Creative writing is a tool to express myself, and through re-drafting, understand myself. Essay-writing can have a similar function if the subject fascinates me, but more often it is about understanding ideas and integrating them into my thought processes and deeper memory.
The act of writing for me is both expressive (the first draft) and reflective (the following x drafts). Sometimes I have an idea in mind before I begin, sometimes I discover the idea as I splurge my emotions and ideas into my journal, and sometimes I have to write the first draft before I see what the piece is really about.
I say these things because the act of writing something original requires three parts of me: the craftsman, the designer and the artist. These parts of me are intertwined in some tasks and separate in others. When I'm generating without thinking then I'm in artist mode, with a touch of craftsman. When I'm writing a second draft, I'm equal parts all three. When I'm looking at the over-arching structure, I'm designer only. And so on.
All of these parts of me are creative - they all have access to my unconscious mind. An artist needs to come up with a vision that stimulates me to grow. The designer needs to solve the problems of fulfilling that vision. The craftsman needs to make the second by second decisions that make up the choice of words in a paragraph. Intuitive decision-making is hard-wired into the whole process.
So: art and design. I looked up some definitions in the dictionary. To design is to imagine how something could be made and then to plan how to do it. Art isn't even a verb - I can only "make art". The closest I could get was an artist as someone who creates things with great skill and imagination. That sounds the same as a designer to me.
I think there is another step to this line of thought, but I can't quite see it yet... something about how all this relates to my writing and my software engineering skills...
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