CREATIVITY [II]

CREATIVITY [II]:
Avoiding Cliché

Creativity avoiding clichés, what is being taught about it in those educational institutes then?

Mr Dawson, Dibrini’s teacher not so long ago, emphasised avoiding clichés as one of the main learning objectives in Master of Creative Writing Program Dibrini has undertaken. Not only in the tools of presenting our stories but also in the genre of subject matters explored must the clichés be avoided. The class were taken into some “great” writings by some great writers, some of them were current, to see what style they used, what techniques are employed, and what critiques are put forward to avoid clichés.

For Dibrini, that was the first time exploring the newer literatures apart from those canons such as Shakespeare’s, Homer’s, and all those classics. First of all, Dibrini did learn from those writings what clichés were and what they did to avoid clichés. Obviously, Mr Dawson’s pedagogical strategy seemed to work.

However, Dibrini is going to say that what didn’t work was avoiding cliché itself. If creativity is avoiding cliché only, then creativity never exists. If everybody is trying to avoid cliché, then they are producing the same thing: a huge mass of jamming replicas of “avoiding cliché”.

In Mr Dawson’s class, we were assigned to writing a short novelette for our final assessment. Of course, the most important thing for everyone was to “avoid cliché”. What came out, however, was that everyone wrote the same thing: variety of forms, fonts, arrangement of scenes, multiple voices, multiple narrative styles, and that sort of stuff cramming in on everybody’s works. This is because (as I mentioned before that Mr Dawson’s pedagogical strategy seemed to work) everyone of us saw the clichés and because we were doing the same thing, that is, we were trying to avoid them.

Dibrini says this avoiding cliché doesn’t work for creating creativity because when we produce the same writing as we think that is “creative”, creative writing students in, say, ten years later who look at our work produced today would say all we did are clichés. Just like we say all those work in the past are clichés. Dibrini can only suggest for now that in order to be creative, DO NOT avoid clichés. Human can’t avoid clichés by avoiding clichés. This is because what goes on everyday is already cliché; that’s human essence. In spite of this, Dibrini is not going to propose a way of being creative because if it is proposed, it won’t create creativity. It will create yet another cliché.

What Dibrini has learnt from undertaking a Master in Creative Writing is that creativity is pureness. Creativity is raw, personal, and ambiguous. Dibrini has also learnt that human creativity is not creativity but only an acceptable cliché. The REAL creativity may not be acceptable for human; instead it may be considered as vagueness, misinterpretation, a lack of understanding in a particular issue explored, a nonsense, or even an insanity. This is because human perception is not ready (yet) for creativity. They deny their own inability to be creative by rejecting the pureness of creativity and define their creativity as “avoiding cliché”.

Dibrini hopes that one day human will be able to experience the real creativity that does exist in this world. It is a beauty. It’s beyond definition and some simple explanation. Some day. Dibrini hopes.

Interpretation

Interpretation

Yes. Interpretation is one of the human essences. Human always interpret. They interpret their lives. They interpret their thoughts. They even interpret their own interpretations.

This creates a realm of interpretation of which human think as REALITY. They believe the TRUTH is out there for them to discover. They invented the word “fact” for there brand new interpretation.

Human refuse to admit that what they discover is actually in their head. They discover every moment they think. The interpretation of their minds produces new essence, new facts, and new truths every minute. They just don’t admit that.

There is no such thing as REALITY.

CLICHE

CLICHÉ

Cliché is a French word. This word is synonymous with some English words such as banality, commonality, plainness, or even dullness or boredom. It is no a good complement if something is considered a cliché.

Apart from these “clichéd” definitions of the word cliché, cliché is also an implicit representation of negative gaze, dislike, or hatred cast on it. It is something people try to avoid, if possible. A position of a cliché is in the opposite side of what determined “a work of art”.

However, once upon a time, cliché was surely considered to be a work of art. Something that everyone wanted to produce like one. Cliché was once adored. Suddenly, the admiration for the cliché had come to the saturation point. Cliché became banality, commonality, plainness, or even dullness or boredom as mentioned above. Avoiding clichés took the throne of a work of art. But the throne wouldn’t last so long.