What's creativity? Are you it?

And does it matter?

I found myself last week on a longish car trip with my aunt, as many people do around holidays. We were chatting, and she was telling me about her new hobby. She’s throwing pottery, and we had all received lovely bowls from her the previous evening. She’s quite good, and we were all so thrilled to receive beautiful examples of her time, love, and care.

First: My aunt is great. She’s smart, funny as hell (like, tbh, most of my family), has more energy than even the most energetic people in my extremely energetic family, and has a fierce desire to give and do that is really beautiful. She’s also generally very modest and self-deprecating (like, tbh, most of my family, except when we’re the complete opposite. It’s 50/50 ok, we contain multitudes and some of those multitudes are lawyers).

And so I was surprised, and sad, to hear that my aunt doesn’t think of herself as creative. “Pottery suits me,” she said. “Because it’s not too creative.”

Photo by Daniel Lloyd Blunk-Fernández on Unsplash

Setting aside whether pottery is creative (it definitely is) or whether my aunt is creative (she most assuredly is), I found myself getting really defensive on her behalf, and I quickly realized why.

I don’t think I’m creative, either.

I’m a science journalist. A writer. A musician. I crochet. I was a scientist. All of those things do require creativity, and I do not think I am creative.

Why do I not think I’m creative? I think I’ve fallen prey to what kinds of creativity are promoted, as opposed to what kinds exist. I think I’ve fallen prey to self-comparison. And I think I might be wrong. I think I might be creative after all. And maybe you are, too.

People (ahem, social media) tend to laud very specific types of creativity over others

What is it to be creative? The technical definition is forming novel ideas out of your imagination. And many of us, including myself, tend to really emphasize the “novel” bit.

I am a musician. I sing works that other people write. To sing something isn’t just to do a pure imitation of what a previous person did (though you can do that, and lord knows sometimes that’s what audiences want. In which case, dear audience, Spotify exists). It also means putting your own interpretation on the work, with different dynamics, different flourishes, emotions, and emphases.

I sing well. Well enough to get paid for it. Sometimes I bring other people to tears. A few times a choir has come to a halt because they got distracted by the solo I was singing over them (I HOPE this is because what I’m doing is good but I mean…).

But the fact remains that what I do isn’t composition. I’m not inventing a song. I’m singing someone else’s. People tend to admire those who compose over those who sing. Everyone knows who Mozart was, but very few know Josepha Hofer.*

I am also a writer. I make my living doing it, and it’s a creative pursuit. I write non-fiction. About science. I work to make difficult concepts understandable and hope that other people find them as wildly interesting as I do.

But because I do write nonfiction, I don’t feel I’m a creative writer. I read people like N.K. Jemison, Martha Wells, Annalee Newitz, and I cannot begin to imagine what life is like inside their brilliant minds. I could never imagine the worlds they do, the conversations, the plots. None of it. Me? I can tell you how plants work. My work gets praise for its accuracy, its clarity. Sometimes for its humor. Never for its creativity.

We laud the brilliant creativity of novelists and composers. We should! They see worlds, imagine sounds, far beyond what most of us could ever come up with. On my colleague Christie Aschwandan’s podcast Emerging Form, she and Rosemerry Wahtola Tromer speak with poets and writers about how they create, and I see glimpses into worlds I could never mentally inhabit.

By comparison, what I do seems so paltry. It seems staid and sterile. A pale, pathetic effort to merely execute what someone else has made, to merely describe research that someone else did.

I’m surrounded by a lot of really creative people

I am very lucky in that I have wonderful friends, and many of those friends are ABSURDLY creative. They paint beautiful watercolors or make astonishing abstract mixed media. They write entire novels. They compose and play music. They sew fantastical hybrid mashup cosplay from scratch. They DM DnD games where they’ve made up the rules, the world, and endless encounters out of their (sometimes rather scary) brains.

I am so proud of them, every one. I glory in their accomplishments and I gleefully slurp up the work they produce, admiring its beauty, its originality, its joy.

And I know I could never do any of it.

Comparison is the thief of joy, and seeing their beautiful work, knowing I can’t even write a poem, can really suck the joy out. Social life, and social media, often pits people against each other—if only in our own heads. Who has won the most awards, who is the most lauded, who has done the coolest thing lately. Comparison can take joy and convert it straight to jealousy. It’s unfair to my wonderfully creative friends.

It’s unfair to me.

