Emily Fishman

All my life, I have been told I was creative by teachers who meant well and by others who used the term as a way of explaining why I hadn’t done the assignment like they wanted or why I had chosen to write a 12 page story in the fifth grade when a single page would have sufficed. A word repeated over and over inevitably loses its meaning, and eventually my “creativity” became less and less something that I knew how to define or assess. I was enrolled in the G/T program, I never made lower than an A, and my English teachers always liked me best, so I figured I could become a Writer. In my child’s brain, all I knew about Writers is that they got to live inside stories as a job and that they could work in their pajamas, so I felt like it was the fulfillment of everything I had ever wanted (I hated and still hate wearing real pants). When I applied to the University of Michigan, I wrote essays about how my love of stories led me to wanting to apply here, and I happily enrolled in English classes and joined the staff of the copy desk at the Daily. I thought I would eventually transition and write later. The world was my oyster.

 

Sometime around the fall of my freshman year, I had a crisis. In hindsight, it was mild, but a crisis nonetheless. My first B on a paper made me aware that every single person in my classes seemed smarter than me, which highlighted my inability to come up with a single original idea. It was … a bit of a situation. I think that B caused me to question whether or not I was actually a good writer or I had just been able to fake my way into good grades all throughout high school. I was at Michigan with the leaders and best, so why couldn’t I be the best? I couldn’t really find a distinction between a poorly received essay as failure and the realization I’m not creative enough to pursue my dreams as Failure. I thought I would be able to write the next Great American Novel, but I realized that I most likely would not.

 

I’ve been doing the school thing for a while now: procrastinating on deadlines, writing essays on essays on essays, and cramming my head with knowledge that I don’t know I’ll ever need again. I should be better at it. I should be good at it. It wouldn’t be inaccurate to say that up until this point, my identity derived from school, from grades, from the approval of my teachers. But school is familiar, and familiarity breeds contempt. While most (if not all) of my creative freakout is self-authored I think some of it can be blamed on what school values; academia, for all its creative championing, values repetition, regurgitation, and reproduction. Maybe I wasn’t as creative as I thought it was, maybe being creative is an ideal I have built up in my head, maybe creativity slipped away in the night after the fifth set of flashcards. So that’s how I got here.  

 

After the initial panic subsided, I realized that my crisis of creativity was a problem that could be solved like any other I had faced in academia thus far. Yes, I had some setbacks. Despite my new resolve, I still felt the sting when a professor told me that my essay “wasn’t accomplishing anything I set out to do.” Amidst the creative panic, I could admit to myself the actual problem, and that helped me find the solution. What scared me about creativity and producing original work was the lack of guidelines or rules, so I decided to create some. In my experience, structure does not limit creativity, but rather allows it to flourish. There’s grey area between creative and untalented, between structure and freedom: find it and live in it. At least, that’s what I’m trying to do. Sometimes the rules I follow for my own creativity seem silly, arbitrary, and even confusing, but I think I’m learning to love the structure. I might never be the stereotypical “English major” who writes poetry and has a Kurt Vonnegut tattoo and who’s “too good” for Harry Potter, but that’s okay. I have also come to the minor revelation that working in an creative industry was still possible even though I might not be writing the narrative myself. The fact that you could still have a creative career without being necessarily “creative” yourself was ground-breaking. I am not going to write the narrative, but I will come alongside those who are creative and hone and shape the work of those who are creative into something that is even better.

 

I wish I had some sort of sage life advice and wisdom to impart as to how to handle a creativity crisis and the ensuing re-evaluation of all one’s life goals, but I don’t. I think I’ve come to the conclusion that the world need creative people, but the world also needs people like me who are a part of the process in their own limited way. There are multiple ways of writing and multiple ways of being a “Writer.” I have an internship in Chicago for which I’m vastly underqualified, but the structure of creating for my job might just jump-start my own creativity. I’ve found ways on campus to be more of a behind-the-scenes presence in the creative process, through my work as a copy editor at the copy desk of the Daily and as a Peer Writing Consultant at the Writing Center. Despite my minor freakout, my résumé will not be blank just because I probably won’t publish anything in college; I’ve come to realize that other experiences are valuable as well. It’s looking more and more like those jobs will be the kind of work that I do for the rest of my life, and that’s fine with me. Even though I struggle a little every time I write a paper, my GPA is okay. And, if my intuition is correct, I think everyone struggles at least a little when they write. I will graduate from the University in May of 2019. I will (probably) not be unemployed forever. I’ll look back on the structure I craved and the new ways I had to think about creativity and (hopefully) laugh.