I shouldn’t be surprised that this is still the hardest part. After all, how may essays over the years—thoroughly researched and well supported with quote-by-quote outlines—have I opted to end at the very start? The act of starting something new is terrifying, maybe even more so every time. What will I say? Will it be any good? Where will I even go once I have started? The ever-looming threat of failure is darkest at the onset, when it’s easiest to turn back and you haven’t invested anything at all, yet. I can’t possibly know what I’m going to say before I begin to write.

 

And so, this time, just like countless others before, I begin by talking myself in circles, searching for a place to begin: a thought, a harmonious combination of words, anything at all that will give me the little push I need to just—

 

The push into a great, swirling, hissing, glowing, tempting, evil, mass of undefined brain goo called “creativity.”

 

These are uncharted waters. My fuzzy comfort blanket has always been literary analysis, where there is always another line to read, another point of view to consider, a thousand and one more little things I can read too much into when I’ve run out of ideas. This is not my comfort blanket. Fiction is not something I’ve practiced, not something I’ve done and received feedback for since the age of twelve, at least. I have no defenses in this strange new land. My greatest weapons—“thus” and “however” and “such”— feel as if they’ve been drained of their formerly immense power. I feel extraordinarily out my depth despite the fact that I have been reading and analyzing fiction the majority of life. Setting out to write, it’s almost as if I’ve never read a piece of fiction in my life. In fact, all of the stories in my brain now feel more like a curse than anything else, because the stories I love keep creeping their way into all of my ideas. How do authors possibly, ever, ever, write anything original? How is everything not the same? Do all writers do this? Do they just pick apart scraps and bits of stories they love to weave together? Do they write what they wish they could read? Do they write what they already have read?

 

When I was a happy third grader, this was easy. I loved creative writing. I made things, I had a plethora of stupid ideas, I wanted to be an author and write stories and I had absolutely zero fear of sharing these stories and ideas. The more I grew, the less creative I felt. The ideas didn’t come to me anymore, and it seemed more and more like every day the creatively talented people I knew just were that way. I didn’t have the ‘spark,’ that creative persona, you know, that stay awake because I had so many ideas keeping me up stereotype programmed in me. Or maybe, I just didn’t feel like I did.

 

This is not literary analysis, nor is it a research paper.

This is something else. Something new, for me.

 

And still, the beginning is the hardest part, and so I will approach it with the tactic I love best: asking a question.

 

Can you learn to be creative?

Can I?

 

 

What follows is the answer. (and still, perhaps, only the beginning).