Featured Reviews

Craig Detweiler – Honest Creativity [Feature Review]

A Call for Creativity

A Feature Review of

Honest Creativity: The Foundation of Boundless, Good, and Inspired Innovation
Craig Detweiler

Hardcover: Morehouse Publishing, 2024
Buy Now: [ BookShop ] [ Amazon ] [ Kindle

Reviewed by Ashley Hales

A few weeks ago, ensconced in summer heat, I realized that all my creativity and all my ideas had dried up; it was just too hot to write. Had it all disappeared? What could I do to get it back? 

I cracked open Craig Detweiler’s Honest Creativity: The Foundation of Boundless, Good, and Inspired Innovation hoping for some relief from a creative slump. Detweiler is a filmmaker and has held academic posts at Biola, Fuller Seminary, Pepperdine and Grand Canyon University. His contacts and examples range from Pixar executives to Dolly Parton, the Beatles, and the inventor of the margarita cocktail. The goal of Honest Creativity is a book that will “nurture your originality, expand your authenticity and deepen your integrity” through a “mash-up of the muses who inspire [his] pursuits” (19). 

What struck me most throughout the book is this joyful mash-up of stories. While much of the time, I wanted deeper storytelling or a more full development of them, Detweiler is like a butterfly flitting from one flower to another, collecting stories like pollen, and dropping them into his narrative like bits of excited joy. If you’re looking for a how-to book or a book to dive deeply into the why and how of creativity, this is not that book. But if you’re looking to flit in and out of its pages one of these examples may provide a delightful bit of inspiration for your own creative work.

The book is organized into three sections: people, process, and products. In the first section he considers the creative’s fears, limits, and aspirations — reminding us that “boundless” creativity flourishes only due to constraints and reminding us that failure is part of the process. The second section focuses on process: hard work, grit, and the way that both reception and revision play a part (137). In the final section, products, Detweiler reminds readers of the stark realities that artists need patrons, teams, marketing, and followers.  

Detweiler’s book ranges broadly and though informed by his Christian faith, faith does not seem the bedrock of the book. Many a “Christian” book — whether about creativity or simply something on what is called “Christian Living” — does not actually proceed from faith. The window-dressing of belief may lurk throughout its pages, but does the work also operate at the level of paragraph and tone in a Christian manner? It is rare to see the fruit of the Spirit displayed, a sense that the reader is also my neighbor whom I am commanded to love, and a sense of the animating Spirit to enliven prose, sentence by sentence. In another recent book about creativity, Break, Blow, Burn and Make: A Writer’s Thoughts on Creation, E. Lily Yu writes: “what is on offer in recent years of book publishing and church life is, in the main, lifeless, without love, without hope, without mystery” (25). And yet in her book on creativity, the image of beekeeping is offered throughout to stand in for mystery, work, and even a momento mori. While much of the prose that’s out there glibly uses faith or else elides it altogether, Yu’s book proceeds from it. 

But did either book help get me out of my creative rut? Yu’s poignant prose and thoughtfulness did make me want to write. Detweiler’s work reminded me of the meandering journeys in the life of a creative maker and his questions at the end of each chapter provide some helpful, practical starting points. A book on creativity can never actually make you creative. But it can provide — whether through its own craft, inspiration, or examples — the way forward. What’s on you is the taking up and the doing. Take up and read.

Ashley Hales

Ashley Hales (PhD, University of Edinburgh) is co-founder of The Willowbrae Institute, author of Finding Holy in the Suburbs and A Spacious Life. She co-hosts The Cartographers Podcast
with her husband and produces The Russell Moore Show with Christianity Today. Read more of her work at aahales.substack.com or connect at aahales.com.


 
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