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To create is to resist; to resist is to create.

What is Creativity?
So, “To create is to resist; to resist is to create.” Why did I start with that quote? Well, that’s the last line from “Time For Outrage!”, or in the original French, Indignez-vous! a small but powerful book, more a pamphlet I suppose, by the French diplomat Stéphane Hessel. But then a lot of books don’t have the power this little book has. It was published at the end of 2010 when Hessel was 93 years old.
I must create my own system, else be enslaved by another man’s. The Marriage of Heaven and HellI trust creation, not dogmas created by others. It’s like Jung once said, “I don’t believe, I know.” That’s knowledge, that’s trust. Another story comes to me now, from 90s London, as a way of trying to get at what I mean. What the hell’s 90s London got to do with anything you’re asking? Well, before I founded La Muse and even before I worked in magazines in New York, I managed a very cool bar in Camden Town, called The Good Mixer, all this during the Brit-pop 90s in London. The bar is still there too, but I haven’t been back since it went under new ownership. Anyway, the bar had fruit and veg sellers and barrow boys from the market out front, old age pensioners from the spike down the road, like in Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London. Mods and all types of sellers from the Market Stalls up the road, people from all over London, as well as one man who had created a record label, “Blur” being one of his bands. It was a mad place and a lot of fun. The place was an amazing mix of eclectic creative people: musicians, artists, producers, sound engineers, journalists and the museos and groupies that followed them from all over the world. Mostly New Zealanders and Australians served behind the bar with me. You’d get ten Japanese teenagers sitting around one Coke for two hours, watching the sellers play pool and waiting for a glimpse of the guitarist from Blur. That was one of the many bizarre regular occurrences in there. However, the thing I found in talking to any of the successful creative people in that pub was that they were simply doing what they loved. They were playing music, writing about it, producing it, mixing it, because they loved music. Some bands got lucky and got real famous. Some were well known for a few years. Others were dropped after their first album, especially ones taken on as tax write offs by the big companies – “boiler bands” as they used to call them. You had bands that made it big in England were unheard of in the States and bands that nobody knew of in England became famous in the States. It’s the way all creative industries go, nobody really knows what will be “successful” where and when, even though they say they do. Most of the musicians and other creators I met didn’t care. They just wanted to make music, have fun, and get drunk with other people on the same wavelength. It was a mad bar, a mad time. After two degrees I found myself serving alcohol and having fun with all these people, a worthless resume building exercise, but it was better than sitting in an office cubicle. Better than any MFA. Why? Because it taught me this lesson: you can have fun doing what you love, creating what you love. The success comes with the doing, the fun of creating, not with getting a load of money. I’ve another story kind of in the same vein, or going at the same thing about creativity. About ten years ago I met a woman in Maine who’d just dropped her last kid off at college the week before. She’d always wanted to write short stories. Of course I was there telling her she should take advantage of her new found freedom and go to a writers’ retreat. I’d met so many women like her. “I wouldn’t know how,” she said “I’m not a real writer. I’m really not that creative any more.” We were standing in front of her old colonial house, with its wrap-around porch and this amazing flower garden. Not only that, out the back was this mad organic kitchen garden she’d created. “Well, if you’re not creative,” I said, “then either am I.” “What do you mean? You write novels,” she said. “You just created three kids, a wonderful home, gardens, and are a great cook. Each one of those things is highly creative.” She looked at me, confused at first, then smiled. “You know, I’d never thought about it like that.” Again, like I said at the outset, creation is not owned by artists and writers. Everyone has “it” in them. When you were a child all you ever did was create. It was called play, something I’ll talk about more in a later episode. Creation is a way of embracing new, personal worlds, whether it’s making music like those guys in Camden Town, building, designing, mending, painting, sewing, engineering, or gardening like that woman in Maine. The list is endless. If you think you’re not creative it’s because you just haven’t found out what it is you love creating, yet. Every retreat, over and over again, for nearly twenty years, I met people from all over the world who “needed” to create. They left everything behind and went to a little village in the mountains of the south of France, in the middle of nowhere, to create. And they’re still going there, irrespective of whether I’m there or not because we created a space, a safe space for people to create. Some of these creators have never written a word. Some have never painted. Some are well established. Some are famous. Some old, others just out of college. Some the head of colleges. And what do they all have in common? The need to create. The need to be a creator. Here’s the thing: As soon as we’re born we’re told who we are. A lot of the time by people who don’t know who they are. And so, the problem grows, consolidates its case, something like this: “I’m definitely not creative. No, other people are. The people making movies, acting in them. The people writing them. Even the people creating the billboards.” Well, here’s my response: It’s not true, it’s a damn lie. Society constantly kills creation by making us think we are only one thing, not many. The world is large, and so is each human being. We are many things, the most important: we are creative beings. We’re all creators. Everyone needs to create, to make, to bring something into being. Creation is how we bring what is inside us into being. The idea that “creativity” is only for so called “professionals”, or those who make money from what they create is not only wrong-headed, but insulting.
