"I'm a very creative person"

 

I have seen this phrase many a time, sometimes without the word 'very' in it. I have sometimes met the person who has written it, but more often you just see it when someone is in a situation where they have to describe themselves. It could be on a CV, it could be on a dating profile, it could be when they are being interviewed. Or you might just hear it crop up in a conversation. 

I have a longstanding problem with the phrase itself, and with the very idea of 'creative' and 'creativity'. And this is not because I have been paid in a previous career to spend a lot of time working out exactly what words mean. I think the word 'creative' is itself quite hard to unpack and quite slippery, with a broad sweep of meaning and understandings. Here are a few examples to mull.

The creative arts bring in billions to the UK.

a highly creative solution to a longstanding problem

one of the most creative thinkers of her generation

creative accounting

I've just always been very creative...

And when his creative work was done, the Lord took his deserved rest.

At its simplest level, it seems to just mean, like the Lord,  'making things that weren't there before'. But does that mean every cook is creative, every farmer, every builder? It feels like certain kinds of creativity get ignored. And it is clear that sometimes just making things is not creative (I have taught art to Primary school children; read my face).

To be really 'creative' seems to imply making something that nobody else could have done as well as you, or maybe making something that other people will enjoy (maybe the creative accounting especially!). So the creative playwright writes the script. And the creative actor delivers a version of it that nobody than she could have. And the creative cinematographer produces images in the film that exceed all other attempts. It is certainly not a neutral word, and certainly not in the minds of people who self-describe themselves as creative. 

With all due respect to the artists and writers and composers of this world, I have to say that my apogee of creativity, and the one that I admire most, is when people think of a solution or an idea or a method that suddenly breaks through a problem and literally makes a path that did not exist before they thought of it. The great scientists seem to share the feature that they could imagine an explanation which had sometimes evaded all who went before, perhaps because it had seemed too playful or bizarre, but which a truly creative thinker never rules out. Some people (former colleagues included, happily) have a capacity to imagine a solution to problems that seems simple but nobody else had been able to come up with. My late wife Cro was a tremendously creative thinker in getting people to work in a different way to solve a problem. At its finest, creativity is so powerful. I am sure that each of you can also remember teachers (at any stage in your life) who simply had that creative ability to reach your brain and make you think in a new an different way. 

So it is a powerful word and a good thing, but maybe my objection to the phrase in the header is that I do not think you can self-describe yourself as 'creative'. You can work in the creative industries, you can do a creative writing course, you can be 'a creative' literally, in the lingo of government employment statisticians. But you can't call yourself creative. That is somebody else's job. 

You can attempt to be creative, making, painting, writing, composing, performing, but in the end the only judge of whether you are creative or not can not be yourself. The people who recieve your watercolour, your symphony, your lesson, your unifying field theory, your solution: they are the only people who can give you the right to use the adjective.