When I was a child, I was always upset that I couldn't draw well. I had all sorts of incredible pictures in my mind. Vast fantasy landscapes with multicolored, talking trees, monsters, superheroes, and a myriad other crazy concepts floated through my brain (and this was WAY before I even knew what drugs were). Alas, no matter how hard I tried I could never get the pencils to do what I wanted, and so every single thing I ever drew ended up as a wadded up ball of paper in a trash can.
Then, enlightening struck. At some point just before high school, I realized I could use words to draw the scenes I had experienced as a child, and immediately began flirting with creative writing. Before I had a computer, I would spend hours with my mom's old electric typewriter, frantically churning out page after page of my soon-to-be fantasy epic until I ran out of correction tape and had to white everything out by hand. I knew that if I could just get it finished, I would rival Tolkien and Lovecraft as creators, and, like them, be a god in a universe of my design.
However, right around that time I discovered the guitar, and everything creative that was non-musical went bye-bye for the next eight years.
Flash forward: It's the start of my sophomore year at Wagner College. I'm still playing guitar relentlessly, and reading voraciously. I had just switched majors from Behavioral Psychology to English Literature because I refused to experiment on hermit crabs (I kept them as pets and loved them. Also, I don't need to make animals do what I want them to do to get my rocks off). Throwing myself deep into the bogs of critical theory, I all but forgot about creative writing and focused instead on unwrapping and analyzing other authors' universes.
Here's the kicker: I find the acts of analyzing literature and writing critical pieces to be on par, creatively, with writing fiction, or poetry, or music. It is certainly a different breed of creativity, but it is nevertheless brought about through the creative process. While I might not be creating my own world in which my original characters live and think and act, I am without a doubt composing an original argument consisting of ideas that are completely mine. These new ideas relate to either the literary work itself or an earlier critical piece with which I intend to disagree, and the creativity comes into play when I begin toying with those ideas to see how they fit into the universe created by the author whose work I'm studying.
I've been told quite a few times that being a literary critic is uncreative, and that being a literature professor is mainly a job for failed writers. First of all, I'm a failed musician, get it right. Secondly, the notion that constructing a critical argument using original ideas is somehow uncreative is both asinine and insulting. Third, insinuating that a college professors, who routinely present papers filled with original research at academic conferences around the country and world, lead "uncreative" lives is beyond absurd.
The bottom line is that being able to spot, analyze, discuss, and understand the behavioral patterns of characters in a novel or how a poem's meter reveals different linguistic or literary conventions of a given time period without doubt qualifies as creative. Taking it one step further and writing about your discoveries so others can argue, discuss, and further your arguments is akin to writing the fantasy novel I always dreamed of drawing.
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