativity? Writing essay after essay with a dire need for structure and clarity leaves little room for overly creative writing. In fact, I HATE reading history books that add creativity to the writing. It’s painful to read a history book that spends more time describing the setting than actually interpreting what happened. It feels like historical fiction to me.
But here I am in the blogosphere and I can guarantee most of my readers would rather read a creative masterpiece than the dull, straightforward history writing I like to chew on.
I don’t desire to be a dull writer and I don’t know that I necessarily am, but I can see how my time in college drilled some of the creativity out of me. We weren’t asked to create history. We were asked to interpret it.
Now that I want to write creatively for my historical fiction novel and for my song lyrics, I do need to open up to breaking outside of my college-created comfort zone.
Thank goodness I’m not writing essays anymore. How constraining! It’s hard to have voice when your debating the economic effects of the New Deal especially if you had a subpar history education in the past and just found out what New Deal was. (Apparently, it’s not a new hand in cards.)
Enough of the dad jokes, I’m not even a dad.
Finding a resurgence in my creative writing has at times been difficult. I want everything to tie into a nice, neat package to send out into the worldwide web. Creativity is messy.
Creativity is also risky. It puts you in a more vulnerable position because you are moving outside of a structure. It’s freeing, but not when you want to control everything. Then, it just feels like chaos.
I’ve had to get used to this creative mindset. It’s not linear and very imperfect. In thesis writing, you can look back and find the pieces. Is there a thesis and are there points that go directly back to that thesis? If yes, even if you display no creative writing, you will have at least followed a format that can lead to success.
Creativity leads to failure. Failure leads to innovation. The greatest musicians, inventors, and writers in the world are also the biggest failures. They just don’t let it stop them.
I’ve found this to be so true in my songwriting. I’m terrified of creating a tune that no one would like or a melody that doesn’t make sense. Don’t even get me started on lyrics. But if I’m afraid to fail, I’ll never create any music at all. It only develops over time making creative choices, choices that include knowing what “failures” to toss aside.
Did college kill my creativity? Of course not. It is pretty hard to destroy the creativity of the human brain. Yet, I think it holds me back from my greatest work. This is not college’s fault. What I learned in college was very valuable. It’s up to me to step outside my comfort zone and embrace the creativity inside of me even if it means less structure, less control, and more chaos.