Let’s get creative about creativity

Let’s go back to the definition of creativity: Forming novel ideas out of your imagination. To me, for so long, this definition has taken “novel” to mean entirely novel. Novel music. Novel worlds. Novel visions.

That definition, I think, is unfair. It’s limiting. It is, dare I say it, uncreative.

Creativity can mean so much else. It can mean taking beloved characters and putting them into new situations. It can mean executing a pattern in different colors or with new modifications. It can mean making up new jokes, parodies, satires. It can mean putting your own twist on a dance or performing as a character in a play. It can mean making new fun videos.

It can mean putting your own voice and interpretation to someone’s composition. Or bringing your own words and descriptions to the natural world. It can mean forming clay into new shapes, or finding a new way to make a loved one laugh or feel appreciated.

Creativity is fundamentally pretty subjective. All of these things could be creative, if we said so. If we allowed them to be so within our own minds.

Creativity is also incredibly human. We all see the world in slightly different ways, interact with it differently, put ourselves into the world uniquely.

Maybe I am creative. Maybe my aunt is. Maybe you are too. Maybe we are all a little more than we give ourselves credit for. Because we are all human. And humans are, it turns out, pretty creative things.

Where have you been?

• Is it reading about a preschool that had a shoe thief? They put in cameras and caught…a WEASEL!!! “It’s not clear if the weasel was working alone or if others were involved in earlier incidents.” I now dream of a weasel mafia.

• Is it learning about the majority of media influencers are men, and most are conservative? I appreciate the Taylor Lorenz breakdown.

• Maybe it’s reading Sabrina Imbler’s staunch defense of science, Scientific American, and its (now-ex) EIC Laura Helmuth. Laura has been a mentor to many of us, me included, and I appreciate Sab’s coverage of this.

• Maybe it’s reading Laura Helmuth’s own recent piece on why RFK Jr. is a pretty terrifying choice for anything to do with health.

• Maybe it’s reading Julia Serrano’s piece on transgender people and bathrooms. There is no evidence that transgender people are dangerous to anyone in a bathroom, and in fact they are more often victims. I can tell you I’ve peed next to many transgender people and have never once felt unsafe. The bathroom bills are about stoking hatred and fear, and most certainly not about protecting anyone at all.

• SABERKITTY. Ahem. I’m fine. They found a frozen sabertooth kitten, and of course what I want to know is whether the scientists went “pspsps” at it.

• You may know that rats can be trained to drive tiny cars. You might even know they like to do it. But did you know scientists have now taken to studying those rats to see how the anticipation of fun increases joy?

Where have I been?

• You may have heard that Elon Musk has been nominated for the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE, of course), and promised to make things like science more efficient. Guess what? Science is not efficient. It cannot be. And yes there are good reasons to spray bobcat pee at rats.

• I had a ton of fun talking the science of music with the Modern Musicology podcast! Thanks so much for having me on.

Anti-Discourse Actions: Even Less Discourse Edition

As many of you know, I’ve been using this section of the newsletter to talk about actions I’ve been doing in the world. The goal was to use this section as personal accountability, to help keep me from engaging in Discourse. Over the past year or so I’ve been detailing actions every two weeks.

It’s been very helpful to me in so many ways. It helped me to look away (which Discourse would often encourage you not to do), walk away from my phone, and do real things that reached real people. I felt encouraged to find new avenues to make an impact.

But, because Discourse is Discourse, I’ve also worried about how it can be seen. Perhaps writing about my actions makes people feel bad because they aren’t doing those same actions, even though we are not the same people. Maybe, because of the performative nature of the internet, people will assume my actions are performative no matter what I do.

It’s also always felt performative, in a bad way. In Judaism, I was raised to believe that the greatest mitzvoth, the greatest of good and honorable deeds, are done in anonymity, with no expectation of reward or praise. I want to do the right things because they are right. Not because of what they are getting me.

Most importantly, I’ve begun to take up actions that I don’t feel comfortable speaking about. They are so needed, and I am not remotely ashamed of them. I’ll keep doing them, regardless. I’ve built the pattern now.

So I think it’s time for this section to end. I hope it wasn’t negative for people, and I hope maybe other people take action, too. Or at least that some of you have gotten yourself away from the toxic Discourse that makes us all so miserable.

*The first soprano to sing the fiendishly difficult Queen of the Night aria from Mozart’s The Magic Flute.