THINKING ABOUT CREATIVITY IS NOT something I do very often, because I would rather spend time actually making something, whether it is a new book, tonight’s dinner, a pond in the garden, a flower arrangement from hedgerow offerings or a space in my mind – what the Greeks called temenos; a virtual space where real things can happen.

I know that these are not equivalents, and that the creative energy required to invent a fictional world is different to the energy required to make a good dinner, but I understand creativity as a continuum, not as a separate, specialised event reserved for art and artists.

This does not mean that I undervalue art, or that I believe that anyone can be Rachel Whiteread or Ali Smith. The key word is “continuum”. My godchild makes a collage out of broken pots and bits of garden debris; Picasso does the same. The result is not the same, but the desire to reorder and remake is the same.

It is this “same stuff” that we should encourage and celebrate. Instead we cosh our kids out of their playful inventions, just as we had to give them up ourselves. For most people art is a spectator sport. But as any sportsman knows, playing football or tennis, riding or running, no matter how badly, gives us much more appreciation of what it means to do these things well. The Sunday footballer understands more about the miracle of Beckham or Rooney than the couch potato.

Painting a picture of a vase of flowers will tell you more about Matisse than three years of an art appreciation course. My vase of flowers might even be very good, but the distance between my “very good” and the achievement of a great painter summons up awe and, more valuable, recognition. When we recognise a process, we are no longer on the outside, shuffling round the gallery, we are complicit with the work of art. We are the same stuff.

This recognition, made possible by humble creativity of our own, extends to all the arts, except literature. Everyone believes they can write a novel or a poem, mistaking workaday communication for its quantum relative. All the arts happen in quantum packets – the leap between what already exists and what could only be invented. For me, the creative continuum is the pleasure I can share by doing it myself, whether singing or twisting metal, and the thrill – physical, emotional, intellectual – of being carried where I cannot go by the eagle-energy of the artist.

Peter Conrad has written a huge book about creativity, which depressed me, because it felt like being back in an Oxford tutorial, overwhelmed with facts, illustrations and anecdotes, and getting nowhere. It is a very male view, and few women appear in its 548 pages. Just as science still muddles the objective paradigm with a male model of behaviour for all activity everywhere (struggle, competition, destruction, rivalry), so Conrad accepts without question that making new worlds, as artists must, is a Promethean endeavour, a theft or a raid that invites punishment in an often tortured or self-destructive artist. Eventually, God is found not to exist, but art continues.

Until the 19th century, nearly everything we consider high art was made by men. I have no problem with that, and I celebrate what is there. We should be careful though, when we take at face value what is often a misogynist and always a time-bound interpretation. For most of history, men have devalued women, especially as original thinkers and creators. Such a premise is unlikely to lead us to truth. The curious and wonderful thing is that the works of art themselves seem to transcend the limitations, even the intentions, of their creators. I would rather hear about this than read endless pages on a male supremacy theory, against God, nature and women, which is pretty much Conrad’s map.

Yes, you can say as Conrad does of Leonardo’s Lady With Ermine, that Sforza’s mistress and the animal she holds are both “wild creatures that have been tamed”, but you might look again at the claw-like hand of the lady, and recall the animal’s capacity to change its coat, and ask if the uneasy power of this painting is not in the tension between the surface message and its deeper meaning.

Creation: Artists, Gods and Origins by Peter Conrad
Thames & Hudson, £24.95

Jeanette Winterson appears at The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival on Saturday October 13 at 6pm
Call 01242 227979
www.cheltenhamfestivals.com

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