The picture to the left was taken a few years ago when Chadwick and I met up at the ICHTHUS Christian Music Festival. I write lyrics for a band and they were performing at the festival.
Read Chadwick's post below on what it means to be "Creative."
What is a “Creative”?
I started hearing this term a couple years ago usually in
reference to artists, and usually ones that are otherwise in the business
world. The graphic artist on staff at a
magazine or advertising agency, someone who does the animation in a movie, but
I’ve also heard it used directly towards people who make their living in the
arts such as a painter or writer (are writer’s artist? That’s a whole other blog!)
If you look up the noun “Creative” online you find the
definition:
“a person who is creative, typically in a professional
context.”
But is that really a big enough definition? When I hear the
term used it really seems to leave out a lot of people. I’ve seen people take a boring spreadsheet
program like Excel and figure out how to automate complicated tasks with it
that no one else had thought of yet. It
wasn’t something in a book or it wasn’t online.
They had to get creative. But
okay, maybe they don’t make their whole living off of that. Now me for example, I have an art degree, but
I am (usually) in non-profit management.
I’ve been in meetings with state agencies and other non-profits and
managed to come up with solutions to problems that everyone there thought was
unsolvable. Coming up with creative
solutions to problems is part of the job in this kind of work. Isn’t that “Creative”? But maybe my degree muddies the water in that
example.
My oldest brother was as far as you can possibly be from a
creative field, at least on the surface.
He worked with computers. He
would tell me, you just put the info in, and info comes out, the computer can
only do what you tell it, very black and white.
He had a Computer Science degree, again, not very artsy. He wore a suit and worked for a military
contractor. But creativity was the
mainstay of his job. Initially he was
hired to keep other hackers out of the computers, to out think them. Later his job was to get the computers back up when they went
down, or else some piece of defense equipment wouldn’t do its job if the enemy
decided at that very moment to attack.
So there he was, figuring out how to put everything back together again
when no one else could. And while
this all took creativity, he told me a story that I think exemplifies the
question of “What is creative?”
While working at the defense contract company, he had been
tasked with leading a team tasked to build a vehicle that could deliver
packages based on internal maps and coordinates. Again, while maybe not “ART” he was being
asked to be creative and create something.
He told me that initially he and his team had laid out a giant circuit
board on a sheet of plywood and once they got it working, they got it down to
less than half of that and finally they had a little cart that they could tell
where in the building to take a package and it would go there with the package
in a little mounted basket. Then one day
he came into his office and found out that his project had been classified, and
all the information on it had been removed from his computer. Then flash forward a few years to when the U.S.
bombed Baghdad the first time and he see those missiles on CNN go between and
around buildings in downtown Baghdad to hit their target, and he knew that this
was his design from years earlier.
Okay, you probably didn’t think this blog would get this “heavy”. But here’s the obvious point. He was a computer science nerd by his own
admission, but created something no one had ever seen before. And let me turn a corner here, because the
expression of “art imitating life” shows itself to be true over and over. Recently I was sitting down watching a TV
drama featuring a bunch of computer science guys helping with police
investigations, not one of those investigative shows, but the purely fictional
cop shows. During the episode, one of
the computer guys has a dramatic moment when he reveals why he wants to be
careful with how he uses his abilities and tells this very same story my
brother told me well over a decade earlier.
My brother passed away many years ago so this means that someone on my
brother’s team is now a consultant on this television show, or maybe even a
writer… using the creative exploits of my brother, and I’m sure his or her own
career, to be a “Creative”.
So what is a “Creative”?
Should the term “Creative” be expanded in our everyday vocabulary to
include people who don’t produce art but, as per the definition, are creative
in a professional context? I think so,
but I also think there is very little chance of it catching on. But I think it is worth realizing that we are
surrounded by creative people in all walks of life, and you never know when the
person at the cubicle next to you is another Rembrandt… of spread sheets.
Read on for the Prelude to DEAD FAITH:
Prelude
Time: Tomorrow night, 11:59
P.M.
Location: Covington, Kentucky
The darkness of the
underground labyrinth was barely broken by the light thrown off by the five
torches sitting in their sconces on the wall.
The room itself was cut
out of the living rock long ago and was damp and cold due to being only yards
away from the mighty Ohio River, just inches above water level. Many of the houses in this old and upper
class neighborhood are known for their hidden passages and tunnels that were
part of the Underground Railroad. But
some of the passages had been in existence long before the abolition of
slavery and had a much more nefarious purpose that had nothing to do with
freedom or helping ones fellow man.
While thousands had
gathered across the river in Cincinnati to watch the home team take-on their
big rival from Cleveland, thirteen men gathered in the darkness of the cavern for
their own dark reasons. Despite the fact
that they were one person short, they began an ancient ritual to bring
their dead leader back to life. As
always with this group, there had been arguments at the beginning, their leader
had been dead for months, and his decaying body, lying on the floor between them, didn't seem as if it could ever be whole again.
Many were nervous that one of their members had not shown up, but had
finally decided, for the task at hand, thirteen was a good number. The appropriate sacrifices were made, the
right amount of self flagellation performed.
And now, at one minute until midnight, the thirteen men were chanting in
unison in a language that hadn't been heard in over two thousand years. Their words demanded the veil between life
and death be torn asunder so their leader could come back to them.
Sounds like an interesting book doesn't it? Chadwick gave me the honor of reading the complete novel. I love that it is set in the area we all once lived. I have to admit, I'm not much of a Zombie fan, but was surprised to find myself caught up in the story immediately. Part of that may be that I was familiar with the setting already, that added an element of "ha, ha, I know where he is talking about or who he was talking about." The book is action packed and definitely has some plot twists I didn't see coming. There is no doubt in my mind that we will be seeing books written by Chadwick in the near future.
Bio of Chadwick Duncan:
Chadwick Duncan is a Christian, husband, and father. He left art to work with Children and related causes and been everything from Executive Director to part time diaper changer (that might not have been the actual title). He recently finished his first novel, Dead Faith, which he hopes will see the light of day soon.
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