I’ve had a lot of thoughts about what creativity means, mostly because I typically haven’t thought of myself as a creative person. I still remember sitting in my guidance counselor’s office in high school. She was asking me if I did “anything creative” and, well, I couldn’t think of anything. She was looking for a “creative accomplishment” suitable for a college resume — writing, painting, music — something that could demonstrate Certified Creativity to the college boards. I think a lot of us who grow up in that type of environment learn to see creativity in terms of some piece of art that we can point to and say “behold my creative accomplishment!” I eventually realized how sad that is. Creativity for me isn’t writing stories or sculpting, and it probably never will be. But for me it’s more about getting dressed in the morning or finding cool junk treasures to put in my house. Or even finding just the right way to fit my thought into a 140 character tweet. And finding 100 little ways to be creative through the day makes me a lot happier than attempting to commit to some official creative endeavor that just isn’t me, simply because I learned at a young age that that was the only thing that counts as art.

(sorry i got a bit rambly at the end, but i hope you all got my point)

but lemme chew. here goes: maybe being “creative” is about making deliberate choices, not previously assigned, in order to produce some outcome, whether tangible or non-tangible. speech, for instance, is not tangible, but it is creative – not all, grant you; our lives are full of vacant, phatic communion. returning, though to the example of the drug-addled painter. okay, he’s not mindful, but he is making deliberate choices about color, canvas, what have you, to produce a tangible outcome. a kid doing a paint by numbers page is just following rules. one creates, the other makes. … however, if that kid is then inspired by her rote craft to paint her own paintings, then maybe her paint-by-numbers afternoon becomes retroactively creative. maybe being creative is about deliberation and inspiration; that you allow the activity to communicate with you, regardless of how lofty or mundane that activity is.
i dunno. just thinking out loud.

Sean, I really like the distinction you draw between ‘imaginative’ and ‘creative’…ideas versus action. But I do wonder about a number of people I know who I think of as intensely creative, but who are “stuck” – it’s like they need to be plugged in and then they’ll light up and be who they really are. It doesn’t feel right to say they aren’t creative — but again, maybe that gets back to the muddled definition of the word in the first place.