Priceless creativity

Over Christmas I found myself short of spare money.  Getting through the month became a struggle, but I know better than to wallow in feelings of despair.  The only person they hurt is me.  And it got me thinking about who I was without the trappings of all my possessions,

The answer I come up with every time is that I'm a writer.  I'm a weaver of tales with a moral, a message.  And in my greatest dreams, someone who changes the world through my stories.  

Good writing has two sides to it.  There's the learning the craft side.  The punctuation rules, the structure rules, the writing to a cliffhanger rules.  I've put in well over my 10,000 hours for mastery on that.

And then there's the unleashing of our individual creativity side.  This is what makes us memorable  storytellers.  Our unique and priceless creativity.  It's the ability to pluck disparate ideas out of thin air and spin them together into the gossamer threads of story.

We can't put a value on our creativity.  It's something we can't pin down, something we have to allow to run through us.  As an introvert, I spend much time alone in solitude.  And that peace is richly rewarded.  Out of it comes a flow of story ideas.  Many is the time when I've left off mindless ironing or washing up to grab a pen and paper to capture a brilliant new idea.  An idea that leapt unbidden into my mind when I wasn't looking for it.

Those rough scrawls on paper get filed in a ring binder.  Eventually they may get neatly written onto my  list of story ideas that I keep in a lever arch file.  But sometimes they don't get as far as being neatly filed.  Sometimes the idea prompts me to sit down and write the story right then, right there.

I may not have had any spare money over Christmas, but I did have a wealth of creativity.  And creativity doesn't need money to access.  It needs quiet, and openness, and a willingness to sit and listen to the still, small voice inside us.

That's such a small price to pay for the priceless gift of creativity.