Other people and I who consider themselves artist, those who delve into creative processes – agrees that hesitation is the enemy of creativity. How can a place like college hesitate someone you asked? Well, through their ways of thinking. In college, you have to be fast, analytical, and solve the problem. That simply doesn’t work if you want to be creative! When I went to college I found myself to be out of touch, and I was not fit for it. Each day, I feel like something within me died. The feeling went on for more than a year, and throughout the course of it, I was filled with despair and denial. Not until I found a book by John Cleese, with the title “Creativity”.
I considered the book to be my holy book. How can I not? The book has solved a year of agitation and confusion of mine! The book was so interesting, and it wasn’t written by someone who considered themself as an expert who had all of these useless titles. The guy who wrote the book was a comedian, and he wrote tons of sketches for the famous comedy group Monty Python. In one of the chapters, he stated a reason as to why the kind of thinking offered and thought by academia is not in line with that of creative thinking. Solving a problem in an extended amount of time is not creative thinking. He argued that creative thinking requires a kind of contemplative thinking, in which we contemplate the problem instead of trying to find a way of solving it. That is why, stories are rich, whereas academic writing is full of dull and uninteresting structure. They simply do not have the time to fully contemplate the problem, and they have to be tied unnecessarily to a deadline.
Some people also have this notion that non-fiction, scientific journals, and articles – are so much more than fictional work. It happened because there is a connection between the words “higher education” and “research”. Anything that can be backed by factual evidence and written by an “expert”, is worth more than just a guy who does not have a Ph.D., Dr, or Professor at the start and end of their name. I beg to differ because people tend to forget that fiction is so much more accessible and fun than reading those soulless papers. For example:
- Jean Paul Satre’s No Exit (Existensialism)
- Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus (Absurdism)
- Fyodor Dostoyevksy’s The Eternal Husband (Psychoanalysis)
This just goes to show that, simplicity is not cheap.
If you have a course that teaches Creativity (e.g. Creative Writing), then you are bound to fail. Because creativity, with respect to contemplative thinking, cannot be reinforced if you have a grading system. Essentially, we all agree that creativity cannot be taught, but it can be reinforced. Even though it has been emphasized many times in class, the contrary often happens. The teacher will assign you something in the name of creativity, give you a deadline, and BOOM! They already failed to reinforce creativity by giving it a due time. Thereafter, your works will be criticized and (gosh knows) scrutinized in front of the class as being unoriginal, distasteful, and boring. That’s not your fault, even famous writers like Edgar Allan Poe would create a boring short story if they had given 15 minutes to write!
To conclude, if you want to be creative and offered a course to be creative in college – you’d be better off dead. God knows what would happen if a great artist like Frank Zappa went to college instead of pursuing music. He might just earned himself a title, but that’s it. He has sacrificed his freedom of expression only to jerk off his “intelligence”.
Creativity comes naturally, and if there is hints of artificiality, it will die.
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