January journal: Creative
Jan. 11th, 2014 11:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livI was chatting to jack about what prompt he might suggest, and if there's anything he doesn't already know about me after six years together. And it turns out that I hadn't mentioned some of the creative projects I've done, so that became the prompt. This post will also serve as a kind of belated response to kaberett's post about creativity.
I generally don't think of myself as creative, at least not in the sense that I make art (in any medium at all). I am however creative in the sense that I think about original ideas, I'm creative in my approach to science and teaching and other tasks and decisions. Whenptc24 linked to this Big Five test (a personality scale thing that has been proposed as a replacement for the MBTI) there was a section that measured something to do with creativity. I answered some of the questions in ways that suggest I'm really creative and some in ways to suggest I'm not creative at all, and on balance came out with a personality type that included a description saying that most of my friends probably think of me as not very intellectual. Which really couldn't be further from the mark, "intellectual" is one of my most prominent traits! But the test seems to be based on the assumption that people who think creatively also make art. Also a little while back ceb described me in reference to creativity:
That said, when I was discussing this withjack I did come up with a few examples where I have done something that could be considered creative in the artistic sense. In my first few years of school, I managed to get a bit of a reputation for poetry. I'd been exposed to quite a lot of poetry at home from my dad who often used to read or recite poems. And I had a pretty good ear for rhythm and a broad vocabulary, and I was aware of a few rhyme schemes other than merely couplets, all of which made me look really impressive compared to most six-year-olds. So I got a lot of praise for my "poetic" ability. I think it's still true that I have a reasonably good ear for rhythm and a broad vocabulary, which is helpful in writing poetry but by no means sufficient to be an actually competent poet rather than a precocious child.
So actually my most successful poetry has been more or less filk; people sometimes turn to me to rewrite well-known songs so that the words refer to someone in our social circle. I also occasionally play with verse translations of Hebrew and French poetry, meaning that I can depend on someone else to come up with the actually artistic concept and I just do the playing with words thing I feel more confident of. I do very occasionally post poems here, justifying myself that bad poetry is part of the tradition of LJ / DW and I don't have to feel embarrassed that my stuff is a bit rubbish. Oh, and as a teenager I wrote a fair bit of pretentious mostly blank verse, and some slightly less awful but still pretentious formal verse, which got published in the school magazine that didn't have very high standards. Whenjack and I got together I started writing him a sonnet cycle, but I only managed four of the five sonnets I'd intended.
Other than that, I did a little bit of theatre at school. People are often surprised to learn that when I was 15 I was commissioned to write the script of a pantomime which was performed by an am-dram group in a local village. The brief was Cinderella with Power Rangers (!) and I ended up with a suitably silly thing where Cinderella's fairy godmother was the viewpoint character, the youngest fairy in fairy godmother school who rebelled and wanted to be a Power Ranger rather than a fairy godmother. The pantomime was moderately successful I think; it was a bit of a weird experience to discover that the theatre group had changed some of my writing to include their traditional in-jokes. They also weren't allowed to use any of the filk songs I'd written for copyright reasons, so they came up with some basically awful songs instead, and I felt embarrassed at being associated with the awful songs and jokes, but also proud that my work had been performed on a real stage with a real audience. The script of the panto is lost on a defunct computer, probably mercifully.
I also co-directed our sixth form Greek play, Euripides' Hippolytus. We did the dialogue in English and the choruses in Greek. Most of my input was in scanning the verses, a skill I've unfortunately long since lost, but it was a wonderfully soothing intellectual exercise at the time. Does applying the rules of scansion count as creative? I'm not sure, but it was a direct contribution to a work of art. Secondary to that I helped to train the chorus members to recite the verses. It was very educational to attempt to take a role of some minor authority with my peers, and I can still recite some of the most intensively rehearsed bits of the choruses, notably the hymn to Eros.
That's probably most of it. I'm fairly resigned to the fact that I'll never write a novel, but I can imagine one day attempting to write some popular non-fiction. Maybe this blog will cover some of the training, some of the need to put in time writing badly before you can write well. I like to hope I'm a better writer now than I was ten years ago, but I feel very much at the stage where I have just enough expertise to see how far I fall short.
