1. The definition of creative play

Let us define what I mean by creative play because, as it turns out, the meaning of “creativity,” “play,” and “creative play” have long and complicated histories. I think it is easiest to start with what lowercase-c creativity is NOT, including:

1. 1. Talent. As Alfred Balkin, professor, composer, and coordinator of the Integrated Creative Arts Program at Western Michigan, says, “True talent is a gift – ephemeral, elusive, undefinable, unteachable, unlearnable….Creativity, on the other hand, is an acquired behavior – learnable, teachable, tangible, and crucial to human development. The talented person may be, and often is, creative. The creative person may be, but less often is, talented….The creative person makes things happen; the talented person might.”Footnote ¹ Takeaway? Anyone can be creative. You can be creative.

2. 2. Leisure. Oftentimes, adults make time for creative play during their leisure hours. This makes sense. However, one’s privilege, or one’s freedom to do what they will with great swaths of time, does not necessarily account for time well spent. While you do not have to be rich to be creative, you cannot be lazy. According to Meredith Van Vleet and Brooke C. Feeney, co-authors of the article “Young at Heart: A Perspective for Advancing Research on Play in Adulthood,” real play must completely absorb an individual in the activity at hand.Footnote ²

3. 3. Mastery. Adults who try to connect with their childish ideas of “play” often get swept up in the “gamification” of play, the need to be the best at some video game or athletic endeavor. Pure play, however, does not pursue mastery. Play is voluntary, not forcefully productive.Footnote ³ It is the difference between hitting a basket of golf balls into a lake and training for The Masters.

4. 4. Work. As children, we often imitate the adults around us. We play House and Office, Doctor, Teacher, and Fireman. We pretend to shave our beards in the mirror. Ironically, while being around children reminds adults how to play, or how they used to play, sometimes playing with children, as adults, becomes a job. Forcing yourself to play like you did as a child might not be the kind of fun we are looking for.

Play, therefore, is an activity that has no other goal than to be amusing. Something that absorbs you and involves an in-the-moment, voluntary approach to doing whatever it is you want to do. The doing part is important though. As Melinda Wenner writes in Scientific American Mind, “Simply stated, to create means to do, and that is the key. Creative people do things. They make. They put together. They make connections where connections were not previously apparent.”Footnote ⁴

2. The psychology of creative play

It is safe to say that the introduction of creativity into our daily routines can serve as small mental health breaks. As Marc Bekoff, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Colorado, says, “Without play, adults may end up getting burned out from the ‘hustle-bustle busyness that we all get involved in’.”Footnote ⁵ Well, sure. This is why we invented happy hour, am I right? Everyone benefits from brain breaks. However, the further up the career path, the family-making path, the soccer-mom, and everything-else-on-your-plate path, the more adults have to intentionally make time for play within their daily routines. Rahaf Harfoush tells us in her TedTalk, “How Burnout Makes Us Less Creative,” that spending time in creative pursuits flies in the face of some of our:

This constant push toward the goal of productivity and attainment means we stop making time to rest our brains and allow them to wander. We need more wandering.

According to a team of researchers from the University of Southern California, “Letting our minds wander is an essential mental state that helps us develop our identity, process social interactions, and it even influences our internal moral compass.”Footnote ⁶ Unfortunately, when undergraduate students were asked to “delve into soft-skills such as creativity” in the classroom, they had already been brainwashed into believing it was a waste of their time.

There has been a lot of research done on what a creative genius looks like (that is, Einstein, Edison, Jobs, Marie Curie, Da Vinci), but not a whole lot is known about the human desire for lower-case-c creativity, the everyday hobbies, interests, and passions of ordinary people. What we do know is there is an awful lot of space in our brains taken up by these seemingly frivolous pursuits, making them “appear important to positive psychological development.”Footnote ⁷ Hence, the USC researchers conducted a study using experience sampling to track the creative processes and emotions of 79 undergraduate students over a 12-hour period. After an initial in-person interview and collection of intel, the researchers sent these college kids off about their day. At random intervals, students received and responded to surveys on their cellphones, answering questions about what activities they were doing, if they had company or were solo, and how they were feeling at the time, just before the phone call.

