Fool that I am, I once participated in a message board discussion about the nature of creativity. One of the more forceful debaters was of the firm opinion that creativity essentially concerns the rearrangement of what’s there already. Shuffle things up and see how it turns out, like dipping into a Scrabble bag and morphing up new words if you can’t create something that’s already in the dictionary. And that didn’t feel right to me, since it’s such a contradiction of my experience in being creative.

Sure, there are occasions when the rearrangement of elements is an adequate description of what’s going on. One episode of some soap operas is much like another for instance. A good percentage of blues music could be constructed by taking well-worn twelve bar chunks and being miserable on a topic de jour over the top. And there’s no denying that where some copywriting work is concerned, what I’m doing owes more to craft than inspiration. So yes, some fraction of what’s called creative can be done by rote, interestingly.

That rearrangement argument can be taken quite a way. Brian Eno’s experiments in generative music, where software allows users to pick parameters for the sounds generated, are as convincing as some ambient electronica I’ve heard. That makes music an emergent property, in the same way that flocks of birds flying together generate amazing patterns by following just a few simple rules. No need for any group consciousness, just keep Charlie on your left, and aim for Portugal unless any obstacles come up, in which case wheel clockwise by 30 degrees. The ultimate example is DNA, available in just the four flavours, cycled in humungous strings of interacting spirals to produce every organism you’ve ever met or eaten.

All very well, but that random mixing theory doesn’t get across what it feels like to want to do something creative at all. It doesn’t explain the impetus to make something new. And it doesn’t explain the power of what we create to move, to inspire, to change our individual and social worlds for the better. Yet those are, sometimes at least, the reasons that people are driven to create in the first place. And that, I believe, is where we need to look in order to lift the lid on creativity, if that’s something that interests us.

Paradoxically, creativity often starts as a purposeless activity – doodling in a notebook, tinkling a keyboard, making shapes in clay – that becomes imbued during the creative process with real profundity, for the artist at least, and with some works maybe an audience too. Let’s not get too hung up on the word profundity, if only because it ignores another aspect of creativity, what it feels like to play. Again, if this stuff was just random, would we get so hooked into it? Well, that depends what you think play is.

One summer at junior school, we mock-battled for control of a mound of earth in the school grounds. It was an activity that was my entire focus for the time the fad lasted, and taught me stuff about the beginnings of teamwork, group dynamics, leadership. More than that, I felt energised and inspired by what we were doing together, more so than whatever Miss Theed was doing with us in the classroom at the time.

Sure, that was to do with learning mammalian pack hierarchies and so on, stuff every generation learns anew. The ‘new’ in there is a clue. The search for novelty is an important drive. Neophilia drives human culture forward, while the urge for homeostasis keeps things the same. And what applies to society applies to the individual. Seeking difference, whether in exploring what’s already there, or making stuff that’s new, is an evolutionary trait.

Putting it like that has a certain stick-up-its-ass quality about it though. Which is why I was fascinated to read a brilliant interview with musician Jon Brion on his creative processes. It touches on his film soundtrack work – his brilliant scores can be found on Punch-Drunk Love and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind among others – and his work as a producer with artists including Fiona Apple and Aimee Mann. There’s a lot of substantial and articulate thinking there about composition and improvisation, very relevant to non-musicians as well as those who are musically adept, and I found it through The Onion’s website at http://www.avclub.com/content/interview/jon_brion.