How a creative mind works

When the music teacher came into our third or fourth grade class and gave us small plastic recorders to try out for ourselves to motivate us to think about learning to play an instrument, I yawned. I didn’t care much for the tinny sound. I gave the recorder and any other instrument for that matter a hard pass. I didn’t need something else to learn. Many of my friends, though, jumped at the chance, one signed up to learn to play the trombone, another to play the clarinet.

A few years later, I started watching my friends play entire songs and wished that I had learned to play the piano. What I wanted to learn was how they built one note after another, turning the odd sounds into something worth listening to and enjoying.

Image by Pexels.

My friends has learned that they could create something from nothing. For my friends, it was music. For my father, it was making one cut after another into a block of wood until it became something of beauty. I never learned to play an instrument or to carve wood like my father.

For me, though, I learned that I could write.

I write about how I watched my father first carve wood and how I couldn’t carve like him, but I could create feelings and emotions just like him on paper in my new post, Carving out my place in the world, on The Heart of The Matter.

In the piece, I explain that I’ve learned a ton about writing over the years — thanks to Higher Education and lots of trial and error — but I still go about it the same way, like completing a giant puzzle board. I fit a piece here, fit a piece there until I look down and have a story full of imagery and context.

Check out my post on HoTM. How does creativity work for you? Where are you the most creative?

Related Story:

Carving out my place in the world

The Heart of The Matter