I, APPARENTLY, HAD NO CREATIVITY

 

This month’s theme: creativity as a kid superpower. Hmm.
It’s not that I can’t buy it, it’s more that, as a kid, I positively knew I didn’t have it.

Let’s start with kindergarten and all those times my friends wanted to “play house” and pretend to cook dinner and dust the furniture. Where was the fun when I could do that for real? Or the fun in pretending the baby dolls were real babies? Feeding them. Rocking them to sleep.

Sure. I played along but, deep-down, I questioned my skills. Where was my imagination? Why couldn’t I see this as fun? And especially, why couldn’t I think of a way to bring more interesting suggestions to this playdate?

Sometime later, along came Barbies. This, of course, was when Barbies were simply glamorous, proportionately improbable, dolls. Sure, these figurines were more sophisticated than those soft baby dolls, but to me, it was the same old story. While my friends wanted to change Barbie’s clothes and take her shopping, I wanted our Barbies to go on a treasure hunt. Guess who got shut down. I came away with the sense that my idea was lame.

I was lucky, though, to live in a neighborhood with a wide age range of kids who organized nightly games on our street or who had interesting things like xylophones in their basements or showed us how you could make your skin appear to have grown a terrible fungus. But when the neighborhood was quiet and I was left to my own devices, it seemed I couldn’t drum up anything to satisfy an undefined urge. I, apparently, had no creativity.

If anyone then had mentioned that creativity is a kid superpower, I would have concluded that most people lived in this vibrant world brimming with color and excitement and overall brilliance, but some of us were destined to slink into cavernous spaces of gray.

My unrealistic bug

It didn’t matter that I could see a myriad of scenes in the clouds. I could paint objects with unrealistic colors. I could turn a phrase that made adults laugh. But I didn’t recognize that as creativity, not when other kids were oohing and aahing over things that were seemingly more conformist.

 Looking back, though, I can see my false reasoning clearly: In truth, my creativity simply outshined my ability at the time.

Funny, but that’s still a theme in my writing life.

Just yesterday, I finished a near-final draft of a new MG novel. So, it’s now time to turn my attention to this spark of an idea that jumped into my mind last December. It started with a theme (which, as an aside, is not my normal process). It grew with a shadow of a main character, a sense of setting, and an inkling of the story’s destination. And now I’m faced with that familiar feeling...
The story I hope to write is smarter, more creative, than my ability to conceive of it.

Yet, I’ve kicked that self-doubt so many times since “playing house”, I know some things. For one, it may take time. It will definitely take long walks and hot showers and times of sheer boredom where the brain does its creative best when it’s not being forced to come up with brilliance. I do know...
This will happen. And I can’t wait to get started!

Jody Feldman credits her parents with giving her the space and encouragement to explore her creative side and see the vibrancy that swirls all around even when it’s not physically there.