Derick W J Tan

So in part one, we established that in order to be creative, you must surround yourself with works that you find creative. You then have to try and figure out why they’re considered creative, just get a rough idea, and then using that idea you go work on something yourself to try and be creative.

Here’s the twist.

What’s likely going to happen is that you will fail. No joke. You will most likely fail at trying to be creative. Your lecturer will say that your work is ‘tacky’ which makes  you feel like trashing your work and proceed to login to your blog and write an emo post.

If it helps, seriously, no sarcasm, do it. Why else did you create a blog, right? Once you’re done, however, go figure out where you went wrong and learn from it.

And that’s the key.

Learn – and then apply. Repeat.

Sooner or later you’re going to see – to understand – how something creative is made because creativity is but just someone’s perception/interpretation. It’s not about whether you’re born with it or not, don’t mix creativity with what’s between your legs.

Once you have the general understanding of how a person – a client perhaps – interprets whether something is creative or not, you just have to go tailor your work to their taste and those people are going to say that it’s creative.

The problem here is that you understood creativity – in your line of work – by exposing yourself to other people’s works. Your lecturer didn’t sit down and gave you a lesson on ‘how to be creative’. You went and understood it yourself.

You. Yourself. Undestanding.

That’s why it can’t be taught because you have to experience it yourself and how fast a person understands creativity is entirely dependant on the person himself. Because it’s true when they say that some people are just born talented. All that means is that the rest of us who are short-changed in this aspect will just have to go through the longer way of learning it ourselves and becoming good at it.

Now, when you understand how something is deemed as creative, you’ll have a rough idea of how to go about creating something creative and then that’s when you start waiting for the *ding!*  moment. And that moment is reserved only for the super duber ultra creative ideas.

In the process of waiting - which you don’t literally go sit on a toilet bowl and do - you can continue to churn out works/designs that people like me may say “Eh, the graphics on this website is quite beautiful” while others would say “wow, this piece of rock sculpture is so creative!” You can do that because you understand how to go about doing it such that it’s different, unique and good.

To be creative at something is to also be good at it – to be good at something, you need to study it and practice and we’ve already covered that.

Do. Fail. Learn. Do again. Repeat-until-succeed.

It’s the same formula that you learnt in primary school mathematics when your teacher tosses your workbook across the classroom because you made a careless mistake twice. The idiot threw your workbook because you, the student, didn’t learn.

Student didn’t learn = Teacher epic fail.

Call me arrogant but while my writing now is still far from professional, it’s a hell lot better than the very first story I wrote. No, it’s not HHHL, it’s actually a Sci-fi/Fantasy story that will never see the light of day. But even so, go read a few chapters of Her Hero and His Love and then come back and read a few chapters of Specimen Two: Ixion.

There’s an improvement.

All I have to do now is, well, keep doing – keep on improving. Keep on writing more and more, learn from my mistakes draft after draft, then apply, apply, apply.

You just have to fail again and again and again, which trust me, is not easy to do. But it works =)

Summary:
- Creativity cannot be taught.
- To be creative, you must experience creativity, surround yourself with, and on your own, understand it.
- You need to experiment being creative.
- You’ll probably fail but,
- learn from your failures.
- Apply it to the next thing that you do.
- Improve.
- Sooner or later you’ll get good at it.

If something is impossible, it just means that someone out there is too lazy to go figure out how to do it yet.

- Derick

Over the past few months as I’ve browsed different blogs and forums, talk to friends and strangers, I’ve always come across the topic about how he or she can’t do something even though he or she may love it – and that it was impossible.

Coming from me, the content of this post might actually be a lot more credible if I have a published book to my name first, but uh, I really need to get this out of head now. So bear with me for a few minutes and hear me out, I do have a point to make.

One of the reasons that these people cite as being the problem as to why that can’t do it, is because they’re not creative enough. And that usually shuts other people up because creativity is supposedly something that you either have or don’t.

Bloody bullshit.

Creative cannot be taught – it must be understood. And once you understand creativity, you’ll come to realise how silly it really is.

You must first understand what the hell you’re doing in order to have moments when, take for example: You’re sitting on your toilet bowl, shaking your head as you cuss and swear at vegetables for being so yucky to eat, and all of a sudden you’re inspired by this super creative idea and with it, you became super rich and famous.

Creativity is not mathematics where 1+1=2. You can teach that to a boy and if he gets it, he learnt, if he doesn’t, he’s retarded just slower than other children.

The first thing you have to do is establish what creativity means to you, because while you might find something to be creative, I might find it to be an absolute waste of space.

To me, something that’s creative is something that is:

A. Either unique, or if someone have already done before, done in a different way that produces a different effect/benefit.
B. Useful.

I can never find art creative because it’s just something that you look at – especially paintings. Bloody hell, colours on paper = creative? Seriously. The words I’d use to describe art would be ‘beautiful’, ’stunning’, ‘cool’ or perhaps even ’strange’.

Now, once you’ve established what creativity means to you, you have something to work towards to.

You must now expose yourself to other people’s works and figure out what makes their works so bloody creative to you – how did they do it? Odds are even if you ask them, they’re not going to be able to give you an answer. That is why a lot of people like to say that creativity is something that you either have or don’t – they can’t explain creativity. But hold that thought for now, and try to figure out why or how someone made his work so creatively.

Is it because he reinvented the wheel? Is it because he used a material that was thought to be a bad choice for such an application?

Try and figure out how, then try doing it yourself, apply what you learned/guessed and once you’re done, ask for a few people’s opinions to get their feedbacks/criticisms. And then work on it again.

– The One With Creativity – Part II (coming soon)

If something is impossible, it just means that someone out there is too lazy to go figure out how to do it yet.

- Derick