For so long, I believed that creativity was this magical thing—like finding your muse, or something that flows through your bloodline. I recall moments when, as a kid, I sat and thought deeply, waiting for the ideas to come to me and help me write. Then I read The Creative Curve by Allen Gannett. He told me creativity isn’t magic at all. It’s a learnable skill. It’s work. It’s the same message Seth Godin hammers home in The Practice: you show up, you do the work, you ship it.
My mother used to tell me that creativity is something you have or you don’t. Most of the time, I tell myself the story that I need to continue writing because I believe it’s a continuation of my father’s legacy, who was fond of writing, and I wanted to follow in his footsteps.
But is creativity only a stroke of genius?
This book challenged everything I’d told myself about where creativity comes from. And maybe that’s why I enjoyed reading it.
I kept thinking about my younger self, sitting and waiting for ideas to arrive. Now I wonder—what if I’d been reading instead of waiting? What if I’d been building that internal database my teacher talked about, the one you create by reading, reading, reading before you write, write, write?
Gannett doesn’t just tell you creativity is learnable. He shows you the pattern.
The big idea? Creativity lives at the intersection of familiarity and novelty. Too familiar, and you’re boring. Too novel, and you’re weird. The sweet spot is what he calls the creative curve—where magic happens.
But how do you actually get there? That’s where the book gets practical.
First, we need to consume. A lot. And it’s deliberate consumption, not just scrolling mindlessly. This is what my teacher used to tell me: if I want to improve my writing, I have to read, read, and read, before I can write, write, and write. Gannett was telling me nothing new—and yet hearing it again, backed by research and interviews with successful creatives, made it finally click.
So what does it look like? You study what works in your field until you can feel the patterns. You build your internal database of what “good” looks like.
Then comes the part nobody talks about: imitation. Yeah, you read that right. Gannett argues that creatives don’t pull ideas from thin air. They reconstruct what they admire, remix it, and add their own twist.
And I totally agree with this, especially with how my blog is set up today. It’s actually a mix and match of everything I like about the websites of people I follow.
It’s even comforting to think that every artist we admire learned by copying the masters first. Why should we be different?
Next, he talks about building our creative community. Gannett breaks down community into four specific types of people we need: Someone who knows more than we do and will give us honest feedback. Someone whose strengths cover our blind spots. Someone who keeps us going when we want to quit—because we will want to quit. And someone with credibility willing to stake their reputation on our work.
I read this section and started auditing my network. I don’t have all of these. That’s probably why I’ve been stuck.
Finally, iteration. I’ll be honest. This section almost disappointed me because don’t we want the magic formula? I wanted Gannett to tell me creativity is a burst of inspiration that we could somehow unlock if we just know how. Instead, he gave me homework. Generate ideas. Test them. Get feedback. Refine. Repeat.
And yet. That’s exactly why it landed.
So I stopped waiting for inspiration to strike. I started showing up even when I didn’t feel like it. I started reading deliberately. I started imitating the blogs I admired. I started looking for my people.
I thought about my mother’s words, about how creativity is something you have or you don’t. About my father, whose writing legacy I wanted to continue. About sitting as a kid, waiting for the muse to visit.
Gannett’s argument is simple: achieving creative potential requires countless hours, days, even years of work. The book won’t tell you what to create. But it will tell you how to become the kind of person who creates work that resonates.
Turns out, I don’t need to wait for magic. I just need to show up and do the work.
So, if you’ve been telling yourself you’re “just not creative,” read this book. Not because it’ll make you feel better but because it will give you a map for where to start.
jessa 