Creativity

Other than math, which I retained well, (read that very left-brained here) and English (had great teachers and loved English), I remember very little of what I learned in school. I remember a teensy bit of Spanish: can count to 100, remember days of the week and months of the year, and one line from the dialogues: "Albondigas! No me temos el pelo!" Translates as, "Meatballs! Don't be pulling my hair!" Seems in some Spanish-speaking countries, the idiom for 'don't pull my leg' is 'don't pull my hair.' I can remember the prologue to Canterbury Tales in old English, and lots of my Shakespeare. Almost all of Frost's poems but not his essays, some Burns, quite a bit of Keats and Shelley, geez, now I'm on a roll: Emily Dickinson, Poe, and a ton of Thurber. I can also cough up a few lines of Caesar's Travels from Latin II, but I digress. The point is that I can't recall any history or science. 

No, I don't remember econ, psych, civics, world history, western civ, british monarchs, biology (although I was fascinated by the way earthworms have organs for both sexes and line up with each other to have sex twice at the same time, but that's a post for another day...) , sociology, the list goes on and on. Of the things I don't remember. 

This came to mind today when I talked for a bit with a local fellow who tried to start a writing group. They met twice, he was disappointed at the turnout, and he hasn't continued to pursue it. The group,  not the writing. He said they used Liz Lehrman's 6 Steps for Critical Response. It worked well and is effective at controlling the inevitable TAIEG (there's an asshole in every group) syndrome.  I hadn't heard of this method and he recommended I google her. 

I did. Looks cool. 

Then I googled him. Wow. He writes plays, has some film shorts on YouTube, and has written for the tabloids. Recently self-published a book on writing for the tabloids. 

So, in looking at his work, I had to ask myself, "Why do we create?" Did I ever learn this in school?

I think the answer is different for every artist. 

If you learned this in psych, or have a theory, email me. I'd love to have this conversation . I'll try to remember it afterwards.