The components of creativity.

“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.”

-Scott Adams

Today, as I sat in the computer graphics lab for 3 hours and hammered away at the keyboard, I realized that there is a certain creativity involved even in something as logical and straightforward as coding. The code written by two people to do the same thing still contains very noticeable differences. The formatting and indentation of the code differs and in some cases even the very logic used to achieve the result varies vastly. Words like 'elegant' and 'beautiful' are just as applicable to code as they are to poetry. 

So what is it that constitutes creativity? Is it an inborn ability to recognize patterns and shapes where others see none? Is it the skill to generate aesthetically pleasing sequences of words/tunes/colours that takes years to master? Or is it just plain individual thought and its elegant expression? The answer, in my opinion, is all of the above.

Some people are born with an innate ability to spontaneously explode into a process of creation that leaves the mind boggled and frozen in awe. Others work at their art for ages before their thoughts can find a worthy expression on a medium. Some others are creative in the sense that they dare to create things nobody has ever had the courage to think of before.

I believe that there is a logic to creativity, a pattern, a design that follows mathematical laws. I also believe that these laws are so complex that we cannot understand them while in the relatively weaker concious state of the mind. This may be the reason why our imagination seems to be much stronger while we sleep or meditate. 

I once attended a creativity workshop where I learnt a very simple way to be creative. The trick is to find one way to do something and then ask yourself the question 'how else?' multiple times until you have found a unique and possibly beautiful answer. The way this works is that when we approach a task the first time, the left brain comes up with the most logical and straightforward way to do it. We must then urge and cajole the brain into coming up with more and more answers until the left part is out of solutions. It is then that the usually dormant right part awakens. It is the job of this part of the brain to solve things one has never encountered which means coming up with something new and hence being creative.

A simple exercise in creativity would be to find a hundred ways to divide a square into four exactly similar parts. If you get stuck at less than a hundred ways, ask yourself the question 'how else?' Trust me, there are more than a million ways to do it.