A Reworked Essay On Creativity

I originally started writing an essay collection, or that was the idea of what it was going to turn into, back in December of 2024. I worked on it for a few months, writing three full essays that I felt were okay, but I didn’t feel happy about the project in its then-form. I started this blog instead, and have written shorter pieces for publication within a day or two, which I found much more rewarding. Looking at my stats, and getting some real life feedback too, a few people are clicking on my links and reading at least some of these. Which feels very cool!

I’d had the idea for an essay collection on certain topics since March 2024, according to the brief foreword I wrote, and the first idea was to write about creativity itself, something nobody else has ever done, and all thoughts on it will be wholly original. Either way, what follows is a reworked version of that essay, originally written some six months or so ago.

I have not thought of myself as a creative person for a long time. I have rather denied that part of my brain for the better part of a decade.

In the early 2010’s I tried to write for the first time that I can remember, and after giving up on that I pivoted to making music and YouTube videos. These received a mixed response from friends and family to say the least. My online friends seemed to love my videos, whereas my real life friends and family decidedly did not care for them.

Or rather, I know there was some positive feedback, but what stands out in my memory are only the negative responses.

I persevered in making videos at random intervals for my own sake and online friends for a few years, but I eventually stopped sharing them on my main Facebook profile and just shared them directly to the online friends who’d enjoy them.

The negative feedback from real life people made more of an impact than online positive feedback, and I eventually stopped making videos, or even expressing myself creatively much at all. The haters won, as the kids would say.

After publishing my first short story, Four Cats And A Life Improved, a preview of which you can find on this blog, and after sharing this blog on my social media sites, I have gotten positive feedback, which is weird and very rewarding. I’ve never been good at accepting compliments, but I feel like I should be taking the positive responses to my writing as a sign to keep going and get better.

Creativity for me in most of the decade that followed my YouTube era became having ideas, fleshing them out in my mind, whether sketches for comedy videos, songs, or anything else, but never putting pen to paper or pressing record on a camera or microphone. I’d obsess about them in my head for a while, play with the ideas until I finished them, and then never tell anyone about them.

During these years I’d deny being creative, and even deny myself the act of being creative, of expressing myself much at all. Which probably didn’t much help my mental health issues at the time. I was severely depressed.

As someone on Bluesky recently said, you should give yourself permission to make bad art! The original version of Four Cats was pretty bad! The essay collection wasn’t good enough! Then I continued to work on them, and the short story turned into something I think is pretty good, and this blog is a decent creative output as well, in my opinion!

Around the time of the pandemic, you know the one, the negative voice in my head suddenly became quiet, and I started feeling better, and in the more than five years that have passed since then, my life has just continually gotten better. And I have gotten better as a person. I am a much better friend and brother and son than I was in my twenties.

In my twenties I didn’t read much. I pretty much only read a few books during the two stays I had in a mental institution. I would periodically watch a lot of movies, and a lot of TV, but in other periods I didn’t even manage that, and I have a big question as to what I was actually spending my time on. Did I ONLY use my phone? For social media and articles about whatever was interesting at the time? I fear that may have been so.

As my mental health and life improved (I met my soon to be wife almost five years ago) I stumbled over a book at a store, and saw a chance. I took a picture of the book and sent it to my older brother as a Christmas gift suggestion for myself. And I got it.

For the next six months I had that book lying on our living room table to try and trick myself into reading again, and come summer 2022, I finally picked it up and read it in one sitting. Thus it started.

I kept reading more books, and eventually started thinking, Hmmm, maybe I could write something too? The book that made me see the possibility that my ideas might be worth putting out there was Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho. If something like that can be a huge success and not be off-putting to people, the idea I’d had for a book since 2012 or whatever, was possible too.

Not that my book would be as good, or as impactful as American Psycho of course, but it was possible to be weird and disgusting in your writing without being shunned and exiled from society. We all need to learn to be weird at some point.

At that time I started researching self-publishing, because I knew I didn’t want to go the traditional route of rejection and work. I want my writing to remain a hobby.

As I am (re)writing this, I have published one short story, finished another I’ve yet to get artwork for, so it hasn’t been shared with the world yet, and written a few posts on this blog, so my name is technically Out There now. Four Cats sold a dozen or so copies to friends and family the first week or so, and I haven’t really promoted it much since then, so there haven’t been any sales since week two. But more and more people are clicking into this blog! Several dozen!

I also feel it’s important to write this early idea (meaning the essay collection), and publish it, as a moment in time early in a writer’s career. In theory I could become successful, rich, and a changed man. Slim odds, but not impossible. In that case, I want to be held accountable. I’ve always believed that everything should be put out there and stick around. In 2024 I started deleting old posts on social media and YouTube though, but I still want to publish everything I write, if it feels finished.

I’ve deleted some paragraphs here about where you would be reading the original essays, which would have been Amazon Kindle, which we all know isn’t great. Now you’re reading it on a blog, that isn’t Substack, much for the same reasons I ideally wouldn’t be using Amazon at all.

