Recently I found myself being about eight years old and unable to do my school creative writing assignment. I had gone up to the British Library to attend an evening class in character development for graphic novels, and suddenly felt that terrible childhood helplessness of being completely unable to think of a single idea for a story I was supposed to be writing. I never could come up with ideas for fiction; I would force myself in primary school to write some random opening sentence just to put something on the paper, but could never get any further. Somehow I did manage to graduate even without completing any of those creative writing pieces through the years.
It was a weird thing, feeling that mild panic return as a (normally) functioning grown-up. The brain freeze, the embarassment at complete lack of ability to carry out a simple exercise. We weren't even being asked to do anything more than simply imagining a character, defining their physical traits and personality, making them as interesting and unusual as we liked to make them stand out a bit and be memorable. But all I could do was think of real people I know, and no attempt to add or embellish features or aspects to apply to them felt the slightest bit convincing. I simply could not do it. And I felt bad, since these new characters were then meant to encounter each other and we could see what happened next...
Associating with creative types, as I do, just makes it worse. Too many people for whom writing stories and songs is a very normal day-to-day occurence. So what's wrong with my brain and why didn't I get the creative gene? Can it be learnt?
Unfortunately, this is not to say I'm totally lacking in imagination. Just the useful, creative sort. It doesn't take much prompting for a whole dreadful sequence of events to play out in my mind, uninvited and very quickly.
Like this one -->
Does this happen to everyone else, too?
It was a weird thing, feeling that mild panic return as a (normally) functioning grown-up. The brain freeze, the embarassment at complete lack of ability to carry out a simple exercise. We weren't even being asked to do anything more than simply imagining a character, defining their physical traits and personality, making them as interesting and unusual as we liked to make them stand out a bit and be memorable. But all I could do was think of real people I know, and no attempt to add or embellish features or aspects to apply to them felt the slightest bit convincing. I simply could not do it. And I felt bad, since these new characters were then meant to encounter each other and we could see what happened next...
Associating with creative types, as I do, just makes it worse. Too many people for whom writing stories and songs is a very normal day-to-day occurence. So what's wrong with my brain and why didn't I get the creative gene? Can it be learnt?
Unfortunately, this is not to say I'm totally lacking in imagination. Just the useful, creative sort. It doesn't take much prompting for a whole dreadful sequence of events to play out in my mind, uninvited and very quickly.
Like this one -->
Does this happen to everyone else, too?
