THE ROOTS OF CREATIVE GENIUS
Creativity is indispensable in business, cooking, child rearing and many other facets of life and led me to start reading The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp. One of the central points of her book is that one needs to work at creativity and must know how to prepare to be creative. There is a process that generates creativity. The details are different for every person but the basic process can be learned and become habitual.
Mozart, an innately gifted creative artist, still had to work extremely hard and was fiercely focused. His hands were deformed by the time he was twenty eight years old because of all the hours he had spent practicing, performing and gripping a quill pen to compose.
It takes skill to bring something you’ve imagined into the world and developing skill takes practice and discipline. The popular notion of being “struck with a lightning bolt of inspiration”is rarely accurate. Tharp makes the point that without the proper skills and preparation the lightning bolt will only leave you stunned. In the culinary field, it is often the chefs that spent years training that can best implement their ideas.
In a past post I wrote about how a change of context (and a little caffeine) can help me be creative and I’m always interested in hearing how other people get their creative juices flowing.
1 CommentCategory Creativity
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by Justin Hanson
On August 15, 2009 at 2:38 pm
People often equate creativity with originality. But sometimes creativity is incremental. Sometimes it’s an idea or an image (or a taste) that gets refined and refined. Although unrelated to my passion (architecture), music is often a source of focus. Hearing a good song can spark a thought or an image in my mind, then it’s a matter of staying in that place until the idea has materialized.