Scott Keen with a Guest Post: "Finding Creativity in the Everyday"

Welcome Scott Keen, author of Scar of the Downers, with a guest post on creativity every adult should read.

 

Finding Creativity in the Everyday

By Scott Keen

Nine years ago, I remember sitting outside watching my oldest daughter (who was less than 1 year old) playing under a patch of pine trees. All around us lay a carpet of the pine needles, brown and bunched into three strands. As I picked a bunch up, I noticed how they looked like three spindly fingers. That was the beginning of a race of beings called the Dendron that you will find in my book, Scar of the Downers.

The thing about creativity is you have to know where to look for it. All around us there are hints of the fantastic, and to see it, you must view the world in a different way.  Our children already do it. The stick on the ground can be a gun, a sword, or even a spatula. The tree can be home base, a house, or even another world.

I stay at home with my four daughters, and that gives me ample time to see how kids are effortless with imagining and creating. They build elaborate worlds to play in where they don’t even need any toys. They just run around, sometimes with dress-up clothes and props, and sometimes not.

Part of fostering creativity in my life is just doing the things that my children already do. Asking the question “What if…?” and then not censoring myself with the answer. It’s the basic beginning point when you are thinking of any kind of story. I believe that this kind of imagining is something that adults don’t do enough of, even though I would bet that anyone would perform better in the workplace if they did.

The mundane jobs that surround a stay-at-home dad do another thing for me… I constantly feel the need to challenge myself in the realm of the creative because it can so easily atrophy. Just like I had to buy a chin-up bar because I was feeling stagnant physically, I have to stir up my creativeness daily to keep my imagination flexible and active. I sometimes play my guitar and tweak a song that I’ve written. Or sometimes I work on a manuscript (currently I’m working on the sequel to Scar of the Downers and also a musical I hope to produce and direct this year). Or, sometimes I just design something with Legos or wooden blocks with my kids. Occasionally, I’ll design and build for real, like a table or a bench or something else that we need. And sometimes, I just try to think differently about the things around me – like could those holly leaves be the shape of the Dendron’s shield? Or could this flower be the iris of another creature?

Finding creativity in the everyday can be difficult since it’s so easy to lose oneself in watching too much TV, playing too many video games, or even just keeping the house picked up.  What’s important is that I shouldn’t let my creative self languish. Like all good things, you have to work at it.

Thank you to Wow! Women on Writing for providing this stop on Scott Keen's blog tour!

For more information and more tour stops, click here.

About the Author: 

Scott Keen grew up in Black River, NY, the youngest of three children. While in law school, he realized he didn't want to be a lawyer. So he did the practical thing--he became a writer. Now, many years later with an MFA in script and screenwriting, he is married with four daughters, two of whom he homeschools. He blogs at www.scottkeenbooks.com.

About Scar of the Downers:

Branded on the slaves in the Northern Reaches beyond Ungstah, the scar marks each one as a Downer. It is who they are. There is no escaping this world. Still, strange things are stirring.

Two foreigners ride through the Northern Reaches on a secret mission. An unknown cloaked figure wanders the streets of the dark city of Ungstah. What they want no one can be sure, but it all centers around a Downer named Crik.

Crik, too scared to seek freedom, spends his days working in his master's store, avoiding the spirit-eating Ash Kings while scavenging food for himself and his best friend, Jak. Until he steals from the wrong person. When Jak is sold to satisfy the debt, Crik burns down his master's house and is sentenced to death.

To survive, Crik and his friends must leave behind their life of slavery to do what no other Downer has ever done before--escape from the city of Ungstah.

5 Lessons My Kids Taught Me About Creativity

Last month, I announced my intention to participate in National Novel Writing Month (a.k.a. NaNoWriMo). The goal was to write an entire novel in the span of thirty days. The result of this endeavor would turn out much different than my original intention. (Sigh!) I fell far short of writing an entire novel. How short? Well, if it were a race, I tripped on an untied shoelace at the starting blocks and never got up.

If every dark cloud has a silver lining, here's mine: I learned several invaluable lessons about the creative process last month. And I learned them from an unlikely source, my children.

