Cultivating the Creative Personality

I’m fascinated by creativity–who has it, how you get it, what people do with it. From the time I was little, if forced to choose between being considered creative, athletic, or beautiful, I would choose creative every time. Well, that’s not true. There was a period in junior high school when I would have given just about anything to have a boy named David think I was pretty. But I eventually outgrew that, and creativity reigned supreme.

The funny thing about creativity (and perhaps any other trait) is that it’s hard to know when you have it. I’m not alone in this. Agnes De Mille, the contemporary dancer and choreographer, writes in her autobiography Dance to the Piper about a time when she felt she couldn’t gauge the value of her own work. De Mille had just received acclaim for her work on Oklahoma, which she felt was only fairly good, while for years critics had ignored much of what De Mille considered her best work. Disheartened, she talked with Martha Graham, another leading light in contemporary dance, and confessed that she had “a burning desire to be excellent, but no faith that [she] could be.” Graham responded with what De Mille considered the best advice she ever received, and which I think has a lot to say to any of us pursuing a creative life:

There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening, that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium  . . . and be lost.

It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable it is; nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.

Stories like De Mille’s encourage me because, although it is easy to acknowledge her accomplishments and talents in hindsight, seen from the perspective of her own experience, however, there were never any guarantees. She was regularly told she had no talent, that she was too fat or too old. But still, she persisted, in the face of rejection, confusion, and little financial gain. She kept the channel open and kept showing up for her work.

I’ve spent a lot of time recently reading and thinking about creativity, and how to increase its presence in my life. Maybe I’ll be able to uncover some hints or tips to help me down the creative path. Or, at the very least, to keep me from getting too discouraged when that path gets rugged and steep. I’ve learned that although most of us don’t aspire to become Michelangelo, Mozart, or Martha Graham–the people I considered Creative with a Capitol “C”–even garden-variety creativity of the rest of us can be enhanced. The big question is: How?

The answer to this question would take more than a blog post to answer, but I did come across a few ideas. Dr. Nancy Andreasen, a psychiatrist and researcher on creativity identified several traits common to the creative personality. Creative people tend to be:

• Adventurous, rebellious and individualistic, yet at the same time sensitive to the experiences of themselves and others;
• Playful yet persistent;
• Intensely curious about everything, but single-minded in their vision.

These could be considered paradoxes, unless you consider the work by one of my favorite writers, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who found in his research that the creative personality can best be described by one word: complexity. He says, “it involves the ability to move from one extreme to the other as the occasion requires. … [C]reative persons definitely know both extremes and experience both with equal intensity and without inner conflict.” For example, they have a great deal of physical energy to pursue their craft, but are also often quiet and at rest. They tend to be smart, but take a naive approach to a problem. They have a combination of playfulness and discipline, or responsibility and irresponsibility. On and on, the examples continue.

I was sitting at my desk, engross in my reading. I had several books spread open before me, highlighting paragraphs and taking notes on my computer. I was focused. Then my husband walked into my office and asked if I wanted to drive to the Oregon coast the next day with our daughter Sarah. We could spend some time walking on the beach, buying salt water taffy, and maybe eating some clam chowder for lunch.

I was totally caught off guard. Of course there was no way I could drop everything and go to the beach for the day. I had so much important thinking to do. Plus, that meant I would miss yoga. I couldn’t just change my schedule on a whim.

Or could I? Hadn’t I just been reading about playfulness? Curiosity? Being adventurous? Maybe part of nurturing the complexity of the creative life was a willingness to be flexible. Is it possible that there are many different strategies you employ to “keep the channel open,” as Martha Graham suggests? For me that means that it is important that I know how to buckle down and spend hours working at my desk. But maybe it’s equally important at times to be able to change course quickly, to shut down my computer, roll up my jeans, and go for a walk on the beach. On a Thursday. For no apparent reason.

Which is exactly what I did.

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