On Being a Creative

When I was a child, I used to spend my time making stories. Playing "house" involved elaborate plots, costume changes, and musical numbers. My sister and I choreographed dances to Disney songs and performed them with gusto. My Barbies had fully fleshed out character arcs. I played with them much longer than most girls probably did because it was an outlet for my imagination.

Speaking of imagination, I was also the child who believed in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy into my preteens. I so longed for real life to be magical that it devastated me to learn that it was all pretend.

I would fill notebook upon notebook with stories, maps, and drawings of fantasies in my head. I took dance lessons, and voice lessons. I sung in the choir and on stage as part of high school theater.

I have always been a creative. I just didn't know it yet.

Somewhere along the way, I decided that I was a serious young person. Creativity was a frivolous endeavor. I would pursue academics and throw myself into learning. I grew up with shows like Gilmore Girls where you couldn't be the serious, intelligent ingenue if you didn't read the classics and maybe ventured into literary fiction. To be fair, I was more of a Paris than a Rory growing up, but the verdict was clear. Fantasy and creativity were for the misunderstood artists and geeks in the early 2000s television world.

Romance felt too silly, too fluffy, too girly. Fantasy felt too removed from reality. I was a serious person, after all.

Looking back, I find this amusing. I pursued an undergraduate and graduate degree in biochemistry. While it was a serious endeavor that can be seen as very left-brained, it required inventive thinking. The design of experiments, the researching of proposals, the troubleshooting of anomalies all required creative thinking. Teaching was very similar. Yes, it required deep subject matter expertise, but in order to properly explain those complicated topics, you needed to be able to think on your feet and tailor your explanations for your students' needs. Writing exam questions alone was an extremely creative exercise as was designing lecture slides.

After about a decade of claiming that I was serious, an academic, a scientist, I realized that science wasn't that separate from art. In my teaching packages, I highlighted my innovative ideas and creative solutions. These were features of my career and myself, not an after thought.

Sometimes I get embarrassed explaining my career trajectory, especially when the question of "What did you do before writing?" comes up. I struggle to find the right words to connect the dots of my seemingly winding road. But at the very heart of everything I have done, I have been a creator.

A creator of:

-experiments

-research proposals

-a dissertation

-lectures

-exams

-teaching proposals

-instructional materials

-scripts

-slide decks

-and so on...

And now, I'm a creator of fantasy worlds and fiction novels. I've embraced the idea of being creative and having a creative career. My time in teaching and pharma have made me a better writer. Communicating clearly and not overcomplicating topics were paramount to being a scientist and professor.

And being a creative is not without it's challenges that require some of that logical, decisive left brain.

There is no true distinction between creativity and reason. No one is predominantly one or the other. Some of the most creative people I know have analytical careers. Some of the most analytical people I know are creatives! Try working with an editor and tell me if they aren't some of the most logical people you'll meet.

Most of the scientists I knew had very creative hobbies. They were musicians, and bakers, and collectors, and artists. We all needed a balance between the logical aspects of our lives and the fun, imaginative parts of ourselves.

Creativity is a spectrum, but most importantly, it's fun! The best part about being a creative is how fun it is. I might complain about edits or the business side of things, but I get to spend my days in fantasy worlds with characters that I created.

I can't wait to hold my debut novel in my hands. I'll feel just as accomplished holding Moon Dance as I did when I held my PhD dissertation or finished my teaching philosophy. They were labors of love, and flexed my creativity in different ways.

I'm a proud creative these days, letting my past self run wild in ways that I had forgotten about. Writing has always been a joyful outlet for me. It's very special now to be able to share that creativity and imagination with the world.