Insight and creativity (spun off the "Do you have to read fantasy?" thread)

[Feo Takahari]

The "Do you have to read fantasy?" thread turned into another discussion of creativity. Those always wind up weird for me, since I don't consider myself "creative" in the usual sense of the word. I'd like to make another attempt to explain what I mean when I say that, and talk about why I'm not necessarily interested in being a "creative" writer.

A while ago, I decided to write a story about what happens when different kinds of heroes meet and work together. The last hero I came up with was in many ways the simplest--Melody, a magical girl warrior. On the surface, this tends to imply a caster-type who wears a frilly dress and says the names of her attacks before she uses them. But there's more to the genre than that, of course.

To me, the essence of the magical girl genre is friendship and an optimistic faith in people's goodness. Magical girls are ready and willing to fight against those they see as truly evil, but they can recognize when someone's doing the wrong thing for the right reasons, and they never give up on saving innocent lives. Even in shows with only one protagonist, they tend to be team players, ready to work alongside redeemed antagonists to defeat greater foes. So when I wrote Melody, I felt free to adapt her somewhat--making her more cunning, and making her combat techniques more pragmatic--because what mattered to explore her genre was that she be a kind, friendly girl who works well with other heroes. Or to put it in stronger terms, what mattered was that kindness and teamwork were the values she upheld, and I could show how those values succeeded and failed.

Wolf the werewolf was trickier, since there isn't just one "werewolf" genre. But there is a pretty consistent "environmental fantasy" genre, and the core of that is a respect for nature and natural processes. Combine that with some behavioral patterns and thought processes observed in wild wolf packs, and you've got a pretty consistent character. Again, I had room for flexibility and creativity (particularly in how he interacts with other characters), but what gave me a base to work from was what I took from other stories and accounts.

Price is a superhero, and I did something of a double move with her. She has a superhero's drive and determination, and, to put it bluntly, a superhero's martyr complex. But because she's a science hero, I also gave her the skepticism and curiosity of the "heroic scientist" archetype. A lot of her character development comes from recognizing when these contradict each other and deciding to favor the latter over the former.

I suppose there was a certain amount of "creativity" involved in making these characters and building a world for them. But I don't think creation was the core element here. Nor was it knowledge of genres and tropes, at least not surface knowledge. I built my story around morals and messages, taking the values that other writers promoted and celebrated, then putting them together and watching them collide. If there was a single thing that mattered, it was understanding--truly grasping what those stories meant, and responding to them appropriately.

There's an incredibly important implication to this. Anyone who understood those genres could have written that story. It's not really "my" story, except insofar as I was the one who chose to write it when no one else was. But even if it's not that creative, I think it does something interesting and says something that matters.

I do have some projects I want to do that I would call creative. There are ideas that I don't ever see discussed, things I'll need to create new language and new tropes in order to describe. But for the most part, I'm happy to work off other other people's creativity, because I have as much to say about the things they've come up with as I do about my own ideas.

 

[Svrtnsse]

Reading this I get the impression you define creativity in a way similar to how I define originality.

To me, creativity is about creating or producing something of your own. It's taking some pieces and putting them together and see what happens. It's a bit like building a house with LEGO bricks. All of the pieces are the same for everyone and everyone can put them together. Building a house in lego isn't original, but in creating the house you're being creative.

Originality on the other hand would be if you instead of building a house you built a chandelier and instead of lego bricks you glued together potatoes.


I feel that creativity is about creating things whereas originality is about coming up with new ideas for things to create.

My apologies if I missed the point or if I'm not making sense.

 

[Devor]

To me, creativity is about creating or producing something of your own. It's taking some pieces and putting them together and see what happens. It's a bit like building a house with LEGO bricks. All of the pieces are the same for everyone and everyone can put them together. Building a house in lego isn't original, but in creating the house you're being creative.

Originality on the other hand would be if you instead of building a house you built a chandelier and instead of lego bricks you glued together potatoes.

Thanks for that. The only thing I'd add is that you're being more creative when you're getting further from the picture or instructions included in the box, and less creative the more you follow them. It's about shaking off the picture and being yourself with the blocks, not about being "new" and "original" and replacing the blocks themselves.

Otherwise I'm a little worn through on the discussion of creativity, and I'm not a good one to comment on dialogue pieces. So it'll be interesting to hear from fresh voices.

 

[Philip Overby]

I suppose there was a certain amount of "creativity" involved in making these characters and building a world for them. But I don't think creation was the core element here. Nor was it knowledge of genres and tropes, at least not surface knowledge. I built my story around morals and messages, taking the values that other writers promoted and celebrated, then putting them together and watching them collide. If there was a single thing that mattered, it was understanding--truly grasping what those stories meant, and responding to them appropriately.

There's an incredibly important implication to this. Anyone who understood those genres could have written that story. It's not really "my" story, except insofar as I was the one who chose to write it when no one else was. But even if it's not that creative, I think it does something interesting and says something that matters.

I do have some projects I want to do that I would call creative. There are ideas that I don't ever see discussed, things I'll need to create new language and new tropes in order to describe. But for the most part, I'm happy to work off other other people's creativity, because I have as much to say about the things they've come up with as I do about my own ideas.

