Play is the Work of the Creative
Andrew Weir | AI Generated
Recently, I’ve been writing about creativity. I’ve already asserted that it’s more common than most people tend to think it is — that it’s a learnable skill that really only needs two things to practice, the first of which is curiosity.
Before you can have new ideas, you need to have old ideas. The way to acquire old ideas is to learn them, and the way to learn things — genuinely learn them as opposed to regurgitating them for an exam — is to be curious.
And now that you’ve indulged your curiosity and seeded your field, as it were, you need to get those little seeds to grow. You need to encourage those thoughts and ideas to bounce around and bump into each other instead of statically remaining in the orderly lines they arrived in. So how do you — to add yet another metaphor — shake the snowglobe?
Playfulness, my friend. Playfulness.
You need to put yourself into a mindset where unexpected things are permissible. You need to indulge in fun. You need to greenlight silliness. You need to embrace absurdity. Because when those ideas do start bumping into each other, they’re not going to make a whole lot of sense, at first. But automatically dismissing nonsense as such is a mistake. It is the death of the creative process.
So yes, maybe that initial combination of ideas isn’t particularly good or viable, but if you kill it in the cradle, it’s gone. If you let it be its own thing, even if you never do anything with it in that state, it can, itself, bump into yet another, different idea and become something else that’s closer to workable. You do that enough times, and suddenly, you have a bright, shiny concept that is wonderful.
This is the main point of an excellent speech given by John Cleese (which I highly recommend watching) back in 1991. That creativity is not a talent but rather a way of operating, and the people who tend to be the most creative are the ones who are the most playful.
I mentioned in my previous installment that humans are naturally curious, and we see that curiosity manifest most commonly and intensely in children. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this is also where we see playfulness most commonly as well.
Maria Montessori, of Montessori schooling fame, insisted that play is the work of the child. That through play, children learn all manner of important skills, methods, and facts.
And yet, somehow, for some reason, that element of play becomes more and more excluded as children get older until the general consensus is that only seriousness has real value. That rigor and process are, and ought to be, mutually exclusive with fun. That silliness, outlandishness, playfulness are only for entertainment and idle fancies. But this attitude doesn’t square with the mindset that actually pushes humanity forward through innovation and creative thinking.
How can a person possibly come up with a fresh idea or new way of doing things if they are unwilling to make a mistake? If they are worried about looking foolish? If they feel they lack the permission to be different?
This fear goes back to that general consensus I mentioned. That work should be work and play is for entertainment in one’s off-hours. That fun has no practical application to work or study. And yet, at the same time, millions of dollars and thousands of hours get invested into “gamifying” countless everyday tasks and activities.
Playfulness might appear, at first glance, to be the enemy of academic rigor. After all, engaging in play involves being wrong much of the time. But how else are we ever to arrive at what is right, or to even recognize that it is right, if we never experience how to be wrong? And how could we ever be willing to do that if it’s not allowed, either by others or by ourselves?
And this is the root of the idea that creativity is something special, reserved solely for those blessed by the Muses to shed the shackles of seriousness and responsibility that restrain all others to frolic in the fields of possibility. That creativity is for the few, not the many.
And maybe, in a lot of ways, it is. But not because it’s impossible. It’s simply that we’ve, perhaps unconsciously, set up and enforced a system that makes it hard to do.
So, we come back to the assertion that creativity is a trainable skill. Like all other trainable skills, we need to set aside time and space to practice it. This means deliberately creating the opportunity to be both curious and playful. Perhaps, in the classroom, this means setting aside assessments for a while and simply allowing discussions or activities. Outside of the classroom, maybe it looks like pursuing a hobby or playing a game.
For example, Taboo or Apples to Apples generally result in a fair bit of hilarity as participants attempt to say something without actually saying it. But as amusing as those games are, getting students to come at an idea sideways is a genuinely useful tool for not only comprehensive understanding but also working within tight constraints, adapting language based on audience, and building a robust vocabulary.
In creative writing, this section of the story is called — not so coincidentally, in my opinion — the “fun and games” portion. Or, even more tellingly, the try-fail cycles.
All of us, all the time, are telling ourselves a story about who we are and what we are capable of doing. If that story glosses over or skips altogether the fun and games, the try-fail cycles, if it never allows space to breathe, it’s not a particularly enjoyable one, is it?