Creativity: Where Does It Come From?

When I was a child I made up stories that my friends and I would then enact.  I assumed other kids did the same thing, though I now realize most did not.  My friends loved playing with me because like me, they loved going on adventures as someone new, and to places none of us had ever been, even made-up places.  Racing to school one day on the shortcut I usually took behind my neighbor’s garage, I twisted my ankle.  I knew immediately that something was very wrong.  My leg was perpendicular to the ground, but my foot was at a weird angle parallel to it.  I screamed and screamed, until another kid taking the same shortcut showed up.  He ran to my house to get my mother.  I had snapped the tendon in my ankle, and it would never grow back.  Other muscles took its place, but I was forced to sit on my duff for six weeks, with my swollen appendage on the pillow on a chair in front of me.  The doctor suggested dance classes as therapy, which turned into a godsend.  Within months, I was making up stories for Kathleen Hinney, my modern dance teacher.  The other little girls would bend and sway and jump around the room, playing characters I had made up, moving in the way I, or Miss Hinney, suggested.  I never stopped telling stories, writing them down as I got older.  When I had to have surgery on my leg at nineteen, derailing my hopes of becoming a professional dancer, it was only a short leap to acting, and from there to writing articles for my college journal, and finally, for the New York Times and less renowned publications.  It was no surprise that my first novel, Ladycat, was about a dancer/graduate student at Berkeley, who took to robbing unpleasant people to make ends meet for her and her child by climbing down buildings easily because of her great extension!  When the novel was sold to Universal, my agent managed to talk them into letting me write the script.  By then I was already writing for ‘The Waltons” and other TV shows, so the assignment was mine. Though the movie was never made, I was well paid for my efforts and had a movie script to show to other studios.  Why I thought I could do any of this I have no idea.  I felt scared with each new venture, but I also knew I had to overcome my anxiety and persevere. That I would be paid for the stories swirling around in my head was amazing.  I had always sensed I would not do well in a ‘regular’ job, and after working as a secretary in an ad agency in New York, I knew I had been right.  I returned to college because I had no idea if I could earn a living as an actress or a writer, and didn’t for a number of years.  In grad school I wrote some more magazine articles, also paid jobs, and then moved to LA with my husband.  What would I do in LA? Within months I had gone to UCLA and taken out several movie scripts, practicing the form with stories of my own.  Thus my new career was born.  I still have a need to make up stories, and am working on my third novel.  My second, “The Girls and Me”, is on sale at Amazon.com.  I still don’t know where all this ‘creative juice’ comes from, or why I have been graced (or cursed) with it, but even in the last third of my life, I have no desire to stop the stories from erupting.  I went from dancing, to acting, to writing non-fiction, to fiction to screenplays and back to fiction. When I can’t fall asleep, I make up stories.  They bring me great joy, and hopefully bring pleasure to my readers as well.  If any of you out there have any idea where this impetus to become an artist comes from, I’d love it if you’d share.  I still have no idea, and just know creativity is a huge part of me and always has been. And for this I am grateful.