“The creative adult is the child who has survived.”
Ursula K. Le Guin
My wife, who still insists, "I can't draw well," related this story:
It was fall, and for our art project the entire fifth grade class had to color a picture of a jack-o-lantern. The teacher proudly hung them all about the room. Everyone's. Except mine. She said it didn't look at all like a pumpkin.
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Have a similar story? Maybe not to do with the graphical arts, but with writing a story or an essay? Or a poem? Perhaps you had an invention-- A GREAT IDEA!!!! TRULY...and it got shot down as soon as the words left your mouth. In fact, you could see their bloody corpses laying there on the classroom floor...alongside your ego.
Yes, persistence is a crucial ingredient in being creative. Particularly because most GREAT IDEAS!!!! are, to be honest, not that great. But, who knows if the next one, or the twenty-next or the five-hunnerdeth won't be a truly great idea--that's the reality...the reality that is both full of failure yet boundlessly wide and deep and long! Doubt my words?...just ask Thomas Edison!
Share a story, I'd love to hear one. Meanwhile, I've got a very short story...I am still writing a poem a day. Many of them are mediocre. Some are silly and would be quite entertaining...for the average nine-year-old! (As if that were a bad thing?) Some are, frankly, future compost. But, every once in a while, that flowing stream of creative juices hits an eddy current and stirs something up that is actually worth listening to. Hmmm.
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Here's the daily scrawl from 1/22/14:
Adult pretensions
...shed 'em.
Along with fruitless contentions.
Come, let us make peace in all dimensions.
That is my intention:
the absolute suspension
of adult convention,
so listen to the child within
and celebrate invention!
