[Ugh, is he doing this again? Well, for my faithful possible readership of . . . eight? Twenty? One? I don't know. I'm going to be talking about something I said in the last post. Hold onto your horses and don't let go unless they threaten you with spears.]
["Creativity doesn’t have to be communicated, or even captured linguistically, pictorially, musically, sartorially, socially, or metaphorically. It doesn’t ever have to leave the head of the creator." I said that, and I meant it. Let me discuss what happens because of it.]
[In fairy and or pixie land, every idea that wanders into someone's head is eventually carried to fruition. Every errant thought is worthy of physical effort. Strangely enough, we don't live in this blissful paradise, and many ideas are lost along the way. I once read a post by a tremendously creative man: David Malki. He takes old and makes new with it in perhaps the most stunning display of the craft that I have ever seen. Once, he proposed a system of dealing with creative thoughts. Carry a blank book with you everywhere. Any time you have an idea, or think something clever, or say something striking, write it down. Write it all down. Capture everything. Then, at the end of the month, burn the book. Burn it. Don't look back, don't copy over, don't store away. Burn. Then, buy a new book, and repeat. It's an exercise in priorities. If what you wrote down isn't worth saving or acting on by the time the month closes, the assumption is that you wouldn't have acted on it in the first place. Now, most of the rest of us actually do this anyway, whether we think of it actually or not. You've got a brain book, and (over time) the things written in it burn away like mist in front of the sun. Poof, vanished. That's not so bad. Some people actually don't have the ability to forget. I can't imagine what life would be like.]
[So humans have these ideas. Some of them melt, and others stand up and grow. Now, there's no dispute over whether the ideas that bloom are creative. That's a socially accepted premise. But what about the ideas that never see the light of day? Are they as worthy of the title of Creative?]
[I would argue that they are creative. Judging by my definition of "Creativity is the production of new ideas or, as is more likely, the purposeful change of old ideas for use in a new way," non-acting ideas are included. Nowhere in my statement does it say that the ideas have to do anything, or be perceived by others as new, or go into the general milieu of cultural identity. In fact, I believe it is just these unused ideas that form the basis for the nuts and bolts of creativity. It is these ideas that resurface right when I need them when I'm writing dialogue or trying to create a clever interaction in a comedic sketch, or when I just need to have a comeback to something Philip threw at me. It's the ideas from before that come, unbidden, to my aid just when I've run out of creative juice.]
[Besides, if ideas that never see the light of day were discredited from being ideas, let alone good ones, some of my favorite things in the world would be uncreative. How about Half Life 2, episode 3? Not out yet. I still have faith it will be amazing.]
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Thank you. :-)
ReplyDeleteI like this post. It feels hopeful. I don't know how much of it is anything or not (that is a nonsense statement).
I was surprised you didn't say anything about honing ideas, practicing thinking for thinking's sake so that when you need to think of something, you've built all the neuron pathways you need. But what you talk about-- ideas that surface when you need them because you've thought them before-- implies that, upon reflection.
I just had to do a critique on a dissertation (written originally in Dutch) that spent fifty pages talking about religious fundamentalism without ever saying "religious fundamentalism."