Best of the Week: Sea of Information

We hear so many things about creativity during humanities.  The creative personality is a paradox:  completely undefinable yet easy to make statements about.  While I was reading "Sea of Information"  I was more drawn into Andrea Barrett's ideas than I had been to anyone else's.  She reminded me of myself in a way because she didn't plan to write a story about tuberculosis, she just found an old book by chance and it sparked an interest in her that was never even remotely there.  I was reminded of myself because often times people will say something as a joke or an offhand comment, and I start to really think about it.  My imagination runs wild, even though the what was said had never even occured to me before.  Barrett made many bold statements about those who are creative and those who aren't.  And she told them the way a true writer would.
When we divided up into smaller groups to discuss the article I felt a little guilty because I, as I often do in small discussions, didn't shut up.  I had so many ideas that I wanted to share.  Eventually I realized that I was talking to much, and when I did I realized how similar many of our observations were.  One observation that we had in common, which I thought was the most important thing discovered all week, was that the difference between creative people and those who aren't is that creative people are more focused on feelings and emotional attachment than those who aren't.  Other people focus on big picture and everybody as a whole.  Creative people focus on the individual.  Andrea Barrett talked about when she walked past a sugar factory in Williamsburg.  She said that a historian might be wondering about working or how much the people there were paid.  She only saw one person there though.  She gave that place as a background for one character.  It only mattered to her because it was that one person's life.
It took me a while to realize why I loved this article so much more than any of the other ones we've read.  Similarly to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi she made many statements about creative people, but I found her story more interesting.  That was when I realized that Barrett's article did exactly what she thought a good story was.  In "Creative Personality"  generalities were made about creative people.  It said that all creative people were one thing or another.  Csikszentmihalyi was doing what many of the researchers Barrett worked with were doing.  Barrett was telling a story about one person: herself.  We went through the struggles that she went through and felt her own personal reactions instead of focusing on what the group as a whole felt.  Andrea Barrett wrote her article like a novel, proving all her statements about writers true.
Noticing that creative people are more focused on the individual seemed to be one of the biggest steps we have taken as a class.  It was never really said before, but it is something that seems to be a "well, duh" statement.  Creative people are focused on individuality, what single people go through, and most of all the emotions that drive the work they create.