You clearly can do a lot that I would define as creative.
“However, when it comes to writing . . .” you present a strong picture of yourself and what you can and cannot do.
I would ask in turn: if you were what YOU define as creative, what other things would you be able to do and excel at?
(Giphy)
I’m not entirely sure exactly what you are asking in your last question, but I will answer in reference to this specific project…
For example, I have had a specific main idea for my own story that I have always wanted to write. It’s been in my brain for years, and I have actively tried to expand on it and try to turn it into something, but I have never gotten past the actual idea (it’s a theme, really, not a specific plotline or outcome). I’ve been able to picture a few settings that would fit, but I literally cannot picture any characters that would need to inhabit this place and theme. Not at all. And that’s just the characters, main or otherwise. Never mind what they would do with this theme - what’s the goal? outcome? preceding events that led up to it? That’s where the deep, dark abyss comes into play. It’s the imaginative process, I guess you could say. I was never a child that was into imaginative play - I like games and sports that have concrete rules and goals and outcomes. It’s why I excelled at math. It’s fixed. it’s predictable. I don’t have to rely on my own original ideas.
Do hear your own voice in your head when you think or visualise ‘scenes’ / things in your mind? (internal dialogue/monologue)
Let’s not get me started on my internal dialogue/monologue. It never stops for one second. It’s kind of funny that you mentioned that because it’s directly related to the ‘theme’ I mentioned in my previous post.
Clearly the cousin of @ninjas_with_onions who is giving the TEDx talk below (in Kuwait) has a few ideas regarding hearing voices in the pursuit of creativity.
However, if there is anyone in the audience who is dreaming up–for instance–falafel ice cream, that is an idea whose time may never come.
I just thought I’d include the visual of the above 
and these links (◠‿・)—☆ 
https://discussions.viki.com/t/what-do-you-use-to-eat-this-your-hand-a-fork-a-spoon-a-knife-chopsticks-or-something-else/38807/134?u=leerla73
https://www.scoopwhoop.com/20-Exotic-Ice-Creams-Thatll-Make-You-Drool-Instantly/
(Giphy)
Cheese ice cream from the Philippines.
Sounds like a wonderful dish. I learned last year that supposedly at some point in the middle ages, cows in Europe developed a mutation that made their milk difficult to digest and started causing a lot of sensitivity issues among European populations. Asian populations who drank milk from non-European cows and their relative did not, and still do not, have such problems.
There is an Amish farmer in Bird-in-Hand, Pennsylvania who sells grass-fed raw milk products through a “club” system. Members invite friends who pay a lifetime membership fee so that milk, cheese, cream, etc. are technically sold to private club members and not to the public (thus getting around American legal paranoia). The farm sells water buffalo milk and yak milk as well as cow’s milk made from the milk of “Asian cows.”
A Nepali friend tried some raw milk cheese I bought at one point and said it tasted exactly the way he remembered cheese tasting from when he was a kid in Nepal.
I assume that aged yak cheese from Nepal is slightly different from what Miller’s farm market sells.
I found a course in creativity YouTube that is free; it seems to be aimed at school teachers but seems applicable to anyone. Everyone has heard of Adobe; how many people know about Khan Academy?
To keep things on topic, this is a perfect example of what I mean by saying everyone is creative.
Anyone who can cook even one dish that is loved by friends and family members is certainly creative.
Tonight, I rummaged in the refrigerator for something for supper (which I have just finished eating. I have to go shopping tomorrow, but what did my “icebox” give me?
And what else was there in the kitchen?
Hmm. I wonder what could possibly emerge as the result of using all of those items? Certainly nothing life sustaining, savory, juicy, warm, and filling. Impossible. And yet . . .
(Giphy)
https://www.korea.net/Events/Overseas/view?articleId=9992
“As part of their Korea at Home campaign, the Embassy of the Republic of Korea and the Korean Cultural Center, together with MIND S-Cool and the BGC Arts Center, have organized a free, live webinar titled The Role of K-Dramas in Sharing and Shaping Culture Beyond Borders. The one-time event consists of a series of talks focused on discussing K-drama production with Korean entertainment industry professionals, featuring dialogue with some of the Philippines’s celebrated entertainment practitioners. The webinar is open to everyone and will be streamed live on November 6-7 from 9:30 AM-12:30 PM on the Korean Cultural Center’s YouTube Channel and BGC Arts Center’s Facebook page.”
