Giving Thanks: Creativity

Hi everyone, and welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! Can you believe Thanksgiving is next week?—cause I sure can’t. It feels like the end of the year really snuck up on me. But, in any case, all month long, we’re talking about thankfulness, and things that we, as writers, as creators, should be thankful for. So far, we’ve talked about things like editors, books, creative minds, and even linguistics, and I’ve tried my best to show you from a unique perspective, why it is that we should all be thankful for these things. And today, I want to talk about one of the simplest and most basic things that we should be thankful for, but one that I’m pretty sure every single person takes for granted, every day.

Giving Thanks: Creativity

See? How often do you sit down and think, “Goodness, I’m thankful for creativity”? I’m willing to bet that it doesn’t happen very often. Creativity is one of those things that we’re all born with, in one capacity or another, and because of that, I think it’s something that we completely forget about when push comes to shove.

For us writers, creativity is highly important for our continued success in our chosen field. It’s the same for artists. And honestly, it’s the same for businesspeople. We all need a certain measure of creativity, to get through our daily lives, and to succeed within those lives. If we’re facing a problem, whether it be with work, school, or even with something at home, it’s often creativity that shows us the way out, the way to fix the problem or come up with a unique solution that suits us, in that particular moment. Without creativity, problem solving would be a whole lot more difficult.

But then there’s storytelling. Storytelling wouldn’t even exist, if it wasn’t for creativity. Why would we even bother telling stories, if we couldn’t be creative in the process? It would all be like professional writing, where editors take out every last scrap of uniqueness between authors, where any creative liberties would have to be removed so everyone sounds the same, where everything is about facts and nothing but the facts—and how boring would that be?

So I’m thankful for creativity, because without it, I don’t know where I’d be.

Creativity is how we move forward in the world, how we change the things around us, how we process and perceive and define things in our lives. Creativity is a lens, through which we see and understand the world around us. And creativity is a lens through which we create new worlds, to teach people about the world they live in, today.

My challenge to you, this week, is to notice all the times you’re being creative. Notice them, focus on them, and be thankful for them. Be thankful for your capacity to be creative. You were designed that way. You were made that way. And I sincerely hope you’ll learn to appreciate it, as much as I do. It really changes the way you write, when you’re always thankful for the ability to do so.

[love]

{Rani Divine}