Challenging Creativity

To be creative you must be challenged.

There is a chef on the local news channel who seems to have lost his creative spark. Here’s are a few of his recent segments:

• Broccoli & white beans side dish
• Egg, Bacon and Romaine Salad
• Oven Roasted Chicken and Potatoes with Braised Red Cabbage

While there’s nothing wrong with these recipes, there’s a definite lack of originality that one expects from a professional chef. It doesn’t even seen that he takes much effort to name his recipes. We sometimes joke that were he to publish a book of his recipes it would be called “The Dishes I prepared on the Local News During the Calendar Year 2008.”

For a while now, this is how I’ve felt about my own presence here on Write Anything. It’s been nearly three years now, and each week it’s more difficult to come up with a topic. And even if I do have an idea, I find my own writing lacking.

This is what happens when creativity is not challenged. Creativity is a process of conflict, of success and failure, or experimentation. This is one of the reasons that the starving artist is such a powerful cliche—because it’s so often true.

So I’m looking forward to the upcoming changes on Write Anything. We’re making changes designed to challenge ourselves, and our readers, to be better writers. I’ll leave it to other to unveil the specifics, but I think it’s fair to say that following this blog will be a much more active experience than it has been in the past.

I, for one, am looking forward to the challenge.

This post was originally posted on Write Anything—
where six writers talk about the trials and
tribulations of their writing lives. And each
Tuesday the soapbox belongs to me.