Even if you're building off a previously conceived idea, I do think it's still creative. We have lots of weird architecture in Japan. These buildings were created with the concept of a building in mind, but they're not necessarily created for the purpose of what a building is. They're like livable art pieces. Which for me is an interesting concept. It's a different form of creativity. They're not reinventing the wheel or anything, but they're still creating something beyond expectations.

Another idea of creativity that others may not think is creative would be philosophies like dadaism. From what I understand of it, dadaism is a form of creativity that may not be clearly seen. It's the shaking up of the ideas of what has meaning and what doesn't. Taking a toilet and smashing it and presenting it as art. To me this is still a form of creativity because these artists are taking the preconceived notion of a toilet's purpose and re-purposing it. Some may balk and say, "Dude, that's just a busted toilet." The same way someone may read your story and say, "That's just about _______." An artist may put in different kind of work that certain people can see if they're only looking at the surface.

I even find creativity in nature sometimes, as weird as that sounds. For example, I watched a video about a desert lizard that was wide open for predators. However, there is some kind of stinging beetle that shoots out poison. The way the beetle walks is very distinct. So in order to make itself more fearsome, the lizard mimics the way the beetle walks. A creative way to avoid being eaten.

So there are multiple ways to define creativity. I don't necessarily think it means creating something brand new that's never been thought of before. Even taking those story ideas that you wanted to explore further, deconstructing them and then putting them back together is a form of creativity to me. Maybe not the "uncorrupted core" or whatever you want to call it, but it's still the act of creating, however minimal it may be viewed.

 

[buyjupiter]

Another idea of creativity that others may not think is creative would be philosophies like dadaism. From what I understand of it, dadaism is a form of creativity that may not be clearly seen. It's the shaking up of the ideas of what has meaning and what doesn't. Taking a toilet and smashing it and presenting it as art. To me this is still a form of creativity because these artists are taking the preconceived notion of a toilet's purpose and re-purposing it. Some may balk and say, "Dude, that's just a busted toilet." The same way someone may read your story and say, "That's just about _______." An artist may put in different kind of work that certain people can see if they're only looking at the surface.

Surrealism has the same general ideas flowing in and out of that school of thought. Less toilets though.

I like playing around with ideas that have been done before. For example, the most fun I had, creatively, was when I took the "inheriting the kingdom" idea, added humor, a talking tree (but not an Ent, apparently Terry Brooks has some talking non-Ent trees too), a rambunctious princess, and had it in a nebulous modern era (last half of the 20th century, sometime). It reads very Terry Brooks (Magic Kingdom for Sale) meets Downtown Abbey. All of the elements that are in the story have been done and done to the point where you see the trope and you immediately are reminded, strongly, of a piece of media/book/character when you read the piece.

I don't think that makes me a bad non-creative writer...because I think I figure out new and interesting ways to combine archetypes and tropes and themes.

I do think that this skill set of being able to combine elements and write dialogue heavy pieces might make me a better screenplay writer than novelist however. Good thing I like LA?

 

[Svrtnsse]

This is a bit of a tangent, but I found it a little bit interesting and a little bit amusing - and it's about ideas.

Where do ideas come from? | TED Playlists | TED

 

[Jabrosky]

I have observed that people dabbling in creative fields fall somewhere on a two-point spectrum. You have people who are content to replicate something that already exists, and then you have the imaginative types who prefer to make up their own stuff.

My mom and I lie on opposite sides of this spectrum. She loves to paint, but prefers to copy from photographs or other people's artwork instead of create her own designs. I would wager that most so-called observational artists fall into the same category as my mom. On the other hand I get a lot more pleasure creating my own things than in duplicating existing references bit by bit. Whenever I do use references, it's always to enhance or inspire my own designs, and I tend to modify whatever bits I'm taking from the references.

This same spectrum must exist in fiction too. Some writers want to portray what they see around them and what they know from personal experience. These are the writers who produce books like To Kill a Mockingbird, The Catcher in the Rye, and most other books with mundane (or "realistic") settings and plots. Then you have guys like me who prefer to create more exciting and not-so-everyday fare for their stories, the sort of stuff we don't experience in our day-to-day drudgery. I wager most people interested in the fantasy genre, and certainly most posters on MS, fall into this latter category.

While both the replicators and the inventors can produce quality work, I can't help but question where the creative fun lies in the former approach. Slavish replication of what's already out there sounds boring to me.

 

[Rorick]

"Art is theft." - Picasso

"I am quite content to go down to posterity as a scissors-and-paste man." - James Joyce

The concept of creativity is entirely subjective. Everything you write is going to be influenced by your experiences, without exception. Creativity is just iteration, building on ideas, shapes, colours, moods, other people's work. People have been telling each other stories for maybe half a million years at the most generous estimate. As long as language. If you look at the creation myths for many religions and cultures, you'll see the same themes recurring over and again, as an example.

Take Shakespeare for example, most of his work is based on other people's. Coriolanus is mostly rehashed from Dionysius and Plutarch's accounts with bits of the Iliad woven in for flavour

Stories are ancient. What's creative is how you tell 'em.