Where Does Creativity Come From?
I’m trying something a little different this year in my articles for SleuthSayers, the mystery blog. I will try to focus on writing articles that fit the time or season of year more appropriately. In January, my thoughts typically run to productivity and creativity, as I plan my writing projects for the coming year. I thought it might be a fun idea to analyze those two areas of thought at the top of the year. Today, I’m looking at how various people in the arts regard their creative spark. Just where does the magic reside when you’re writing a story, crafting a piece of music, making a work of visual art and more? I pull together quotes from people in a range of professions, and I swear, they all have one thing in common: they have no freaking idea where their ideas come from!
The article is entitled,
The Force Beyond You!
I share quotes and insights from a diverse group of people that includes: writers Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Michael Ventura, Steven Pressfield, artist G.C. Myers, musicians Jeff Tweedy and Kris Kristofferson, and the great mystic William Blake.
Here’s a taste of it:
When someone asks how a particular idea came to me, I always make a joke. Because I have no freaking idea. Sure, I can point to a string of plot points that I scrawled in a notebook before I started—proof of my complicity—but the finished story never quite adheres to them. And yes, I can often recall how or when I first learned certain factoids that I worked into a story, but when they pop up in my prose they are often employed in a manner I had never previously considered.
What I’m saying is that I have come to accept that Creativity is ultimately a mystery. I must leave it at that. I have no choice. The process is too ephemeral to explain any other way. In fact, I’m worried as I write this that words will fail me. We have all heard certain writers claim that the story just wrote itself, or that their characters took on a life of their own. Those sorts of pronouncements are often parodied because they sound fatuous. (Please enjoy the scene below from the film Wonder Boys that marvelously skewers that type of writer.) That’s why I have today brought into the lecture hall the words of other creatives that I have collected. These folks are far more eloquent than I am about this mystery, so I’m going turn it over to them.
While I obviously think it’s important to contemplate and value your own experience of creativity, the older I get, the more fascinated I am by the collective experience of arts workers. Is it not interesting that many people who do creative work are in awe of the same thing? Namely, that art is a mystery, that the more they show up and practice their work, they more they are rewarded by it.
Often, the thing we want to produce when we sit down comes out in a completely different way than the way we imagined. The work surprises us. There is just enough variation in our faults and flaws to alter the thing as it is being made.
What’s more, if we don’t honor our calling, we are ultimately miserable because our human soul knows it’s on this earth to produce something. And it will drive you crazy if you do not commit yourself to it.
If this sounds like gibberish to you, it’s proof that I can’t even speak about this miracle adequately. That’s why I wrote this article, because I kept finding quotes from creatives who seemed to be talking about the same thing.
If you are a writer, artist, musician, or creative entrepreneur in the making, you probably owe it to yourself to check out this piece. It’s probably one of the more profound articles I’ve written for the blog. And I can say that only because so much of the wisdom contained it in comes from creatives who are far better worker in their craft that I am.
Thanks for stopping by, and here’s to a great and creative New Year!
While you’re here, I might as well put in a plug for my mystery novel, The Marshal of the Borgo, which is set in the Italian countryside. It’s a story that fits what I was saying earlier. I sat down to write a simple murder mystery, and something very unusual—I dare say special—came out. Witchcraft, vino, and murder, as I often tell people.
Click for details (affiliate links).
BUY THE MARSHAL OF THE BORGO
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READ THE FIRST CHAPTER OF THE MARSHAL OF THE BORGO
Typewriter image copyright Joseph D’Agnese.
