What are your favorite ways to express your creativity?

This is a silly question to ask people who try to write every day, don’t you think? Am I supposed to not supply the obvious answer, but instead come up with something like interpretive dance? I like to express my creativity by howling at the full moon once a month. I enjoy crocheting beer can hats. I make macaroni necklaces. I sculpt objets d’art out of cheese. I macramé, papier mâché, tango, play the ukulele, fold 500 origami frogs a week, and make evening gowns out of tinfoil and tinsel in my spare time. It’s how I express my creativity.

Sorry, but none of those things are true. Although, I have been known to bay at the moon on occasion. I express my creativity by writing. Sometimes, I even work my way into full on creative efforts that involve completely fictional people in completely fictional circumstances. Sometimes, these silly Plinky questions allow me to do that. That hasn’t happened in a while because Plinky seems more and more like poll site all the time, but that’s neither here nor there. I shouldn’t rely on a website to prompt me creatively anyway.

There was a time when I was a proper artist. I worked in proper artist media like paint and charcoal on paper or canvas. While I was a pretty good artist, I wasn’t all that creative. I did mainly photo-realistic art that was so ridiculously realistic that it looked like a picture. Finally, it occurred to me, in this day and age with technology like cameras, spending 90 hours on a painting that looks like a picture is silly when you could, in fact, just take a picture. So, I kind of stopped.

It wasn’t really as conscious of a decision as it sounds. It had more to do with lackadaisical laziness and the computer. On the computer, I’m much freer to create anything my little heart desires. There’s this genius invention called an undo button and you can save different versions. I can change the colors in an instant. You can’t do any of that with paint. I made the goldfish that you see there attached to my profile. When I was painting, I never would have created something like that. It’s not a photo-realistic fish.

Sometimes I miss getting my hands dirty. There’s nothing like working with charcoal. By the end of the day, I looked like a coal miner just come from a shift. There’s a satisfaction in looking at something and thinking, “I made that”, but I get that same satisfaction from writing these answers every day. It’s a daily ritual. It’s my daily absolution. It means that I’ve accomplished something creative today, even if it’s just arranging words on a screen, even if it’s only a stupid answer to a stupid question on Plinky.