There is an old saying, “The devil is in the details.” Meaning that, for a person to do something well, it is often necessary to understand, manage, and make use of, lots of tiny bits of information.
These articles contains some very interesting bits of information about how K-dramas come to the “little screen.”
The popularity of K-dramas in the Philippines is certainly something I did not know about. But more fascinating to me is information about the apparent origin of most K-dramas AND information about the talent pool that production companies draw on.
The “creativity class” question for today is: does the kind of detail shared in the above articles stimulate you to be more creative in your own way when it comes to supporting K-dramas, or does it put a damper on your enthusiasm?
The crisis in many, many K-drama rom-coms comes when some unexpected and challenging details emerge about what is going on in the lives of the ML and FL.
And one of them is that moment when one of the fated lovers discovers that the other one is either richer or much poorer than the other.
“Why did I have to learn this about you? We were so happy and having so much fun! I can’t be with you! I can’t measure up! This ruins everything!”
I am asking myself now:
(Giphy)
(Giphy)
(Giphy)
More on creativity and K-dramas . . .
Does it sometimes seem there is a fine line between exporting culture for other people to enjoy and dictating how other people can enjoy that culture?
I absolutely love gimbap and kimchi. I have never had some of the other famous Korean dishes because I don’t live anywhere that would make it easy for me to just walk anywhere and get fresh out of the ocean seafood or fresh from the farm ANYTHING.
I have yet to learn to make gimbap thought the videos for doing that are numerous. I want to learn.
However, if I do learn, how many people would say, “Oh, that’s lovely. But it’s not really Korean food. It’s more Korea-boo food, right?”
The reality is that, like gimbap, K-dramas are rooted in a very specific culture. There’s a reason why Rochester, NY has a couple of Asian markets and numerous “Asianese” restaurants that “round-eyes” flock to along with the Asians of whatever ethnic background these restaurants cater to.
Because there IS something special about eating tasty food that is “just like grandma used to make” . . . with grandma being a woman looking skeptically at the friends her grandchildren bring home for a meal.
It’s an odd fact of human life that . . . well, we are all human.
But it’s an odd fact of being human that, when human beings cluster for generations and form cultures, then the cultures start trying to convince each other that “our culture is the most authentic human culture, and unless you can show a pedigree proving you come out of our culture for two or three hundred years back, you’re not really the best sort of human being you could be.”
And isn’t it interesting that, when someone from a non-Asian culture shows an interest in an Asian culture to the extent of learning languages and recipes and whatnot, the Asian folks are shocked?
“Wow, you speak our language so well! Wow, you cook our food so well!”
Why, gabsahabnida!
Don’t take that too, too literally from all Koreans. This is based on the account of those who live in S. Korea as foreigners. This is on the account of people whose parents were even born, and raised in S. Korea. Even from the account of people who they themselves were foreign raised, and, or mixed people of Korean descent.
WARNING: Slight American helmoi rant begins in 3, 2, 1 . . .
Now.
I am privileged to know an African-American police officer who self-identifies as a Christian, who has made it his ministry, if you will, to mentor at-risk youth in my interesting upstate New York city of Rochester. Rochester, which, according to U.S. Census information is the second-most ethnically diverse city in New York state outside the Big Apple itself.
He has done this for 25 years or so, and “kids” of all backgrounds know him so well that, from current grade-schoolers through young parents with grade-schoolers themselves, people flock to him wherever they see him.
I have a friend in her mid-thirties with kids who shrieks like a BTS fan girl whenever he visits the YMCA I attend.
Because of his dedication to what he believes God has called him to do, his wife divorced him about three years ago. She was not willing to support him any longer. Through mutual friends, he met a Korean-born Christian woman a couple of years ago, and they started dating. She is absolutely his biggest fan.
(Kind of sad that, in other parts of the United States, it has been more difficult to get some really positive vibes going for both the police and Koreans, but that’s another thread, perhaps.)
Dominic Choi Makes History As LAPD’s First Asian American Assistant Chief
3,355 views
Jul 28, 2021
Being of the American generation that was directly impacted by the “Korean conflict,” I can certainly understand the dislike of and even hatred of African-Americans by some older Koreans. These men and some women, too, I think, were associated with a conflict that many think could have been avoided if the UN (or somebody) had just had a bit more political guts.
