What is Creativity?

Once again, I have a case of writer’s block. Last year when I decided to give up my songwriting and drawing goals after a couple months, it was because I wasn’t good at making myself create on cue. Clearly it’s no different for writing, though perhaps a bit easier for me to fake.

So there’s the question of the day: is it okay to fake art? To force it just to keep the creative momentum flowing? I don’t know the answer to that.

Seth Godin said this just today:

You could watch the most non-creative, linear-thinking, do-it-by-the-book cop work to solve a crime and you’d be amazed at how creative her solutions seem to be. Creative for you, because you’ve never been in that territory before, it’s all new, it’s all at the edges. Boring for her, because it’s the same thing she does every time. It’s not creative at all.

This makes me wonder if, in some sense, creativity is simply knowing your environment so well that you can flex and move within your personal limitations and that, for you, it doesn’t seem like creativity. It just looks like it to everyone else because you know your space better than they do.

So is creativity relative? Does it even exist? It seems like more of a product of practice than anything. Someone should write a book about that. Oh wait.