Writing again today, took a break for the weekend but I think I'm still pretty much on track to keep writing on here about three times a week or so. Although, I'd like for this blog to be a place to write when I have things to write ABOUT, and not just something to keep dumping in in order to meet the three times a week goal.
But there's a school of belief that says to be a writer you just have to keep writing, just keep pushing through and putting words on paper until something good hits you. And today it kind of worked because I wanted to write about creativity (I'm getting self-referential I know, god forbid).
But where does creativity come from?
And I mean that in more of a metaphysical sense-- for example, different artists draw creativity from different sources. For instance, Tarantino draws his creativity from movies, basically-- he draws on an existing body of work and spins variations on it until it resembles originality.
Somebody like Woody Allen is creative in a hyperreal way, since his movies resemble reality but they're infused with a kind of impossibly academic tone. And he often uses farce and fantasy elements to tell stories. But his range is fairly limited as well.
As a more extreme example, someone like Salvador Dali was inspired by the absurd and by dream images, and tried to confound typical interpretations of "meaning" and how that could be depicted.
Without getting too heady, the main question I have is how to click into the creative process in a real way.
A good parallel to use is meditation. There are a ton of techniques available to people in order to meditate, and they all leave to a "state" or frame of mind/existence that is accessible to everyone.
So in some sense, that state of mind exists as a universal field, regardless of if anyone is actually in sync with it.
It makes sense that a surrealist would draw creativity from dreams-- that must've felt like drinking from some kind of spiritual source from those artists, because the dream world is another kind of universal field that unites everyone. Dreams are pregnant with symbols and obscure meanings, and even though they're generated by our minds, they seem to exist separately and apart from ourselves.
But there are other ways to be creative, of course-- the main question is, to get to that creative "state," is it easier to stress a method or process or wait for a spark?
What I mean is here, I just started writing, forcing myself along until I was able to make SOMETHING worthy of being written down and possibly read-- but I don't feel that great about it.
But it's rare that a true original seed just plants itself in my mind and I start sailing on creative autopilot... and you want to stay in practice all the time, since your skills will dull if you don't keep sharpening them.
Form is a combination of structure and content, and you can go either direction-- focus on content first or structure first, or ideally, a balance of both, but I believe this is rare.
So I've just got to find some method that works a little better for me to keep being creative and putting stuff out in the world. Because we can't be sure of anything in this world, even our thoughts. And our thoughts are in constant flux and flow, like a river.
With a river, you can't stand in the same place twice. But capturing creativity with words or pictures allows us to keep traces of that place in the river we once stood in, to freeze a moment or feeling so that others can see and feel it, crystallized and frozen-- and maybe able to be understood better, because of it.
Philosophically, all of this rambling relies on the premise that the truth is out there (X-files reference). More broadly, everything you can imagine is "real" -- it exists as a possible field or path in the universe. And it's up to you to figure out how to materialize it, if you want to. Peace,
Ryan
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