What Is Creativity? A Definition from a Professional Creative Writer and Multipotentialite

By Youssef Sleiman - October 15, 2024

Quirky, wordy and lightning-fast at the keyboard, Youssef Sleiman is a neurodivergent professional, creative writer, and Gifted Curious consultant working in Dallas, Texas. He’s a quick study, a systems thinker with an investigative and creatively divergent mind on a career-defining mission to “make the important interesting.”

What Is Creativity?

Creativity is joining thoughts into novel arrangements in your imagination. 

The more thorough the blending, the more creative an idea will seem. Jane Austen’s novel Emma, the field of engineering, and Janet Jackon’s album The Velvet Rope each emerge from a multitude of previous thoughts, sometimes called inspiration, that are so thoroughly blended that critics, analysts and fans have dedicated decades of discussion to parsing out the inspiring thoughts. Meanwhile, less creative arrangements, such as the infamous double-decker couch from The Lego Movie, will seem like two ideas barely joined with bubble gum and duct tape. 

Importantly, it’s not merely joining “things”; creativity is joining thoughts themselves, sometimes through association, divergence, deconstruction, transformation, etc. There are as many ways to blend thoughts as there are rays of the sun.

For some, creativity takes practice. It’s an art they must activate in the mind and put effort into operating like a weaver at a loom. Some breathe creativity; no thought occurs to them without a half-dozen other thoughts already partially joined and inexpressible until refined. One idea segues to the next with invisible bonds, like hot noodles stuck together, too much for one mouth. (For those of you who have seen me tongue-tied, it’s because I’m talking with my mouth full of thought noodles.)

How I've Use This Definition of Creativity to Be More Creative

I made this framework and definition of creativity. It’s served me well over 17 years in the media and creative industry, not to mention all those years as a budding creative writer filling a portfolio of short stories. The first letter of my name, Y, even illustrates my creativity framework, a bit of serendipity I realized in college.

In my career, I’ve used my creativity-as-thinking definition to

• Craft a two-column brainstorming tool that I use nearly every day

• Encourage, consult with, and tutor other writers

• Analyze movies, TV shows, and books

• Speed up my preparations for all those role-playing games I run

My resume says “creative writer.” That’s not the whole story. Acting, blogging, board game design, dance, graphic design, photography, video shooting and editing — I’ve done more than 10,000 hours of professional creative thinking. Emilie Wapnick, the TED speaker and author who founded the Puttyverse, would call me a multipotentialite, a fluid person capable of excelling in many domains. Behind Emily’s definition is a vision of an individual exercising creativity across various arenas, almost as impulse, as natural as thought. What does it mean to be creative?

Before it was my occupation, creativity preoccupied me. 

I devised the definition above more than 35 years ago to answer this question for myself: “What did teachers mean when they thought my essay was creative or that I was creative?” 

Even though I had a poem published in third grade, my first paying creative gig was actually in fifth grade. I sold paper dolls of comic book characters that I had illustrated, colored and cut out: 25 cents for Wolverine, 50 cents for the Hulk, 75 cents for Spider-Man. Classmates called me artistic or creative. Still, creativity wasn’t a quality I could identify as easily as funny, strong or tall. 

Isn’t creativity just a kind of thinking? Stirring our thoughts until they stick together? 

Before I ever went to school, I wondered about where thoughts began and ended; where was a discrete, distinct thought if one implied two, if yes suggested maybe and no, if gray hinted at black and white together? Were titles the first line of a book? As a kid, I concluded that one thought could not occur alone the same way a daffodil couldn’t bloom on the moon; its existence presupposes a vital context. Every thought springs from another thought just as every thought before sprung from thoughts before. More hot noodles. 

Why Creativity Seems So Elusive

Definitions of creativity still feel insubstantial to me, even my own. If creativity is joined thought, then an individual with a lot of thoughts could potentially be intelligent. J.P. Guilford, the 1950 president of the American Psychological Association, conceptualized creativity as a factor of general intelligence. 

Is an idea creative because others say so or can an idea have its own objective creativity? Well, I tended to surprise others. I reckoned that classmates, friends’ parents, and teachers must be recognizing something they weren’t expecting, a quality they could not have agreed upon beforehand. So, an objective quality it had to be. 

Some definitions, such as the one in the Oxford English Dictionary, imply the production of an artistic work, which certainly describes what our society expects from the word. However, creativity exists in the vivid imagination before anyone puts a brush to canvas, before ink darkens paper, before experiments begin. 

Defining creativity can sound like the setup to a riddle. 

What’s a skill that emerges only when you’re exercising another skill? 

What do you call the action before you act? 

What makes things before you create them?