During the Korean conflict, desperate Korean women and lonely American soldiers got together, and when American soldiers finished their tours of duty, not all the American soldiers took a war bride home with them.
Probably about a month ago, I met a man who looked African-American on the bus who is in his fifties and had a remarkable conversation with him.
I said something in passing about an attractive shirt he was wearing. He said his brother had given it to him. When he spoke, I thought, “OK, then he’s African” because he didn’t have an American accent.
I said, “Oh, you have a lovely accent, where were you born,” I almost dropped my teeth because he said, “Vietnam.”
Through a process I didn’t inquire about, when he was seventeen, his American father brought him to the United States and adopted him. When I spoke with him, he was on his way to work at a Chinese restaurant that is very popular with college students.
I was an impressionable high school and college student during the latter years of the Vietnam War; one of my oldest friends in Rochester is ethnic Chinese but grew up in Vietnam. Her parents moved to Vietnam from Guandong Province in the 1940s; her Chinese dialect is Teochew or Chaozhou. I know in detail about her family’s struggles to escape at the end of the Vietnam conflict.
So when this man told me his brief, brief story, because I was in public, I said only, “I’m very glad you were able to come here,” and then when I got home I cried for the rest of the afternoon.
https://www.nytimes.com/1992/11/16/nyregion/for-afro-amerasians-tangled-emotions.html
The New York Times
For Afro-Amerasians, Tangled Emotions
By David Gonzalez
Nov. 16, 1992
I absolutely know that there are many “Asianese” folks who are color-blind and culture-blind AND I understand why many “Asianese” folks are not.
AND I also understand, in the context of this thread, why it is so important for there to be careful control of contents of, and participation in, K-dramas. Because duh. They are a cultural export that serves as an educational tool about a culture that was old before the United States or many other countries even existed.
But it gets a little old to hear strangers say, “Oh, you’re . . . [insert ethnic identity]. How do you like ‘our food’?” . . . When I’ve been eating it all my life.
(Giphy)
And it gets a little old to hear non-northern European friends ask, “How do you like our food?” when they give me Rubbermaid containers of it. The people who are serving it to me know very well I like it . . . because they served it to me JUST LAST WEEK!
I get that a lot of what I hear is affectionate and sort of social conversation, but there are times when I just want to be allowed to live as a generic, un-labeled human being and enjoy being with other generic, un-labeled human beings.
(Giphy)
And be allowed to try my hand at making my version of their “cultural products.”
(Giphy)
Ideally, at the moment, I would like to meet and marry a half Korean, half-Cuban, half-Chinese, half-Anglo-Saxon retired chef, astronaut, lawyer, painter, potter, and musician . . . and have him fix me gimbap, kimchi, raymeon, scallion pancakes, and budae jjigae every time I sneezed.
But I don’t think that’s going to happen any time soon.
And the chef who’s made the YouTube video below is probably not making plans to move to Rochester and become part of the local “K-population.”
My life is so sad . . .
Those danged Americans think they can just go out and show the world how to be creative. Can’t help but wonder if her choice of garment indicates her family originally is from . . . maybe Shanghai? Or maybe she chose her outfit because it fit the color scheme?
At any rate, I have been thinking over what I heard several years ago, that what you focus on becomes what you love. So watching fun videos such as this one (of a lovely young woman taking art to the next level) will surely help anyone who loves being creative and original to activate more of that in his or her life.
My contribution to the ‘Viki Original’ you haven’t seen yet. 
After carefully applying ‘guyliner’, Randy Roughshod (aka: Lee Byung-hun) enjoys a smoke while waiting to be called on stage.
(pinterest)
Yess!!! Welcome @stardust2466_546 
keep it coming, @kdrama2020ali 
isn’t he a hot tomale? 
@ninjas_with_onions, @entwyfhasbeenfound
His character could be the one hired to spy out for our shot gun married couple’s company competitor.
hmmmmmmmm Who’s Hot??? 
He’s rocking a David Bowie vibe, and the 1980s ladies notice.
“I could care less about him. It’s his motorcycle that I want.”
(WhoWhatWear)
“He’s invited me out to the estate to ride his stallion.”
(Google screen cap)
“I’m his business manager, and I’m always in his business.”
(The Guardian)