I’ve had many people over the years ask me how I’m so creative. It used to really take me off guard because I thought, “Am I creative? Isn’t everybody? It’s not that hard.”

But then I realized that a lot of people think they aren’t creative because they believe that in order to be creative, you have to create something completely new. They think of creative people as these wizards who conjure something brand new out of thin air all the time.

I don’t think that’s what creativity really means, not to me. You can’t really make stuff up 100%. Humans have been around for eons and there have been quite a lot of us coming up with all sorts of ideas. Unless you were raised under a rock by snails, you’ll have been raised in a soup of information, ideas, stories, art, and culture your whole life. All that influences us so much that it’s almost impossible to have an idea that wasn’t sparked by something or someone else. And that’s ok.

I believe that creativity isn’t a rare trait at all, but the birthright of being human. We are born with it and then somewhere along the way, many of us convince ourselves that we aren’t creative because we are “too old,” or “too busy,” or somesuch.

So what is creativity?

The Creativity of Artists

Creativity to me means seeing the world in ways that other people don’t. Not “can’t,” but “don’t.” Take painting as an example. When most people look at an apple, we don’t actually see an apple. We may see photons of light zing off the apple and into our eyes—but then our brains have to process those photons, and give them meaning. The image is flipped right side up, wavelengths are interpreted as colors, our brain recognizes that that collection of colors means that object is an apple—it has a name, a word, a category within the vast categorization system of our brains that allows us to identify this apple as a food item, a fruit, ripe, unbruised, probably tasty, even an opinion: I like apples.

This is the reason why when children draw pictures of people, they look absolutely nothing like the person. It’s not just lack of skill—many adults also draw like that—but rather they are drawing an interpretation of the things they notice most about the person. Mom has a big smile, blue eyes, and long hair, while Dad has short hair and walks the dog, and so that’s what they draw: not the actual image, but their interpretation of the people.

With me so far?

But when an artist looks at an apple, they can’t start with “I’m going to draw an apple.” They have to strip away all of the categories and opinions and personal history we have with apples and get back to what the actual photons of light are doing over there. They have to see that the three dimensional apple can be translated to a two dimensional image, how the apple is changed by light and shadow, that different light wavelengths hit the apple in different ways, and here it’s a little more blue, there it’s a little more yellow. They have to see that a shadow is more than a shadow; it’s almost an entity itself, with different depths, colors, shades, and tones that is changed by the apple sitting on it. Reflection from the apple can cast a slight green tint to the shadow. My point is that artists spend a great deal of time learning how to see the world around us in ways other people don’t.

The Creativity of Authors

Authors are the same way. We see, observe, combine, and present the world around us in weird and wonderful ways.

When I told my kids how weird plants were, they thought I was nuts. But then I said, “well think about it. They eat sunlight, fart the air we breathe. You can chop off a limb and stick it into another one of its relatives and apparently neither one of them is too bothered by this. And judging by the snowstorm of pollen every spring, they must be the horniest beings on Earth, desperate to procreate like nothing else.” They laughed a bit nervously, as many people do when an author says something weird to them like that.

But it’s true. And that’s the sort of thing authors do. We look at the world, especially people, and say, “hey, that’s weird. Why did you do that?” Yeah, it makes people a little uncomfortable, but that’s sort of the point, right? We tell each other stories to examine the bits about life that make us uncomfortable, because so long as it’s happening to someone else, it’s safe.

One of my favorite authors, Terry Pratchett, was a genius because he was a master of this. “Commander Vimes didn’t like the phrase ‘The innocent have nothing to fear’, believing the innocent had everything to fear, mostly from the guilty but in the longer term even more from those who say things like ‘The innocent have nothing to fear’.”

A lot of times, creativity can be taking something in our world and turning it upside down or smashing it with something you wouldn’t think of.

Brandon Sanderson’s books are full of this. He created a region of one of his worlds that is basically the ocean floor and canyons dredged up and stuck on land, where the destructive tide is replaced by a destructive storm. He created swords that are the dead souls of forgotten ideas that cut through the souls of living men—don’t ideas already cut men to pieces? It can build them up, too, and turn them into better men, and so do these special swords once the ideals they represent are allowed to flourish.

He could have just said as much and saved himself the trouble of writing millions of words. But we humans have this irritating habit of not listening to things wise men say. Instead, he showed these ideas to us in a different way, a way that makes us stop and think, and eventually say, “huh. You know, he might be onto something.”

Authors and artists take this mundane world of ours and to really see it—and us—for what it really is, and then find a way to show others what we’ve found.

Anyone can do that. Everyone should do that. Each one of us has a different way of looking at the world and sharing what we see. And however we share it is our own unique view of life—whether it be in painting, writing, dancing, cooking, or designing a your bedroom to be more “your style”—that is creativity.

Conclusion

I’ll leave you with this last video. It’s my favorite reading of a letter Kurt Vonnegut wrote in response to some students who asked him to visit them: