I think of creativity as something we tend to complain we lack.
In some people, this may be just polite, self-deprecating, British behaviour
? "But I'm not creative like you", they say. In others, it's perhaps
superstition: even if we're having a good spell, and do feel creative,
we are terrified of announcing that in case the gods strike us down for
hubris or the muse cuts off her supply line. But it's a thing like
sex or exercise where the notion of excess doesn't enter in. Too
much creativity ? what an impossible idea.
Once upon a time, creativity was associated exclusively with artists. But that's no longer so. I'm sure some of the audience will feel that the absence of a scientist on this panel is especially lamentable, since scientists have as much claim to creativity as artists do. But let's not stop there: fashion designers, architects, interior decorators, chefs ? we no longer have a problem thinking of them as creative, either. In advertising, "creative" is a noun, denoting an ideas person, one of the team responsible for coming up with words, graphics and concepts in a sales campaign. The new Encarta World English dictionary also offers "creative" as an adjective, describing people (including bankers and accountants) who are deceptive with money ? who distort the accounts and cook the books. A pejorative meaning is attached there, but generally creativity is seen as a plus in our society, a thing Tony Blair paid lip-service to when he invited his favourite artistic celebrities (mostly pop stars) to Downing Street.
It's good that creativity has become democratised ? that we think of it as something, like the vote, that can and should be available to all. For much of the 19th century, indeed well into the 20th, the prevailing view of the creative soul was of a man apart, paring his fingernails; not a fellow creat-ure but a creat-or, a demigod. Wordsworth spoke of being "a sensitive, and creative soul". Anyone using such an idiom today would be laughed at. But at least Wordsworth wasn't saying that in order to be creative you have to have been born into the right kind of family, or belong to the right gender, or have been to the right university or art school, or possess the right certificate, or wear the right clothes, or lead the right kind of exotic or Bohemian life ? all of which theories have since been propounded. Such theories give creativity a bad name.
I certainly remember them existing when I was a child. My background was comfortably middle class, but we lived in the provinces, and my parents weren't what was called cultured and creativity seemed to reside a long way away, probably in London. Later I moved to London, in hopes of finding it. But now the message was that certain people had it and others not. The writer, Henry Treece, said that the blood of the true creative artist ran in the opposite direction to that of ordinary men's blood. Others said that you had to live perpetually on the verge of madness and suicide in order to be creative, and that the only Mafia was the Mafia of talent ? if you had the talent you were already in and, if you didn't, you couldn't acquire it and weren't ever going to become one of the family.
Nowadays creativity can be seen as part of our daily lives. If we look at the activities we perform during the course of a day ? cooking dinner, enormous effort and labour ? sometimes of a monotonous kind.
That's the perspiration. But I don't rule out inspiration. Indeed it's something bound up with the third key element in creativity: surprise. I don't only mean surprising others but surprising ourselves. It happens ? the transcending or self-transcending moment. The idea that comes out of nowhere. The image you happen on, or which lights on you, when you're least expecting it. The little dog or the cabbage in the corner of a painting which the artist suddenly realised was the missing element ? and which completes and miraculously unifies what's there for us as spectators. You have to practise. And you have to plan. But the reward is these sudden flashes that aren't at all practised or planned. They don't only happen in artistic and scientific contexts. I remember as a child of 10 playing football and running towards an opponent with the ball at my feet and wondering how I was going to get past him, when, woomph, before I knew it I was past. I'd dropped my shoulder and, without thinking, sold him a dummy. I hadn't preplanned it, no-one had taught me to do it. I'd never even seen it done on television because Match of the Day didn't exist then. But there it was. I've known it happen with writing too ? stuff that's come unwilled, that I don't even feel I "own", or can take credit for, because it seems I've merely transcribed the words, not thought them up. I've twice been taken over by other voices ? Gutenberg's and the narrator of a long poem I once wrote, "The Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper". In these rare instances, it can feel as though you're merely taking dictation, not writing. But you can't sit around waiting for inspiration to strike; if you do, it doesn't. And if you get rusty, if you've not kept in practice, you won't have the skills to honour what's given. Still, inspiration does happen. And those rare moments are the great ones. They uplift you. Maybe they even give a sense of God.
