The idea of teaching an art is something that I actually think about a lot, especially since I just got accepted as a transfer student at Emerson College for their writing, literature and publishing program. Writing, much like visual and performing arts is an art that requires years of practice and hard work to not only master, but to even begin to grasp and harness. There is also a large portion of mastering an art that takes talent alone. Not everything in writing can just be taught to you. You can’t just teach someone how to come up with ideas for stories and poems. Maybe you can teach someone how to organize the ideas and develop them further, but you can’t teach them the act of creating alone. Creating things and being creative is something that someone is born with. They can either create worlds and works of art, or they can’t. So that leads to the question, can you teach someone how to write creatively? And if so, then what do you teach them? How much of the art of writing and creating worlds and scenes can be taught?

I believe that these are questions that don’t have any right or wrong answers, mainly because I think most writers would answer with their opinions. Studies have been done to prove that creativity can be taught because all of us have creativity in us, but the thing is that some of us need to actually take the time to unlock the creativity within us before we can begin to create. Personally, I have been coming up with stories since I could hold a freaking pencil, and believe me, a lot of people hated it (mainly teachers who were just frustrated that I was writing a story rather than listening to them drone on about geometry) but for others that isn’t as easy. Of course there are ways that creativity can come to us, but in my personal opinion, not everyone has the capacity to be as creative as others.

I am going to use myself as an example here. As I said, being creative has always been something that just comes naturally to me. For a while it was in terms of visual art. I used to love to draw and paint and I loved experimenting with all different colors and I was constantly doodling on any paper I was given. This continued until about 7th grade, and that’s when I started to write. I would write little stories here and there with a splash of fan fiction that was based off of other books I read and T.V shows I watched. By the time I got to high school, I put my pen and paper down and I began to focus my creative energy on music in my high school concert choir. I wasn’t aware that you could do more than one at the time. Even when all of my creative energy was going into music, I still wrote, and sometimes I would even draw or paint here and there, but my writing was always the strongest. Still, most people saw me as a singer because I never showed anyone my writing or art, mainly because I never deemed them worthy of the public eye. There also weren’t a lot of chances for me to show off my writing in my high school. All we had was a literary magazine that no one ever read. Most people just took them and threw them in the trash (not even the recycling bin which in my opinion is a bit rude considering they didn’t even put in the extra effort to put it in the correct bin)

A lot of people looked at me and all of the things I was doing with my creative energy and thought I was insane. Singing some people understood. Art was something that most people just kind of brushed off. Writing on the other hand confused the hell out of people in my high school. When people in my high school heard writing, they thought of research papers and English essays. Not once did they ever think of poems, stories, or novels. Any time someone would ask me why the hell I would ever consider writing for fun, I would tell them basically that I can’t help it. I would love to be good at something that made me look more employable, like math or science, but instead of numbers and equations in my head, I have characters screaming their stories at me, and I feel pressured to write them down, but that is a talk for another time. The point is, my mind is just constantly creating and that makes me wonder, can someone be conditioned to be like that as well?

I am never one to argue with science, mainly because I know that everything that makes up the world we live in is science, but when I hear that studies have shown that you can teach creativity, I can’t help but think that there has to be some kind of disclaimer on that statement:

THIS STUDY SHOWS THAT CREATIVITY CAN BE TAUGHT**! AMAZING!

**Disclaimer: you are already creative, but you may not be as creative as someone who can write a novel in three months, or compose a symphony in an hour, or paint a masterpiece flawlessly

Creativity is something that all human beings are capable of, that is an undeniable fact that science has provided us. Thank you science, but the other part of said fact that you can’t deny is that some people just either have a more creative mind than others, or an ability to access creativity easier than others. So yes, everyone has creativity, but the next step is accessing it, and using it, but can that be taught to someone?

In a class I was taking while I was still studying at Suffolk University, I learned that it can take a person up to 10,000 hours of practice to master a skill, especially if it was an art. This was a class on how music affects the brain, and considering the professor was probably the dullest person I had ever met in my life, I kind of fell asleep during most of his lectures. Still, the one day that I didn’t fall asleep, the professor mentioned this bit of information and it stuck with me. It can take someone 10,000 hours (possibly more) to master an art or craft, and that got me thinking about my writing. I wondered if writing was a skill that I had mastered, considering most days it is all I can seem to do.

Although the research is there and there are many studies showing that creativity can be taught, I still believe that there is more than just having it there to make someone have the ability to create, and there is something about the individual mind that determines the level of creativity that we can unlock and use to create and compose. There is still a lot to this question, and there is also a lot that I believe is up to a matter of opinion since science can’t quite explain everything just yet (based on the multiple website articles I read). In conclusion: my opinion is my opinion, but others are allowed to think whatever they would like! So, what do you think? Can you actually teach someone how to be creative, or is it just something you are born with?