I work for a large software company. Recently, email was sent out that we could take “creativity” courses through one of our training sites. I went to check out one of the classes. I took the pre-test, a 4-question quiz to test how “creative” we already are.
I missed half of them.
Apparently I’m not particularly creative. Or rather, the strict definitions of what constituted being creative to them didn’t connect in my mind.
In Love with Creativity
It might sound strange coming from me, but I think creativity is overrated. The most creative people I know produce some of the shoddiest “creative” work out there. These are friends who live with clusters of other creative people wandering the country (and world) being “creative” all the time. If a thought hits their minds, they act on it — and I think that’s wonderful. They create strange realities for themselves and others, but it often lacks a certain drive and — dare I say it — structure to truly be something more.
Much of the work they create reminds me of things made in art classes in elementary school…just on a massive scale.
But they love being creative, and most people I meet seem to be in love with the notion of “creativity.” Not so much the discipline it takes to make something solid, but in love with the idea of creativity exploding from within them as a form of expression.
I am an explosion of moonbeams and rainbows and butterflies and flower petals; I am the scent of childhood and forests and memories long forgotten. I cannot be contained!
Yadda yadda yadda…
Default Creativity
Because I’m a writer, some people assume I’m very creative. And on some levels, sure…maybe I am. But I’ll let you in on a little secret: my most “creative” thoughts rarely make it into stories…because they are not as structured as the ideas necessary to tell a solid story.
Add to this the belief in many that a creative solution is often the best solution to a problem, and it all gets weird. The friends mentioned above? Their solution to so many things comes down to drum circles, 20-foot tall puppets, anarchic expression, and sure — even drugs.
Wandering into work each morning to that would be annoying, but there’s nothing in the minds of these friends that can’t be cured by dancing and circus skills. (Seriously, one old friend called me to his place one morning. “Dude, come over. My yard is full of circus people!” I saw the guy on a tightrope with a monkey on his shoulder a block and a half away…about the same time I smelled the odor of burning weed.)
Turning It On
Add to all this the notion in many that one can simply be creative on command.
I can’t tell you how many managers have told me, “Use your novel skills on this project,” as though that can be flipped on in an instant and that it transfers to tech writing. The structure and discipline transfer back and forth, but what I do when writing a novel is much different than a procedure. A procedure is not meant to be exciting…it’s meant to tell someone how to do something. 1, 2, 3…
Beyond a beginning, middle, and end, though, it doesn’t transfer. My time would be wasted thinking, “In the story I’m writing, I’m working on a scene in which two characters are trying to figure out how to fold up a room so they can steal it…how can I make a procedure about a software installation that interesting?”
Some might read this and think that I’m limiting my view toward work, but trust me: trying to be cute in technical documentation, more times than not, is simply annoying.
Most of my “creative skills” used when writing a novel simply can’t be turned on and applied to everything else in my life. Things have their own rules, as much as we’d like to imagine we can solve everything with autumn winds and folding time.
And this brings me to speed…
The Speed of Creativity
At least in the workplace, the speed of at least certain kinds of creativity do not scale. It took Anthony Doerr a decade to write All the Light We Cannot See. The book is a great example of a creative literary novel, but I can’t imagine telling my manager:
It’s going to take a few years to finish this project, and most days I won’t be in the office because I need to go hiking and clear my mind to get there. Maybe some canoeing, reading a lot of other books…long hours of reflection. If you see me taking a nap while at work, don’t wake me, because that’s part of the process. Oh, and I might even finish later than I told you because this is a process that takes all the time it’s going to take…
One does not sit there thinking about technical documentation and suddenly — instantly — shift into creative mode and knock out creative solutions.
Many creative things cannot be measured the way things must be measured in most corporate environments.
If you talk to most creative people, how they got there took quite some time. Had someone said, “You must reach this milestone and that one by this time,” some of the greatest creative successes would have been shut down early on in the process.
This is not to say creativity runs counter to structured environments (some of my favorite creative friends are software developers), but the love affair with the notion of unbridled creativity has always seemed a bit hyped.
I find it chilling that the corporate office would want to foster creativity in its people. As you point out, most corporate animals have a cliched and insufficient idea of what creativity is. And they would want to harness it for their own ends, not the ends of the creative person.
I work to pay my bills. I do not seek a career and I certainly do not want to define myself by my job (which could be shipped overseas based on a spreadsheet) or my employer. The corporate atmosphere is numbing and not conducive to my type of creativity, and I wouldn’t want to lend whatever talent I have to “the man” for purposes I can’t fully know.
My writing is an outlet, a reaction to my day-to-day work life. Better that they never mix. I would never tell my boss or even a trusted coworker that I write (though few would be surprised). It’s a part of me that’s untainted and untouchable.
I don’t understand the need to be able to boast, “We are a creative company!” What does that even mean? If it were the case, we’d not be in the business we’re in, which requires a certain dryness to things at times. There’s nothing wrong with that — it should be accepted. It’s kind of like an old group I was in…they brought in a foosball table and ping pong table to give the feel that we’re “fun” in the same way that I guess Google is fun? But we weren’t allowed to play. It was there for looks. (Oddly enough, the couple times a friend and I worked out some work problems while volleying a ping pong ball, it was relaxing, and we came up with good ideas, even though we were told to never do it again.)
Like you, I don’t kid myself that my job can end today. I’ve been laid off many times when entire departments were shut down and the work we did shipped overseas. The kind of creativity used in writing a novel doesn’t scale to work…but people who look at spreadsheets all day love the thought that everything scales I suppose. My job serves a purpose: pay, some semblance of security, and coworkers I like. But I don’t go there for creative satisfaction. In fact, those I know who try taking what they do outside of work that satisfies them creatively and tried making it part of their day jobs seem to end up miserable. They see their work killed by committee (why put all that effort into that website when you can just use that PowerPoint deck as its basis?), and find they never actually get to the work outside of the day job that satisfies them.
People at work know I write fiction, but I make it clear that technical writing and fiction are different things and what I write at work will serve its purpose and little more.
There’s a great quote by Mary Oliver about the difference between her old day jobs and the writing that meant the most to her:
“I was very careful never to take an interesting job. Not an interesting one. I took lots of jobs. But if you have an interesting job you get interested in it. I also began in those years to keep early hours…. I usually get up at five. Believe me, if anybody has a job and starts at 9, there’s no reason why they can’t get up at 4:30 or five and write for a couple of hours, and give their employers their second-best effort of the day — which is what I did.”
My second-best effort is still better than most people’s all-out efforts; perhaps because I take the things I do outside of work so seriously. The outside work is not something to simply be turned on and off like my day job work hitting deadlines.