Interesting subject, though.

Keep polishing your Right BRAIN. Once your RIGHT brain is empower, you are in a confident calm mode to do things differently and thats where your creativity will come it

Remember you need to transform form your roots to hardwire your habits and make them stick with you for the rest of your life

Perhaps my response was an example of such excess. If not, my blog post certainly is.

I have provided a link to it as, for some reason, the backtracking (or whatever it’s called) doesn’t seem to be working.

Liz - you’re right, we need to be careful who we hang around with and listen to - sometimes we get useful feedback, sometimes it’s time to close the door. Yes, spending my time with creative people is tremendous fun - and you’re welcome anytime!

Amber - I agree it’s very importance to get the right balance - or sequence - between pragmatism and imagination. Too far one way, you get lost in daydreams, too far the other and you’re trapped in the mundane. I’ll be writing more about that soon.

Quentin - well I should come clean and confess that the Romantics are some of my favourite poets, especially Coleridge and Wordsworth. I don’t think Romanticism as practised by C + W is an obstacle to creativity - quite the reverse. I just think the Romantic image of the artist has become a stereotype, and can lead to limited creative horizons as well as self-indulgence. As you point out, the Romantics were compensating for the dullness of the Enlightenment; I’m trying to compensate for a little Romantic excess.

It’s interesting that all three of you have brought up the issue of balance - between skills and challenges, imagination and pragmatism and Romanticism and Realism. Maybe there’s another post in that…

News-Mind-Graph - thanks for the link, much appreciated.

“We can probably all recognise the classic image of the artist or creative person… The trouble is, it’s not true.”

Check out the Romantics’ response to Enlightenment literal-thinking and materialism, and you’ll find we owe them a great debt.

In this post Mark McGuinness say to us a reflexion about what makes a creative person. He says tips to be more creative in your life.

Thanks for the interesting post. It got me thinking about the differences between being imaginative and creative, or being a person of ideas with no real pragmatisim as opposed to someone who can give birth to unique and interesting projects.

For me, the most important aspect of being genuinely creative is not letting my pragmatism edit my imagination prematurely. While culling back is extremely important in the creative process, we still need the time and the space for expansion first.