Term for people who think they're possessed of strange and wonderful powers of imagination and artistic endeavor when they're actually reinventing the wheel/incredible conformists/artistically incompetent.
How shall I characterize these people? Let me count the ways...
- Rainbows and unicorns are a dead giveaway, either by themselves, or (especially) combined. If they're really into the heavy cre8tive gambit, they'll have a few pegasi as well, and purple. Lots and lots of purple. Although they don't know anything about commedia dell'Arte, they'll have a few harlequins and Pierrots around, too. Seagoing cre8tives have their own obsessions: lighthouses, especially Cape Hatteras Light, dolphins, and "the tropics", which since a palm tree is a palm tree, means anywhere from Fiji to Puerto Rico. (Oddly enough, these people are usually from Iowa, or at the very least, a farm community in Last Green Valley.) I'm not saying that one of any of these things make you a bad person. Just having a zillion of them in one place.
- They generally don't read much, but think that makes them "more original" when they write. As a person-who-writes, I'm often given stories and/or poetry by people who "don't really write, just read this, I think you'll like it": I don't know how many people who think they've captured the soul of pathos by rewriting "The Little Match Girl", given me a gripping, eerie, tale by having a murdered man reincarnate to kill his murderer, or written something of Cosmic Significance by telling me, breathlessly in the last lines that the alien was God, and the strange voyagers were on their way to colonize Earth. Now and then, you get an episode of The Twilight Zone in which you can guess the O. Henry ending from the first two paragraphs.
- If they paint, they have two or three knock 'em dead themes: couples, fuzzy animals, clowns, Jesii, and/or landscapes, usually rendered in amazing 2-D. Couples are nearly always seen from the back, and are usually seen gazing upon a romantic landscape, such as the seaside or some mountains, seen across a deserted plain. Those whe aren't are usually based on the "Love Is..." couple. Fuzzy animals are cartoony and cute -- based on "The Mini Pages" or some other E-Z 2 Draw recipe for drawing cute, cartoony frogs, kitties, puppies, and the like. A thriving subgenre are knock-offs of Great Paintings: if "Christina's World" was a Great Painting, let's make it better by having the figure naked, with really big boobs!
- I leave poetry for last, since everyone you know has written some adolescent death poetry. OK, you can have written some poetry about how you wanted to end it all after your G/BF left you/your pet died/you couldn't attend (name event). But cre8tive people keep doing this looong after they're grown up.
This is only a partial list. I invite suggestions.