What is a Creator?
Of course there’s a distinction to be made here, between what a creative and a creator are, which reminds me of another very cool woman I met, at La Muse. I had just told her she wasn’t a creative, and she wasn’t happy about it. “Aye right, what do you mean I’m not a creative?” We were in the truck, about seven years ago, going down to Carcassonne to get groceries. The woman talking was a Scottish ad executive from London. She was on retreat to “draw the line”, as she put it. By this she meant she was going to draw without taking her pencil off the paper. She’s a great artist, but she writes ad copy for a living. Again, another example of how people can be many things, create many different things. Ya see she had been calling me a creative, herself a creative, the other people on retreat creative, and I didn’t want to correct her because I didn’t want to come off as a mansplainer, as I’d just met her, but now we’d had a few laughs, so I got into it. “You’re a creator and co-creator, not a creative, unless you’re at work.” I said. “It’s the same thing?” she said. “No, it’s not,” I said. “Explain.” She’s a very clear, funny woman and she loved definitions, so I said something like this: “Well, creatives can be people who live life creating walls to not create or they could be people who work as ‘creatives’ for other people. You need ‘co-creators’ when you finish your art. They create internally their appreciation of one of your line drawing. And you’re a co-creator when you appreciate and respond to someone else’s art.” “Then what’s a creator?” “They make things. They create. They crochet. They paint. They sing. They repair cars, write imaginative business plans. Draw the line, like you.” “Oh, so you’re saying society has co-opted ‘creative’ by making us think it’s the same as creator and/or co-creator?” “Exactly. ‘Creative’ has become capitalized upon by the corporate world. (I’ll get into this idea of capitalism more later on. Anyway I’m digressing.) What I said to her was something like: “You’re a creative, the graphic designers you work with, they’re creatives. You don’t necessarily get positive co-creation, or creation for that matter, from your work. Some people do though. They’re creators when they’re at work. But companies want us the audience, the consumer to have a passive relationship with ‘creativity’ so we buy their products, not make our own. A ‘creative’ is a way of blurring the distinction between creator and co-creator.” She smiled at me and said, “Ya know, that’s a well tidy idea.” She called a lot of things “tidy”. I think it’s Scottish for good. At least I hope it is. The word “creative”, just like the word “creativity” has been “robbed” by academic programs, theories, science, commerce. I’m sure if I met that Scottish artist today she’d talk about the advertising of “creativity” on the sidelines of major football matches, or how banks are using it in their ads. My old drama lecturer would explain it differently. He’d talk about the Greek word “drama”, how it literally means to do, to act. He’d say if you’re a co-creator, you’re in the audience. Actors act. Audiences watch, absorb. It’s a different level of creation. You create empathy with the characters on the stage, but you are not creating the character as an actor or playwright. You’re a co-creator when you enjoy and appreciate the play on the stage. And it can inspire you to be a creator, to write your own play, to act in one.You’re a creative negator when you’re criticizing the play, almost for the sake of criticizing it. A co-creator can have wonderful ideas but does not bring them out into the world for the rest of us to see, experience, like a creator does. A creator acts on their ideas. They create software, paintings, books, companies. They’re co-creators who have become creators, become actors in their fields. They get up on the stage of the world and create. They climb out of the audience and start telling the audience about their play, business plan, design, project. Now, wouldn’t it be great to be an actor too, to become the part, to live it, to write it, so others can enjoy what you create? Wouldn’t it be great to be a creator? But how does one become a creator? Insight. You have an in-sight. You look inside yourself. You look inside and bring things into the world that nobody has ever seen or heard before, because it’s yours to share. But again, the question comes up: Why bother? Creation is an act, a sacred act, a personal act, religious in the true sense of the