Creativity, the Talent, Myth and Craft

"For talent without craft is like fuel without an engine. It burns wildly but accomplishes nothing"

Robert McKee

This quotation is the heading to this blog post's brief, it seemed quite apt at explaining the difference between creativity and talent when I first read it. After re-reading it and thinking about it I became quite confused. Lets play with the quotation and see what comes of it.

"For creativity without craft is like fuel without an engine. It burns wildly but accomplishes nothing"

Seems to make sense. Creativity means you come up with interesting and different approaches to things, but without craft you haven't produced anything just thought of different ways to approach them. To me here creativity as a word seems to mean a thought process.

"For creativity without talent is like fuel without an engine. It burns wildly but accomplishes nothing"

Seems to make sense. Creativity without the talent to produce the idea well leaves you with a really nice idea rendered poorly. Personally I feel like this is the first stage of being an artist and I have experienced this dilemma a great deal, when you live in the possibilities and in your head, you can easily "burn wildly" with possibility but accomplish little.

"For talent without creativity is like fuel without an engine. It burns wildly but accomplishes nothing"

Seems to make sense. Talent without creativity means that you can do something well but there is no interest to it, I personally find this with the photo-realistic paintings that have been presented in the BP Portrait award for the past few years. They are huge and impressive but seem to do little more than show how good the painter is, often they are fairly uninteresting and lack creativity.

Creativity is useful in both the idea and how to accomplish the idea, it is often thought of as the "artistic" and "softer" version of talent. Steven Spielberg showed great creativity and talent when he solved the problem of the fake shark not working until the end of the shoot of Jaws, many film director use creativity and understanding to problem solve. Creativity, innovation and problem solving to me are the same process but creativity seems like a new way of doing something, innovation seems like using what is there already to better it and problem solving is simply the process of fixing an issue.

As an artist creativity is gold dust and personally I find that it is really difficult to find, after having watched this I am slightly worried that I have been educated out of creativity.

This documentary also made me think about what creativity is and how to take advantage of it...

And finally here is the expected John Cleese speech about creativity which I think is brilliant, and the opening line is perfect.

"Telling people how to be creative is easy, its only being it that's difficult"