How to be creative
Posted on March 31st, 2008 by Jackie Danicki
Put a deeply felt sense of inadequacy into action:
People who make things, like me, make them in part because they themselves just aren’t enough. If I was enough, I wouldn’t do anything except live my life, but I have a disease that makes me need to produce things outside of myself. It’s a compulsion to prove our own existence.
-Painter, actress, playwright, director, and novelist Rebecca Miller
Filed under: Life
Wow, that’s a wonderful quote. But I think she’s got it wrong. The urge to create is as primal in the human animal as the urge to reproduce. And just as healthy for the species–it’s part of the evolutionary process by which we thrive.
She’s saying, in effect, that all creativity is narcissistic, but that sweeping statement itself smacks of runaway narcissism—she sees only herself in the world–a bit of the pot calling the kettle a pot.
Many creative people do their work for the exact opposite reason, ie, not to prove their existence, but to lose themselves in something bigger than themselves. Equally pathological perhaps, but quite different.
It would be fun to amass a compendium of definitions of creativity, and chart the range!
Totally agree with you! The range from suicidal to healthy, perhaps :)
Artists have been stuck with having to justify what they do ever since art left the churches to become Art. And the more miserable and depressing their explanation, the fewer big happy beliefs about the universe they tend to have. Hugh Laurie, he’s another one.
Totally agree with you on this one, Jackie. And that’s not just because I want to justify making stuff all the time!