word: “re” meaning again or connect and “lego” meaning to choose or revere and bond, ultimately meaning to choose again a reverential personal bond. Creation is religious because we choose to go over something again and again. We become devoted to creating. We reinvent. We re-create ourselves by creating over and over again. Creation is never still, it’s always changing. I’ll get into this idea of sacredness a little more in a later episode. We created a writers and artists retreat nearly two decades ago to help other people create. We created a publishing house to get people’s creations out into the world. Now, I’m creating this podcast for the same reason, to empower others to create too. I’m doing this podcast because no matter what you want to create, no matter what you’re into, there are so many things we all have in common — the walls, the doors to walk through those walls, and the windows out onto the world that creativity gives us. And of course the most important thing, to persevere in order to create, because it’s perspiration not inspiration that counts, and why, for your own good, and the good of others. So, again, why am I creating this podcast? To help others create. So people don’t feel alone like I used to. So they don’t repeat the same mistakes I and so many other creators have made. So we can create something to reflect our needs, and the unconscious needs of all of us. And also because when we create, the world thrives, becomes a better, more beautiful place, not the destructive kind of world a Hitler imagines. Isn’t that what most of us want, a better world? Also, epiphany: You don’t need permission to create. You don’t need a diploma in building to build a house. Plenty of people build their own houses, the whole thing, from electricity to masonry to plumbing to the furniture inside it. I renovated most of the house we left, myself. I learned as I went along. So don’t ask for permission. Do it. Dance, sing, write, build. Now. Don’t think about what you want the work to be. Simply do the work you need to do. Write. Paint. Play. Design. Change it. Refine it. And some day it’ll be ready to be put up on a stage, or into an album. You have to discover your own need, your own love, your own way, away from the psychology of the many, away from what Nietzsche called the “herd-instinct in the individual”, one publicists like Edward Bernays have been manipulating us with for the last hundred years. He would have us believe we can buy happiness. But you can’t buy happiness, because it’s a byproduct of creation, and creation isn’t a product, it’s a process. You’ll be happy if you buy this car is very different from You’ll be happy if you create a car. “Oh, I’m not a mechanic because I haven’t built any cars.” If I’d stopped writing because I wasn’t published I wouldn’t have any books finished, but more importantly, I wouldn’t be who I am today. By being a creator, by writing, by creating, I found out a lot of things about myself. If I’m not creating then I’m missing a huge opportunity to grow. So thanks for listening. I started with a quote from that wonderful Frenchman Hessel but as I said last time, I’m going to end each episode with an Irish proverb. This one literally means: Whoever doesn’t plant in the spring doesn’t reap in the fall.An té nach gcuireann san earrach ní bhaineann sé san fhómhar.This podcast is supported by you the listener via my Patreon page. If ya want to support the podcast and help me get a wage for doing it, because that’s how I see this podcast as a job, one I love doing, then please head over to patreon.com/johnfanning where you can get early and ad free access as well as extra episodes when ya sign up. Ifya can afford it then give me the cost of a price of a cup of tea or pint once a month. Ifya can’t afford it that’s grand too, ya can listen for free, but please leave a review on itunes or wherever ya listen to it and let your friends know about it so the listenership grows. Thank you! And thanks for listening. If you’re looking for more episodes you can find them on all the usual places like iTunes – or on my website at johnfanning.me under “podcast” where I’ve put up overview transcripts with links to all the people and ideas I mention. If you’re into social stuff and you’re looking to engage with me one-on-one, check me out on twitter @fanning_j and instagram @ johnfanning_. It’s been great sharing stuff with you today so until next time take care out there and be benevolent when you can! Slán libh agus go n-éirí an bóthar libh.