Creativity is a Choice

Many people seem to think there’s a difference between creatives and other people.

There is.

Creatives have decided to accept the flow of creativity into their life — and they’ve harnessed these ideas and inventions to make a difference in their world.

The truth is, everybody has creative potential. The difference is that great creators have reached for that potential by mastering their craft and connecting with their creativity.

This is a good time to note that the average person exercises creativity on a regular basis. When speaking, we cannot prepare our every sentence in advance. We make up conversation on the fly — it’s the biggest jam session going around.

We cannot plan every event even in a single day, and we’re constantly improvising to make sure we stay on track. When a traffic jam makes us late for a meeting, we have no choice but to take it in our stride and get on with the agenda.

Life forces us to adjust our plans constantly — and it’s our innate creativity that allows us to deal with it, however uncomfortable juggling the uncertainties may be.

It’s this adaptability that is the foundation of our artistic creativity. But rather than the responsive creativity that comes from dealing with the hand life deals us, art is about wielding this improvisational ability in ways that might not seem necessary in day to day life.

Bursts of creativity can be quite frivolous and seemingly unimportant. But responding to inspiration is the first step in a creative journey — and unless we keep walking, we ain’t gonna get nowhere.

This requires a choice.

Just like how we improvise conversation unconsciously, we have the capacity to generate musical sequences, poetic images and other creative phenomena automatically. In fact, we do it all the time.

Take for example the ambient music that sometimes hums away in the back of your head while falling asleep. The average person listens to these tunes while drifting off and thinks, “I wish I could capture this and play it to people, it’s so good!”

Those we regard as great composers are much more likely to get out of bed, go to their instrument and do their best to capture it, perhaps one day to play it to other people.

Take the famous story of Paul McCartney awakening from a dream with the tune of ‘Yesterday’ echoing around his head. How many times have you or I had a similar moment, only to think, “mmmmh, so cozy” and drift off back to sleep?

Instead, McCartney dragged himself out of bed to the piano where he could translate the melody from his head onto the keys, in the hopes of capturing its haunting quality in a song.

This initial choice to act on the melody was only a starting point. A self-proclaimed career songwriter, McCartney did what was required of him to turn this melody into a finished piece.

He found some place-holder lyrics for the melody, knowing that even though they weren’t good enough to consider it finished, they at least filled the blanks.

“Scrambled eggs…. oh my girl you’ve got some sexy legs.”

Beatles folklore has it that it took him 18 months before he finally stumbled upon ‘Yesterday,’ which went on to become the most covered song of all time (at that point). All because of the commitment to make it happen.

The accomplished artist doesn’t wait for a miracle — they create miracles.

An accomplished artist has accepted that they are capable of generating new ideas — and when the ideas do come, the artist makes some effort to capture the idea and work on it.

Often, this requires much less work than you’d think. Sometimes, simply the act of paying attention to these ideas and saving them for later is all that is needed.

Trusting automatic creativity is a key quality for an artist. Allowing that sometimes, incredible creations pour forth fully formed is an assumption which can immediately lead people to create art.

Whilst some artists spend months or years agonising over their creations (also a choice), some artists make a career of spending between five minutes and a few hours on a creation before sharing it with the world — and both ways, creations like this can go on to have a profound impact.

However, neither a 15-minute gem or a life’s labour is possible without that initial choice — saying YES to an idea or a creative feeling as it appears.

YES is the first step in the creative process.

Yet so many people say NO!

“No. This is shit. I’m not an artist. I don’t know what I’m doing. I should leave it to the experts. I’m going back to sleep.”

Imagine if Paul McCartney had said NO. It’s pretty easy to imagine, right?

Because NO is the easy option.

It’s YES that requires action. YES demands a plunge into the unknown, and YES leads to the potential result of an amazing creation…

It’s also YES that influences our relationship with ourselves in other aspects of life. YES reduces hesitation with all of our creative impulses, in rushed meetings as well as daily conversation.

YES turns our fleeting inspirations into a work of art.

It’s this YES which acknowledges that every one of us has the creativity gene, and that if we learn to trust our innate creative processes, we can reach our creative potential; fluent and artistic.

So next time you’re struck with an idea that could be something amazing — remember that creativity is a choice.

Don’t hold yourself back. Don’t listen to the voices of judgement or comparison — that can come later. Let the creativity flow, and catch what gems should fall in your lap.

Because you are creative — if you allow yourself to be.

Songcraft is the study of songwriting and techniques of creative expression. This methodology was created by Joe Oppenheimer to open the creative flow and craft heart-felt music.

For more information check out www.joeoppenheimer.com/songcraft