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Showing posts from January, 2017

Creativity as a Process

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I've been going through some of my old writing journals, lately, and I came upon this entry, written in 2008 while teaching a class on Autobiography to first year Creative Writing students.  ******************************** What is creativity and where does it come from?  How do we recognise it?  How do we nurture it and how does it grow?  Ghiselin describes the creative process as a process of evolution, of taking something that already exists and turning it into something new or something better.  It is a cause and effect relationship, where the effect may not necessarily be recognised or valued at first instance: 'Because every creative act overpasses the established order in some way and in some degree, it is likely at first to appear eccentric to most men' (1997:3).  We are reminded that in his lifetime, Van Gogh never sold a painting (a claim which is disputed by the experts), yet today we know he was a visionary, experimenting with colour and form, taking what h