The Dying Art of Creativity
I have devoted my life to the mastery of dying arts. Not intentionally, mind you—I don’t set out to study something simply because it’s going extinct. I find what I do endlessly amusing. If mankind is made from dust, perhaps some of us are made from older dust than others. Or perhaps the concept of old souls is genuine. At any rate, I am the sort of person who, like a nineteenth-century housewife, must always keep her hands busy. Knitting and crochet are enjoyable, but sometimes I prefer something a bit more ancient. The Viking-age crafts of lucet and tablet weaving come to mind.
I also write stories. Storytelling is perhaps one of the most ancient arts, and it is by no means going extinct. However, I will on occasion look at the swill at my local theater and scoff at it. I have no patience for endless sequels and remakes, or for films that are so afraid of offending people that they forget to tell an actual story. Good storytelling is an endangered species.
Do I tell good stories? Perhaps. But since it is very difficult to describe what makes a story or storyteller objectively good as opposed to more pleasing to one’s individual taste, I will let that subject lie. But I do possess, like my tablet-woven belts, an object of ancient rarity. I have a very active imagination.
I daydream. The mere closing of my eyes opens worlds before me. My main world—the setting of the three novels I’ve spent the past nine years perfecting and publishing—is a fictional version of Viking-age Orkney. I am trying to change course a bit and write a fantasy novel. Being a bit older and jaded, this new world is slower in coming to me. But I can see it. I can see the cobbled streets of Bennerick, lined with homes that double as places of business for the craftsmen who live there. I can see my protagonist Maywin, with his brown curls and awkward teenage build. I can see Maywin’s father bent over his cobbler’s bench; I can hear the slight swishing his loose sleeves make as they graze the leather he is marking out for a new pair of boots.
My imagination has been active since childhood—and back then, I was not the only one whose mind worked this way. I remember playing make-believe with my friends. Everyone was creative back then. The problem is that my friends grew up differently than I did. I was homeschooled. I woke up at seven, then scrambled to get dressed and eat breakfast so that I would have some time to play Wii before school started at eight. I would always finish my schoolwork by noon, eat lunch, and have the rest of my day open to pursue whatever pursuits I found worthwhile.
Most of my childhood was spent reading and playing outside—as well as learning life skills like how to cook, sew, and mentally figure a 30% discount at Kohl’s. I started crocheting at six and writing my first novel at ten. (I was not immediately successful at either endeavor.) I had a couple of neighborhood friends I would play with, too. But as time wore on, we grew farther apart. They had homework. They had extracurriculars. They were tired after spending all day sitting at a desk. It took me a while to understand why they could never play with me.
A 2020 article from the Federal Reserve entitled “How do children spend their time? Time use and skill development in the PSID” shows, unsurprisingly, how the average child spends their time. Approximately 40% of a child’s day is spent sleeping, 19% at school, and 15% is spent doing things like commuting, eating, and doing household chores. Accounting for rounding, this only leaves 27% of a child’s day to spend as they please. The average child spends 10.5% of their day—approximately 2.5 hours—consuming media in the form of television, video games, and the internet. Less than eight percent of a child’s day is spent playing or socializing, and less than three percent is spent on “enrichment time” like doing homework or reading.
With statistics like that, it is very easy to see why the average child loses their imagination. The problem is that imagination and creativity are important for more than just the telling of stories or the crocheting of baby hats. They are required for problem solving and navigating unfamiliar situations. They are responsible for new inventions and new ways of seeing the world. They add color to life.
Of course, public schools are not the only thing to blame when it comes to today’s loss of creativity. The proliferation of media in the form of television, social media, mobile games, and even advertisements trains the brain to consume rather than create. The demands of life require practicality rather than innovation. Bad ideas (something every creative person has in spades) can hurt people or waste resources. Employees are rewarded not for creating new ways of doing things, but for doing what they’re told. And some people are genuinely more creative or imaginative than others.
I should probably differentiate between creativity and imagination—I probably should have done that near the beginning of this article. Creativity is the desire to create. There are different types of creativity. My own sort of creativity brings sweaters, scarves, and fictional worlds into existence. My father is a tradesman. His specialty is electrical work, but he is adept with carpentry and could probably build an entire house from scratch if he wanted to. Whenever my own creativity demands something made from wood—whether that be an approximation of an extinct Irish instrument or a recreation of a tablet weaving loom found on the Oseberg ship—my father is always there to help me. He can build anything. That is a form of creativity.
Imagination is different. Imagination is the ability to see in the mind’s eye something that does not exist. Imagination and creativity go hand in hand—it is much easier to create something that doesn’t exist when you can vividly imagine it beforehand. Imagination also deals with the generation of ideas. When I was thirteen, I watched a music video for Lindsey Stirling and Peter Hollens’ rendition of the Skyrim theme. It was my imagination that turned that music video into a world with people and a plot. Within five minutes of watching the video, I had the raw materials for what would eventually become Where the Clouds Catch Fire, my first self-published novel.
Both imagination and creativity are dying.
There is hope, of course. There are people like me, made of older dust and filled with older souls, who will work with our hands until our dying day. There are a handful of parents actively shielding their children from the forces of this age that aim to mold them into worker bots. There are people waking up, who realize that life is meant to feel more alive, and who give themselves space to think and feel and dream. Creativity makes us human; it will never die.
M.J. Piazza is an indie writer of fantasy fiction, who enjoyed crafting, her cat, and occasionally dressing up as a viking. For some reason that is lost on me, she has also taken a liking to my tweets.
You can find her work on
https://mjpiazza.com/