Amazon and Kindle are extremely convenient, and so affordable. I often buy books there for less than four dollars, and I have a huge library of books I’ve bought and forgotten about, and I can just browse it with fresh eyes and find something interesting to read when I don’t know what I want to read.

My writings will also be affordable.

The book that got me into reading again, by the way, was Neil Gaiman’s Norse Mythology, which at the time made a lot of sense. I’d read other books by Gaiman many years before, and Norse mythology has been an interest all my life, as I am Norwegian.

I later joined Bluesky, the social network, and found Mr. Gaiman was one of the most active and popular users on there, and he wrote about his process for writing, and I asked him a few questions that he was nice enough to answer, and I felt maybe I was on to something. Some of his “rules” were stuff I had arrived at myself, independently.

Which felt pretty darned good. Until we learned about the allegations of sexual harassment and abuse and such Mr. Gaiman allegedly has commited. That sucked. I feared my own attachment to reading and writing might be negatively impacted, seeing as to how they were so tied into Mr. Gaiman himself at the time.

Luckily I don’t think much about him anymore, and I am still reading and writing.

Powerful men abusing their power to hurt women and others is always a much bigger deal and more important than how it affects an individual’s feelings about a person they’ve been a fan of however. Hopefully he stays out of the limelight forever, and maybe sees some form of punishment for his crimes, but that is doubtful.

So in late 2022 I bought a notebook and a pen, and repeated the trick of having it lying on the table where I saw it every day until I started writing. And I started thinking about my idea, letting it grow, watching it change, and eventually I wrote it down in keyword form from start to finish. I started writing by hand over the next few months, very intermittently, and it took a long time. But I was writing, thinking, and being creative.

One of our cats died in May 2023, and I was very sad, and I got an idea for a short story about said cat, and I got a new notebook and put the book on pause, and then spent the rest of the year writing the short story.

For Christmas that year I wished for and got a keyboard to attach to my tablet, which I have been writing on since.

Mr. Gaiman had talked about writing a first draft by hand, and then doing the rewrite on a computer, which was the same procedure for writing as I had come up with for myself.

I found, however, that writing on a keyboard is both much easier and faster than writing by hand, and it is much easier to edit this way. Shocking.

I rewrote the short story about the cat, sent it out for some feedback, and tore up the whole story and wrote a much better one after that. You might like it. The first part is on this blog, and the whole story is available on Kindle for 99c.

I kept having new ideas during these two or so years and started writing them down in the notes app on my phone. I kept having ideas, and working on them. It was quite a remarkable change after the previous decade of denying myself any creativity. And it felt good!

I wrote a second short story, started an essay collection, quit it when it didn’t feel right, and started this blog. This should be the fourth post in four weeks, and I’m actually writing this two days after I wrote last week’s post, because I’ve gotten the writing itch real bad these past few weeks, after a few months of little productivity! Long may it continue!

I don’t want to put too much pressure on myself to always be writing, because I handle pressure badly. Both external pressure and internal pressure is bad for my mental health. I can only do this as long as it remains fun and rewarding. It can’t become a chore.

I now see the beauty and necessity in creativity, and how wonderful it is to be human. We get to create. We get to invent stories and pictures out of thin air and then share them with others. It’s wonderful.

These days, the 2020’s, it’s easier to share our creativity with other people than at any other time in human history. We can make a meme and put it on our social media profiles in seconds, we can make paintings and drawings and share them, we can make music and put it online quicker than ever.

And I can write my little stories and make them available for others to read without much issue either.

Will anyone care? Not necessarily. Maybe not even likely. Does that matter? No. One day the Amazon servers will shut down, and a different day (or maybe one very exciting day indeed!) the Google servers will shut down, and my writings will be gone forever, just like me. Just like you. Just like everything will eventually disappear.

Humans won’t be around forever. We’ll die out just like the dinosaurs. Climate change? Maybe. Another meteor? Why not? Nuclear war? Definitely something I can see us doing.

And my impact as a writer will be forgotten, no matter how many people read what I eventually write. What matters is my impact on the people around me, my community. I think they say it takes 200 years for a human to be completely forgotten. That’s how long the last person to know you and remember you will live or something.

I take great comfort in the finality of death. One day the universe itself will be gone. It’s just a matter of time. A very long time indeed. And this comforts me.

Well, I’m not sure why it took such an odd detour at the end there, but it might’ve been foreshadowing for another essay on memory I had planned, and might yet write I guess! I don’t want to write anything about so-called “AI”, but needless to say we have some challenges to human expression and creativity with these plagiarism machines! Far smarter people than me are writing about the dangers these large language models present to our society, and I really, really don’t want to get into it.

Sam Altman eat shit!

I’m getting upset because I wanted to write about creativity and then remembered “AI” so I’m stopping here and watching an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation! See you next week?