November may have been a writing marathon for some, but for anyone with young children, it also meant "Parent - Teacher Conferences". As I sat through each conference for each of my three very different kiddos, not only was I filled with motherly pride, also I was struck with a kind of awe at my children's ability to express themselves so naturally and so imaginatively. It's not that I have some awesome writing gene that I have passed onto my children (although that would be supercool). It comes down to the fact that my children are, well, children. They are not impeded by adulthood vices, insecurities and pressures. As I spoke with each of their talented teachers, I realized a thing or two about creativity. And I discovered how I had sabotaged my goal of writing a novel in a month long before I figuratively put my feet into the starting blocks.

Lesson #1 (from my oldest son): Enjoy the process of creating.
I'm reminded of one of my all time favorite holiday movies, A Christmas Story. Remember when the teacher scrolled the writing assignment on the chalkboard and the students moaned in response? Fortunately, my oldest son's Fifth Grade teacher is the exact opposite. She treats writing as an adventurous endeavor rather than a chore. It seems when it comes to creativity, enjoying the process makes for an inspired finished product. My son got an incredible kick out of his teacher's suggestion to use the names off paint sample cards as descriptive words in his essay. As a result, the sunset in his final draft popped with color and imagery! As for the rest of his essay, it brought back wonderful memories of our beach trip last August, a trip he clearly enjoyed at the time and once again, as he wrote about it.

Lesson #2 (from my daughter): Create/Write with wild abandon.

When my daughter writes in her Second Grade classroom, she doesn't worry about what her classmates will think of her when it's "sharing time" or whether every word is spelled correctly or if her penmanship is perfect. She writes quickly, getting down her every thought as it comes into her head. When you read one of my daughter's lively pieces, it's as if she's standing right there talking to you. All of her wit and her spunky personality shines through every word (misspelled or not). If my daughter worried about how her work would be received by her peers or how to correctly spell a word before continuing forward, all that beautiful prose would be lost. I imagine she would be stuck on the second or third sentence when time was up. Her childhood exuberance allows for an imperfectly perfect first draft. If you follow my daughter's example, second drafts are for revision and all the other nuts and bolts. First, let it fly. Fill that blank page and then, flip it over and cover the back side, too!

Lesson #3 (from my youngest son): Life is challenging. Create anyway. 
As I have written in a prior post, my youngest son faces real challenges when it comes to language. You would think that would translate into a parent-teacher conference filled with tense conversations about how to motivate my son to toward activities that involve reading and writing. So, imagine my pleasant discovery that my son had written with the same wild abandon as his his twin sister. My son has always displayed a fantastic imagination, yet, how with all his difficulties (real, documented difficulties) would he ever be able to share his thoughts and grand imaginings on paper? The answer? He simply put his pencil to the paper and wrote an epic tale of knights and swamp monsters to the best of his ability. He didn't let any of his difficulties stop his story from pouring over three pages. When he was finished, yes, there was definite evidence of his challenges with language. The amazing thing? None of those errors really mattered. He had expressed on paper a story of a hero battling uninhibited toward a tremendous victory. If you asked any of us at the conference, we would have said my son was the real hero.

Lesson #4 (from all three kids): Make time for creativity.
Okay, so my children don't add "creative time" into their schedule of events on their individual calendars. They do, however, make time, like most children their age, to play, to create and to generally let their minds wander. And, when they're at school, their teachers actually do schedule time for creative expression. However, as adults, unless your job requires it, very few of us prioritize time for play, for creativity or to generally let our minds wander. Last month, when I should have been writing entire novel, I managed to prioritize everything from worthy tasks like food shopping to time sucks like every social media site over making time to write. Worse than the fact that I don't have a new novel in the works is that I denied myself time to do something meaningful and rewarding. So, yes, schedule time for creativity or, at least, give yourself permission to play even if it's only a half an hour a day.


Lesson #5 (from all three kids): Creating = Joy
Here's the best lesson that all children seem to intrinsically know, creating equals joy, plain and simple. In adulthood, it's all too easy to equate what you have created with money and fame. Sure, a creative life could lead to financial and personal gains, but it's not a given and, most of all, it's not the point.  When my children create something, the best they can hope for is to have it displayed on the refrigerator or to share it with other family members. They don't expect a paycheck and they don't look for reviews written by strangers. True, life demands a paycheck and in order to get one, you need positive reviews. But, that's a lot like writing the second draft before the first. There's a joy in creating that must be valued and protected. My kids understand it. Children universally naturally seek it out.  It's something I had forgotten and I'm so thankful to my children for reminding me!

For more about my writing endeavors

(that I actually completed), 

check out:

www.audryfryer.com

And then, get out there and create!