Here is what they found:

The findings ultimately supported the theory that one’s openness to play positively affects psychological processes, but they also unintentionally found another outcome: young adults do not find play necessary inside the classroom and, ultimately, in their careers. In other words, our institutions of higher education are setting students up to think all-nighters are the way to go.

Linda Hill adamantly disagrees.Footnote ⁹ Professor of Business Administration at Harvard University, Hill studies collective creativity in the workforce and has come to believe exemplary companies and leaders empower their employees by incorporating creative play into the workday. She says:

These traits directly apply to innovative thinking that creates opportunities for companies. Psychologically speaking, the list of reasons people should make time for daily creative pursuits continues to grow. Here is one more:

According to a study out of Wesleyan University, not only is brain-wandering creativity essential for the creative class (scientists, engineers, architects, designers, educators, artists, musicians, entertainers, etc.), but creative activities also teach our brains how to meaningfully process unexpected events in our lives and successfully pivot in new directions. Emily Przysinda writes:

As we know, improvisation often occurs during creative play. Not only in comedy shows, which often highlight improvisation, but also in other types of theater and musical composition, as well as in more ordinary creative pursuits: games like Dungeons & Dragons, in which players must continually redefine their missions, video game quests like Zelda and Skyrim, live-action role-playing games (commonly known as LARP), and during conventions like Comicon or a Renaissance Faire. Putting ourselves in positions where we experience uncommon or unexpected events teaches our brain flexibility, as well as how to address and incorporate differing ideas while allowing us to communicate and perform at a higher level – all amazing returns for simple moments of creativity introduced into our daily routines.

3. Create moments of creativity daily

Creative play includes open-ended, imaginative activities in which we are asked to explore and express our creativity, problem-solving skills, and artistic abilities without strict rules or predefined outcomes. Here are a few beneficial activities you could try to boost your daily dose of creativity:

3.3. Read a comic, draw a comic

We are well-versed in writing that uses images to illustrate a point, like an article on economics, say, which uses graphs to visualize the differences in spending from 1 year to the next. Typical research paper formatting uses images and text to repeat, explain, or emphasize the other. This education started early, with children’s books, in which images defined words (⭐ = star), and helped children learn to read. As children grew older, their books grew more complicated. Pop-up books and sound books and digitally interactive books all attempted to broaden their understanding of what a book could be and what language could do. As adults, we value this kind of invention and try to foster our children’s imaginations by reading these kinds of books. Yet, at some point, adults stopped thinking their imagination was important.

So, venture back in time.

Graphic novels play hard with hybridity, the crossing of the accustomed border between text and image. For example, graphic novels speak in images that appeal to senses other than sight. Sound can be heard in the image of a crowd cheering at a football game. Aromas can be smelled in the image of a steaming cup of coffee. Touch and texture are found in a swimming pool splash and a rough piece of tree bark. While it is just fine to describe a loud crowd in words, images work well too; we just are not accustomed to thinking and creating in linked images. It takes our brain a second to change modes, but when we do, we create new pathways and see what was once familiar in a new light.

Additionally, text-image hybrids leave gaps the reader’s imagination must fill in. A page might read, “Molly ran to the car, ready for her trip,” beneath a picture of a suitcase sitting behind a door the character just ran through. The implication being that Molly forgot her luggage. Implication, you say? Yes, the gap you filled in. We encounter implied meaning in advertisements and comic strips constantly and consistently, but have you ever sat down to examine how implication is created? Try it. Here is a quick, 20-minute exercise:

Draw a line down the center of a piece of paper, turn it, and draw another line down the center so you are left with a large cross, or four squares on your paper. Use this to draw a four-image comic. But first, take a moment to plan out your story using the following sequence as guidance:

• • In the first square, draw something you can hear, smell, or taste.

• • In the second square, show yourself doing something.

• • In the third square, draw something without any people in it.

• • In the fourth square, reveal something internal.

It does not matter if you cannot draw well. There are plenty of successful stick figure cartoons out there (see image below), so knock that self-disparaging thought right out of your mind. It is not about drawing something perfect; it is about how well you convey information (You laughed, right? Because you understood the joke.) If you follow the exercise above, you will have to plan for implication at some point. You will have to tell yourself your audience will understand what you are trying to say and make a mind leap. If your comic reads like a story with a beginning, middle, and end, then you have successfully worked with text and images in the way you may never have done before. You gave your brain a workout. How did it feel?