What is Creativity?

Have you ever read the book Creativity by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi? It is one of my favorites and I refer to it often when I am "musing on creativity." The book is a look at

what creative people are like, how the creative process works, and what conditions encourage or hinder the generation of original ideas.

One of the important points of the book is Csikszentmihaly's distinction between Creativity and creativity. Early in the book, he writes of "3 different phenomena that can legitimately be called" creativity. I'll quote from the book here:

• the first usage, widespread in ordinary conversation, refers to persons who express unusual thoughts, who are interesting and stimulating--in short, to people who appear to be unusually bright.
• the second way the term can be used is to refer to people who experience the world in novel and original ways....I refer to such people as personally creative
• the final use of the term designates individuals who, like Leonardo, Edison, Picasso, or Einstein, have changed our culture in some important respect. They are the creative ones without qualifications.

While I can agree with him that those individuals like Leonardo, Edison, Picasso and the ones he writes about in his book are fascinating, and indeed changed the culture, I plan to deal in this blog with personal creativity and issues surrounding it. Particularly fascinating and important to me are what creative people are like, how the creative process works, and what conditions encourage or hinder the generation of original ideas. Only for me, the defiinition of creative people are those that work in some way to create an original or artistic product--a poem, a book, an essay, a painting, a photograph, a quilt. What do they have in common? What led to the differences in how they express their creativity? What is a creative state of mind? These are things to explore.