I've always known about creativity in my life. I just didn't know what to call it.
It is in fact the way that we look at problems and think of ways to make them better. I once had a job cooking for a youth camp when I was totally unprepared for such an undertaking. I cooked for 40 people on a wood stove, outside without shelter, using large quantities of only a few ingredients that the staff had scavenged. No one told me that I was unprepared, I just did it. When I was 12 I knitted my first sweater, taking the bus into the city every weekend to buy another skein of yarn. When I was finished, it would have fit a Volkswagen but I laced a cord through the bottom and wore it proudly. Problem solved.
Later on I went away to Teacher's College at 30 years of age, leaving my 4 year old and husband behind, because the problem was underemployment. I became a store owner because I was laid off from my job as a teacher. I started writing to add another dimension to the somewhat narrow confines running a small business. Creativie responses wind their way into our lives when we can't really put up with things the way they are going.
Another aspect of creativity's role as problem solver arose when I woke up to find that I had written what amounted to a 100 page letter to Claire, Starla's sister, and realized that something had to be done with it. When I broke it down into a series of letters of sensible length I had to find some reason to space them out in time.
In most cases, what separates a series of anything is life, the living of it and the getting on with our daily requirements. It therefore made sense to follow Starla's life through a journal.
But the most important contribution of creative problem solving that these choices made was that they divided the project up into manageable pieces. I was able to work in a very focused manner on the 2 or 3 pages of a journal entry during the hour or two that I could devote to the writing each day. Then when that entry was done, I could go on to the next. It worked really well for me.
Copyright 2007
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