You’ve Forgotten How to be Creative — But You Can Re-Learn
Three lessons on creativity after going from worker drone to independent creative
I just wrote a story about frozen peas and their anthropomorphized journey from the frozen tundra of their bag to an inexplicably warming black sea. I have no idea where it came from. I don’t like peas. I don’t remember the last time I ate a pea. I don’t have peas in my house. I don’t even, at present, own a freezer.
It was an exercise in freewriting where I told myself to write whatever popped into my head. There was no prompt and a bag of frozen peas is what came to mind. (How weird is consciousness?) The resulting epic was one of deep separation and loss, exposing the ways in which we deny the inescapable realities of death with poignant parallels to humanity’s race against time in the fight against climate change.
I’m kidding on that last point. The resulting prose of sentient peas was, of course, silly, and, as with any first draft of anything, utter rubbish.
I won’t do anything with this odd little vignette. This was a creative exercise for creativity’s sake because I’m working out my creative thinking like I would a muscle.
Most roles in my career so far have had a creative element. I’ve worked for…
