Ingenuity, creativity and time

Creativity is such an elusive thing. For some, waiting for inspiration is a familiar past-time. It's more than just staring at a blank page, or waiting for that tune to arrive out of thin air. If the muse has deserted you, it can be quite a time of anguish, particularly if your living depends upon being creative. At that moment there is simply nothing you can do. Creativity, said Margaret Boden, is the ability to come up with new ideas that are surprising yet intelligible, and also valuable in some way. Creativity is what many of us yearn for, in the classroom, in our homes, in our lives. It's a problem when it appears to be in short supply. Sometimes, it seems, the answer is to just give it time.

When Thomas Edison (allegedly!) came up with the idea of the light bulb (the archetypical symbol of genius and creativity) he didn't do so in an instant. It took him some time, through periods of trial and error, and many shades of failure and near success, before the idea had incubated enough to crystallise in an intelligible form, and then, as if by magic - the idea was finally born. Tim Berners-Lee's wonderful, revolutionary idea of the World Wide Web actually took more than ten years to reach full realisation. The psychologist Graham Wallas suggested that there is a gestation period - an incubation process that leads to transformation - and the creative transformation that brings imagination alive on paper, or on tape, or on canvas, or in the laboratory, is where the genius resides. Watch the video below, a TED talk given by the writer Elizabeth Gilbert, who explains where our concept of genius and creativity comes from.



In his book Where good ideas come from Steven Johnson supports this argument, seeing recurring patterns that foster creativity and innovation. He recognises what he calls the 'slow hunch' which he describes as a long period of evolution of an idea, before it matures to become accessible and useful. Creativity is almost never instant. It takes time. But it sometimes takes on this guise, when apparently from nowhere, a musician or poet can conjure up a haunting melody or a killer line. No, creativity takes practice, and this is why, when we see creativity in the classroom, it is almost always the product of a long period of immersion in study, and an intimate familiarity with the subject. Musicians and poets take time to master their crafts, and then the tunes and words visit them. Give your learners time to practice their art, their thinking, their craft, and you will be providing them with the tools to become creative in their own right.

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Ingenuity, creativity and time by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.