First Things

"Creative people are selfish", "creative people are not practical", "creative people are out of touch with reality". All of these statements are somewhat true and somewhat false.

To be disciplined and productive, a creative person must choose to put time into their creativity, something that may be viewed as lacking in value or purpose by the more pragmatic among us. Carving out time to put into painting, writing, and other artistic pursuits, can seem selfish because generally these are solitary pursuits. However, they could also be termed altruistic in the sense that they enrich the lives of others.

Well-known artists, writers, etc must to some degree be practical in order to achieve that status. The value of creative outputs is inevitably subjective. Well-marketed, 'name' creative outputs may have no more intrinsic value than those from the unknown and un-marketed, but will command a higher price. The purely creative person, unversed in promotion is perhaps the epitome of the non-practical in the sense that their outputs may never see the light of day or be sold. But if they are creating because they are internally driven to do so, rather than because they expect to earn an income from it, this impracticality is irrelevant, at least to them!

We are constantly being told that reality is subjective...perhaps it could be stated more accurately that our experience of reality is subjective. This being the case, if a creative person experiences reality in a different way from a practical person, that should come as no surprise. It could also be seen as a great advantage to combine these different viewpoints in dealing with "reality". All of us need  superfluous, gratuitous, unnecessary embellishments in our lives. Life without beauty may be functional, but it wouldn't be much fun!

Reluctant Writers

As a home educating parent, I made an accidental discovery about overcoming reluctance to write. On one occasion, my 7 year old cried for 1 1/2 hours after being asked to write a few sentences. Horrified, I pulled back from asking him to write anything for a while, questioning whether I had been completely unreasonable to put such a burden on him. Later when I began writing "Plimgar to Luminar: Samuel's Quest", all of my kids showed sudden and consistent interest in beginning their own writing projects and 2 of them (including the cryer) still continue to work on creative writing whenever they can.
Maybe it was a timing thing, but I have the feeling that my own desire to write piqued their interest. Some things are better caught then taught I guess.