I'm suspicious of talk of inspiration, because it can sound mystical, when so much about creativity is practical, and because it can sound solemn and pious. So the fourth element I'd mention is play. The classical definition of a work of art was that of dulce et utile ? beautiful and useful. But uselessness is surely part of it ? the sense that one is mucking around and losing track of oneself ? indeed of everything ? in the absorption of the moment; of being fully aware and yet unaware of what one is doing. The act of creation offers a unique opportunity to be engaged while feeling disengaged; to use time while losing time. A useful piece of uselessness.
The last and perhaps most contentious element of how I'd define creativity involves healing. When people create something they themselves feel better: it provides easement or appeasement at whatever's been nagging away ? whether a shape, a formula, or a broken heart. And, at best, they make others feel better too ? with the pleasure of what they create, or the authenticity of it, or the process of recognition it generates. Of course, the act of creation itself is often associated with pain. It was so, even in the Bible, when God made the world: "For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now." (The apostle Paul to the Romans, 8.22). The word 'groan' repeatedly turns up in relation to the gods and prophets in the poetry of William Blake ? to create is to be in agony. Think of all those movie clichés of mad scientists in white coats, tearing their hair out in the effort to find the right formula; or of poets shivering in their garrets as they toss the nth aborted draft into a wastebin. Yes, creativity is about suffering. But, having created, having laid whatever it is or was to rest, given it a name, put it in order, the agony's over ? and healing begins.
In "The Prelude", Wordsworth speaks of certain "aspects of time" ? "scattered everywhere" ? which have a special place in each man and woman's life, and which it's our task to recover and express: not as an act of nostalgia but because they help renovate and repair us in some way if we find them.
There are in our existence spots of time
That with a distinct pre-eminence retain
A renovating virtue, when, depressed
By false opinions and contentious thought,
Or aught of heavier and more deadly weight,
In trivial occupations, and the round
Of ordinary intercourse, our minds
Are nourished and invisibly repaired;
A virtue by which pleasure is enhanced,
That penetrates, enables us to mount,
When high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen Ö
James Joyce had another word for these spots of time; he called them "epiphanies". A simpler way to put it would be to say that most of us have experiences which haunt us, preoccupy us, linger in the consciousness or surface in dreams. They're sometimes pre-verbal and almost always involve an element that can't be satisfactorily explained. But trying to explain them, or reproduce them, or find other ways to express them, is what creativity is about. D J Enright, in a poem called "Poet Wondering What he is up to", talks of "sort of extra hunger,/ Less easy to assuage than some -/ Or else an extra ear/ Listening for a telephone/ Which might or might not ring/ In a distant room". If that's too narrowly artistic, a definition of creativity, unmindful of how botanists work, say, or accountants (accountants can be creative too), let's just speak of hunches ? intuitions of something hidden which, if uncovered or teased out, will have a special value. That value for others might be intellectual recognition, or technological breakthrough, or aesthetic pleasure. And for the creator it might mean acclaim or financial reward. But there's still that other function ? the therapeutic. When I was younger, I used to deny the therapeutic element in creativity. But I've written at least two books in which therapy ? for myself ? was part of the motive for writing in the first place: one about my father's death and the other about the Bulger case. The books had to be more than catharsis: they had to work as books. They also had to benefit others in some way ? through narrative immersion, or pleasure in a felicitous choice of phrase, or (therapeutic?) identification with the feelings described. Still, therapy was part of it. And that's a function of creativity: when it's there we feel better; when it's not there ? when we can't compose or work, when we're blocked ? we feel worse.
I shouldn't overdo this. Art can't always heal. Primo Levi went on writing about his experiences of Auschwitz but he still, in the end, killed himself. But there are artists who have saved their lives by writing, composing music or painting ? and who have enriched the lives of others too. That's one of the arguments for creativity: the social one. A society which ignores it, which doesn't esteem creativity, is a society in trouble.
Blake Morrison