On Creativity

By Emily Walls

Imagine this: You are locked in a windowless room on the second story of a commercial building. You have with you a handful of binders, a legal pad, one (1) pen and one (1) green marker, several paperclips, a stapler, a Norman Rockwell calendar, and a desk. On that desk you have a computer, which is equipped with Word and Excel only. No Internet. No phone. No one else. How many hours do you think will go by before you begin composing a 29-stanza poem about a young girl who brutally murders a Microsoft icon?

For me, the answer was 114 hours.

When I was in the fourth grade, my teacher announced one day that the school would be offering an extra art class for those who showed particular giftedness in the visual arts. She passed out a small test—a single page with three simple shapes that we were to draw at double size—and explained that if we were interested in the class, we could submit our completed exams and wait for the results.

I was excited. I had never produced anything less than A material in all subjects, I was already participating in an accelerated school program, and I was motivated. Chance of rejection: zero.

So I gave up my recess that day to stay in and work on my test, painstakingly measuring each shape with a ruler and carefully copying the shapes at twice their sizes. I handed in my paper, confident that I would be accepted. A few days later, my teacher posted a paper with the names of accepted students, and I was horrified to discover that my name was not among them. I did not understand then what I know now: Art is not about rulers and grids.

I walked away from my fourth grade experience with new perspective on my place in the artistic community, and though I gained valuable humility and insight into the nature of art and creativity, I simultaneously bought into a profound fallacy that all creativity equals visual art. Since I was not good at drawing, I reasoned, I must essentially lack creativity. Add to that the further segregation of subjects in school and exposure to right-brain/left-brain concepts, and I became fully convinced that I simply was not a creative person. There were creatives and there were non-creatives, and I was the latter.

I built my education on this false premise, concentrating on subjects that could be measured, skills that could be calculated. I had a natural aptitude for writing, but I feared the demands of creative writing courses, so instead of majoring in English in college, I majored in business. I took finance and accounting courses and learned about target markets and interest rates.

And I was right about certain things. I am crazy good at whipping up spreadsheets. I have a talent for organizing ideas, and I can make order from chaos. I’m good at creating systems that make processes faster and smoother. Plus, I have great spatial reasoning, which comes in handy for packing cars on road trips.

Do you know what I suck at? Picking out two colors that look good together. Telling the difference between Arial and Helvetica. Knowing what “white space” is. Layering clothing.

I spent six years post college keeping myself in the lands of Reason, Logic, and Fact, because creativity was not for me. I worked several different jobs – some I liked, some I didn’t – and for one month of 2011, I took a temp position working in a windowless office on the second floor of a commercial building, my only companions a desk, a handful of office supplies, and Microsoft Word. One hundred fourteen working hours and 29 stanzas about murder later, I came to an important – no, essential – conclusion: Creativity belongs to everyone.

I was contracted to work forty hours per week in that position, but the job I was hired to do sometimes took me one hour per day to accomplish, and one time just seven minutes. I begged for more work from my supervisor and coworkers, but they told me there was nothing more for me to do and that I should go to my office and read for the rest of the day. Eyes can only take so much small print, so I spent an alarming number of hours staring at a blank wall. After a few of those hours, I was amazed to find my mind teeming with crazy ideas – comic strips, stories, poems, and the like. I built cities out of staples and file folders. I made origami Star Wars figures. I drew pictures (crude though they were) and made up characters. I wrote Verbal Infusion's first post with pen and paper at that desk.

I found that when you strip away the distractions, your mind will fill the void with your own unique thoughts, and your mind is alive and alight with creativity, even if you’re the kind of person who thinks Papyrus is the font of the future.

That temp job is long over, but I learned from it that I need to make time for reflection and doodling, that I need to intentionally seek inspiration. So I now set aside time to check out my friends' design work on The Fresh Exchange and A Pair of Pears. I watch TED Talks every now and then to see what brilliant people are doing in fields wildly different from my own. I take breaks from romantic comedies to watch movies that challenge me mentally and amaze me visually. And after I’ve done that, I sit quietly and think. And then I create.