Creativity as a Process
I've been going through some of my old writing journals, lately, and I came upon this entry, written in 2008 while teaching a class on Autobiography to first year Creative Writing students. ******************************** What is creativity and where does it come from? How do we recognise it? How do we nurture it and how does it grow? Ghiselin describes the creative process as a process of evolution, of taking something that already exists and turning it into something new or something better. It is a cause and effect relationship, where the effect may not necessarily be recognised or valued at first instance: 'Because every creative act overpasses the established order in some way and in some degree, it is likely at first to appear eccentric to most men' (1997:3). We are reminded that in his lifetime, Van Gogh never sold a painting (a claim which is disputed by the experts), yet today we know he was a visionary, experimenting with colour and fo...