Amy Tan on Creativity
Where does creativity come from?
Amy Tan gives a terrific tongue-in-cheek talk about creativity in the video above, and it’s great food for thought. I’m in the imagining stage of a new novel, so I’m grappling with creativity in a way that feels fresh to me. I spent years, years which I now consider my fiction-writing apprenticeship, on a novel which I recently scrapped. So I’m now I’m listening to new characters, imagining a story world, creating the oppositions among characters that are the core of any story.
I’ve learned from my years of trying to “just write it,” so I’m using a more structured approach this time, something I’ve resisted in the past. I thought it would kill creativity, make the process mechanical. But I find that limits are spurring creativity, forcing me to dig deeper, not settle for the first idea or answer to a question.
The most gratifying part of this process so far is the vitality I experience when engaging this story. As a writer, I feel like I’m alive again.
I picked up Tan’s most recent novel, Saving Fish from Drowning, when I was traveling in Germany, and read it on the train and in hotels at night while I was there. I was surprised to see which authors appeared in English abroad, including Siri Hustvedt and Amy Tan.
Perhaps Tan is better appreciated abroad than she is here. Saving Fish from Drowning is a lovely, sly novel. I enjoyed both the story and the craft. I also liked her essay collection, The Opposite of Fate. It sometimes seems to me that Tan has been ghetto-ized because of her subject matter, and it’s a shame. I suspect her novels will endure when books by some current literary lions are just footnotes in the canon.