[January Journal masterlist. Anyone want the last empty slot?]
jack about what prompt he might suggest, and if there's anything he doesn't already know about me after six years together. And it turns out that I hadn't mentioned some of the creative projects I've done, so that became the prompt. This post will also serve as a kind of belated response to kaberett's post about creativity.I generally don't think of myself as creative, at least not in the sense that I make art (in any medium at all). I am however creative in the sense that I think about original ideas, I'm creative in my approach to science and teaching and other tasks and decisions. When
ptc24 linked to this Big Five test (a personality scale thing that has been proposed as a replacement for the MBTI) there was a section that measured something to do with creativity. I answered some of the questions in ways that suggest I'm really creative and some in ways to suggest I'm not creative at all, and on balance came out with a personality type that included a description saying that most of my friends probably think of me as not very intellectual. Which really couldn't be further from the mark, "intellectual" is one of my most prominent traits! But the test seems to be based on the assumption that people who think creatively also make art. Also a little while back ceb described me in reference to creativity: she thinks she doesn't make anything, but in fact she makes communities and events and explanations and all manner of cool organisey thingsThat is honestly one of my favourite compliments I've ever received, and I think it does make sense. I am finding it rather comfortable as an addition to my self-image that I create communities and organisey things, even if I don't make original works of art very often.
That said, when I was discussing this with
jack I did come up with a few examples where I have done something that could be considered creative in the artistic sense. In my first few years of school, I managed to get a bit of a reputation for poetry. I'd been exposed to quite a lot of poetry at home from my dad who often used to read or recite poems. And I had a pretty good ear for rhythm and a broad vocabulary, and I was aware of a few rhyme schemes other than merely couplets, all of which made me look really impressive compared to most six-year-olds. So I got a lot of praise for my "poetic" ability. I think it's still true that I have a reasonably good ear for rhythm and a broad vocabulary, which is helpful in writing poetry but by no means sufficient to be an actually competent poet rather than a precocious child. So actually my most successful poetry has been more or less filk; people sometimes turn to me to rewrite well-known songs so that the words refer to someone in our social circle. I also occasionally play with verse translations of Hebrew and French poetry, meaning that I can depend on someone else to come up with the actually artistic concept and I just do the playing with words thing I feel more confident of. I do very occasionally post poems here, justifying myself that bad poetry is part of the tradition of LJ / DW and I don't have to feel embarrassed that my stuff is a bit rubbish. Oh, and as a teenager I wrote a fair bit of pretentious mostly blank verse, and some slightly less awful but still pretentious formal verse, which got published in the school magazine that didn't have very high standards. When
jack and I got together I started writing him a sonnet cycle, but I only managed four of the five sonnets I'd intended. Other than that, I did a little bit of theatre at school. People are often surprised to learn that when I was 15 I was commissioned to write the script of a pantomime which was performed by an am-dram group in a local village. The brief was Cinderella with Power Rangers (!) and I ended up with a suitably silly thing where Cinderella's fairy godmother was the viewpoint character, the youngest fairy in fairy godmother school who rebelled and wanted to be a Power Ranger rather than a fairy godmother. The pantomime was moderately successful I think; it was a bit of a weird experience to discover that the theatre group had changed some of my writing to include their traditional in-jokes. They also weren't allowed to use any of the filk songs I'd written for copyright reasons, so they came up with some basically awful songs instead, and I felt embarrassed at being associated with the awful songs and jokes, but also proud that my work had been performed on a real stage with a real audience. The script of the panto is lost on a defunct computer, probably mercifully.
I also co-directed our sixth form Greek play, Euripides' Hippolytus. We did the dialogue in English and the choruses in Greek. Most of my input was in scanning the verses, a skill I've unfortunately long since lost, but it was a wonderfully soothing intellectual exercise at the time. Does applying the rules of scansion count as creative? I'm not sure, but it was a direct contribution to a work of art. Secondary to that I helped to train the chorus members to recite the verses. It was very educational to attempt to take a role of some minor authority with my peers, and I can still recite some of the most intensively rehearsed bits of the choruses, notably the hymn to Eros.
That's probably most of it. I'm fairly resigned to the fact that I'll never write a novel, but I can imagine one day attempting to write some popular non-fiction. Maybe this blog will cover some of the training, some of the need to put in time writing badly before you can write well. I like to hope I'm a better writer now than I was ten years ago, but I feel very much at the stage where I have just enough expertise to see how far I fall short.
[January Journal masterlist. Anyone want the last empty slot?]
(no subject)
Date: 2014-01-12 11:01 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-01-12 08:39 pm (UTC)This reads as a creative person to me, after all science can be very creative and so is planning events for others.
I used to feel very uncreative compared with my immediate family; but it turns out I enjoy writing poetry, short stories and songs even if I can't paint as well as I wished.