Silent in the Background

I have never knowingly quoted Playboy magazine before, and I have no expectation that I shall do so again, but it turns out that, in my blog a couple of weeks ago , I did. I referenced a John Updike quotation and mentioned that I had asked Nigel Rees of Quote... Unquote for help in tracking it down. He included the query in his latest newsletter and from there it was picked up by the Quote Investigator website in USA, where it received further attention. It turns out that the Updike quote about creativity came from his contribution as one of 13 writers invited to contribute to a Playboy piece "On Creativity".  This appeared in the December 1968 edition (which had in excess of 300 pages so clearly a substantial publication), in which Updike wrote: "For one thing, creativity is merely a plus name for regular activity; the ditchdigger, dentist and artist go about their tasks in much the same way, and any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, ...

Two childhood memories: One: "Our family is not creative!" I remember being told this in response to my frustration with my ineptitude with paints and pencils.*  I'm sure the intention was to encourage and let me know that I was not alone - that it was not important.  But the effect was that I grew up believing that I could produce nothing of any worth, even to myself, in the creative line.  To this day, I have a visceral pit-of-the-stomach reaction to any suggestion that I should express myself through any artistic medium. Two: "Write a story - it can be about anything at all, let your imagination run wild!" said my English teacher.  Imagination was something else I knew I didn't have, and any attempt to write a story led me into an inescapable paradox: For every idea in my head of a storyline or character, I knew its source in something else I'd seen or read.  This meant it had to be rejected as not a product of my imagination and thus unsuitable for i...