By Aliza Feldman, Opinions Editor
I was born believing I was creative. As a child, my parents and teachers were impressed with my love for art, music and writing, and my ability to use my imagination to transform blankets into fortresses and write and direct musicals for school projects. I wrote my first book at the age of eight and beamed pridefully as I held it up to present to my mom.
A few years ago, I rediscovered this book buried within a pile of artwork from my childhood that my mom keeps in a big plastic bin beneath her closet. I cringed as I flipped through the pages, realizing that my “original story” about three best friends was lifted almost entirely from a children’s book I had read, just with characters’ names swapped out.
Imitation, I reasoned, is the opposite of imagination. Suddenly, all the praise I had received for my creativity as a child felt like a fraud.
As an English major at Stern, I have been lucky enough to take classes spanning screenwriting, literature, creative nonfiction and copywriting. Somewhere within the overlap of all those classes, a question kept resurfacing: what is creativity, really? I used to think it was a trait you either had or didn’t, like having brown hair or being good at sports. But the more I engaged with the creative process, the more that definition warped.
This semester, in Professor O’Malley’s British Romanticism class, we studied Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a poet of the Romantic movement who drew a distinction between two different creative faculties: imagination and fancy. Fancy, he argued, is a mechanical process, a rearranging of existing images into something that only mimics creativity. Imagination is something deeper. It dissolves what already exists and recreates it into something new, unifying diverse elements to produce new forms of meaning. Imagination, he writes, is the “repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation.”
This distinction clicked when I thought back to my advertising class. One of the first rules we learned was to throw away wordplay. Puns and clever headlines are always the first ideas to surface, but seasoned advertisers warn that they are vacuums—impressive for a split second, yet empty underneath. That is fancy. It dresses up existing ideas without transforming them. Real advertising, the kind that actually moves people, requires something closer to what Coleridge meant by imagination.
But these definitions are still abstract and don’t explain what it takes to truly be creative. That’s where my creative writing classes came in. Each one added a new layer to my working definition of creativity.
In my introductory creative writing class with Professor Matt Miller, I learned that writing characters is about understanding what drives people. What does that character want? What are they afraid of? Those insights are what propel a story forward and explain why characters make the choices they do. It’s not about coming up with the most intense and dramatic plot, but about placing your characters in situations that challenge their wants and needs.
I remember sitting in my memoir class when a student raised her hand to comment on the piece we had just read. “I didn’t like it,” she announced. “I just didn’t relate to her story at all.” The professor gently pushed back. Maybe we don’t need to relate to a story for it to matter. Maybe we just need to be willing to care about someone else’s experience. The comment stayed with me. Why do we read other people’s stories? Should we care about a story that has nothing to do with us?
The answer came from my screenwriting class where I learned about the importance of the audience’s identification with the protagonist. Unlike novels, which rewards readers willing to excavate complex themes, a good film has simple and clear emotional stakes. A guy wants to get the girl. A monster is terrorizing a city and its citizens must try to stay alive. Even if we have never been in those situations, we root for the hero because we can relate to their feelings of love or fear.
That is exactly what makes good advertising too. David Oglivy, often called the “father of advertising,” said that truth is the most powerful element of any campaign. Advertising at its best is not manipulation. It’s identification. It’s about finding the human desire that lives beneath the product and holding it up to the light.
This is the answer to the creativity question and the reason why we watch and read stories about other people. At its core, every story is the same story: what it feels like to be human. It takes on infinite forms, but the emotional heart is always shared. We recognize ourselves in a character struggling with loneliness whether she is an eighth grader navigating a new school or a middle-aged man facing the end of the world. Creativity is the ability to take a lived experience and thread it back into the larger human one.
A few months ago, I finally sat down and watched Mad Men, figuring it was required viewing for anyone who wants to work in advertising. The show follows Don Draper, a creative director in the high pressure world of advertising on Madison Avenue in the 1960s. The show doesn’t simply follow Don Draper sitting in a conference room brainstorming slogans—which, besides making for a very boring plot, would miss the whole point. What Mad Men understands is that Don’s best ideas come from his own life, his wounds, his love, his longing. In a famous scene where he creates a pitch for a kodak photograph carousel, he uses photos of his own family to sell the client on the power of nostalgia. “This device isn’t a spaceship, it’s a time machine,” he said. “It goes backwards, and forwards… it takes us to a place where we ache to go again.” That’s the whole game, in advertising, in storytelling, in any creative act. The deeper you go into your own experience, the more it becomes a mirror for everyone else.
My favorite screenwriter, Charlie Kaufman, understands this better than anyone. In his 2011 screenwriting lecture at BAFTA, Kaufman told a story about a man in his neighborhood he would pass while running. Once, when he was running down a hill, the man was running in the opposite direction and greeted him with a clever line: “Well, sure, it’s all downhill that way.” The first time it happened, Kaufman smiled, certain they had shared a genuine human moment. But then it happened again. And again. Until he realized the man said it to everyone. The next time he passed him, Kaufman looked away, flooded with a shame he couldn’t quite name. He had mistaken something ordinary for something special, and the embarrassment of that mistake felt almost unbearable. What makes Kaufman such a remarkable storyteller is his willingness to sit with the feelings most of us instinctively brush past. The shame of feeling ordinary. The embarrassment of wanting connection and missing it. He leans into those feelings, and in doing so, he finds something that belongs to everyone.
John Keats famously said “what the imagination seizes as beauty is truth.” We cry at fictional characters because somewhere in their story, we have recognized ourselves. There is something beautiful about the way a perfectly captured emotional truth can stop you in your chest and make you feel less alone in your own experience.
So how do you tell stories that resonate? Where does that kind of imagination come from?
In Dr. Ann Peters’ creative writing class, we had an assignment called the mimic, where we chose an author we admired and imitated his or her voice as closely as possible. I didn’t understand. How could imitating someone else’s style help you find your own? The goal, Dr. Peters explained, was not to become that writer, but to find yourself in the process of trying. Your own instincts surface in the gaps. The places where you diverge from the original, where your own sensibility quietly asserts itself, that is where your voice lives.
Now I think back to that children’s book I plagiarized at eight years old and I no longer cringe. I understand that all artists and creatives emerge from somewhere. Every writer you have ever admired once sat down and copied someone they admired. Imitation is not the absence of creativity. It is the beginning of it. Eventually, we stop borrowing and start inventing. We move from fancy to imagination, from rearranging what already exists to dissolving it and making something new.
Creativity, I learned, is not a trait that some people are born with. It’s a way of seeing the world. It’s simply the willingness to look at your own corner of human experience and uncover what it means, not just for you, but for everyone who has ever felt the same thing and never had the words to explain it.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of Aliza Feldman