I don't really try to be creative very often. It's useful in some
ways but short of going down the starving artist route, and without
any friends to impress, there's not much to be done with it.
Singing made-up tunes to myself in the evenings and writing things
here is a large entent of it, along with my bursts of photographic
action using films that I never get around to developing, and all
are pretty one-sided endeavours. In general what creative ability I
have is fairly well segmented in my life.
But I do get these bursts, not spontaneous as artists sometimes
describe, but in the very specific circumstance of being completely
and utterly stuck on whatever practical task I'm trying to achieve.
I don't just mean when my initial plan doesn't work, I mean when
plans are progressing so far down the alphabet that it's becoming
obscene and there's a serious risk of much wasted time or money
should I not find an answer. It's in this state of desperation that
I usually find myself overwhelmed with creative talent, inevitably
humming/singing away to myelf, maybe writing poetry, attempting to
draw (which still doesn't really work), and coming up with new
inventions to solve completely unrelated issues in the world.
This flush of creativity ought to help me solve the problem I'm
working on too, but really it's usually more of a distraction.
Suddenly there's a whole universe of new endeavours before me, all
vastly more attractive than solving the one critical problem which
actually requires a solution. Many's the day where I've ended up
suddenly aborting work for a whole afternoon and instead hunting
around the house/shed for the parts required to build something
completely different, or researching them on the internet, or
handwriting endless notes about an invention, or a song, or movie
plot, or once even an elaborate comedy skit about a hapless
assassin (I wonder where that went?).
It's a fun state of mind, and sometimes then I wonder if it would
be nice to live a life where I could encourage it rgularly, if
indeed I can induce it at will. But most often it just amounts to a
waste of time, and yet another reason why I don't get enough done.
At the end of it though, I can usually look back on the original
issue with the benefit of fresh eyes and see some sort of solution,
or at least resign myself to the actuality that my entire approach
was fundamentally flawed (actually I can never truely resign myself
to that, but eventually I can pretend that I do).
