Creativity
Thinking more about my post on Genesis, I’m hoping that the atheists and unaffiliated among you can get over the religious language. (And that more conservative religious folk can get over my somewhat irreverent take on the scriptures.) Here’s what I’m wanting to hear from you: when have you created something that turned out to have a life of its own?
Over the weekend, three of my friends posted about creativity on Facebook, although they might not have defined it that way. One simply posted some pictures of beautiful pastries he and his wife had made — the kind of thing that might turn out well, and might not at all. They did turn out well, and he seemed proud of them in a way that almost appeared to give the pastries themselves credit. Another posted about an astonishing new vocabulary word his son had learned (one of the new words you are glad to see your children learn, I hasten to clarify). Another chronicled her struggles with a writing project that, at the end, turned out to be something very different from what she had originally intended.
The creation ultimately breaks away from the creator.
This is all I meant to say, for those of you who couldn’t make it through the God talk.
When has something you created — a pastry, a painting, a person — shown you that it has a life of its own?
Tell me your creation stories.
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Heh.
I started a novel about a year and a half ago, plotting the whole thing out before I began…and the story jumped the plot’s tracks a year ago. I’ve reached the point where I know I’m not in control of this, I’m just following behind, writing what wants to be written. This is hard, because I’m a bit of a control freak, but I’m learning to trust the little voice inside that says, “No, no, go this way, this way…”
I have a friend who’s an artist who says, “There are no accidents.”
Robin,
I am an atheist, and I really enjoyed your post. Religion is interesting, and it’s a template for looking at and ordering the world around us.
I think many/most people have a parental view of God, so your explanation of a creation taking on a life of it’s own was very apt in that way.
I am pregant with my first child, and very aware that while I will eat right, and stay healthy for the next several months, I’m not in control of who I’m growing here, and I won’t know until I meet her/him.
I do living history re-creation, both of historical figures and of composite characters (people who “could have been”). They sometimes take on a life of their own and do and say things that I would not necessarily do, as it were. It’s the standard writers’ thing about doing what your characters make you do, only from the inside. Odd feeling, but occasionally it leads to very interesting insights.
Sometimes I can even call up one of these “people” out side of performance: Lady Rothschild Breakstone is MUCH better at dealing with uppity service people than I am!
My dissertation, many (too many!) years in the sort-of writing, took on its own existence in the final push to write-revise-defend. It is in many ways unrecognizable from the project I thought I was writing when I started, even though the texts I worked on remained the same.
in high school i wrote an entirely fictitious poem about a girl abused by her father and how she eventually broke free. i submitted it anonymously because i was afraid people would think it was poorly written, which then caused many to interpret it as an autobiographical cry for help.
it was censored on those grounds, and became a symbol at our high school for abuse awareness and censorship issues. i just wanted to see if i could write something good enough for our literary magazine.
My singing voice has been in development all my life, and getting attention to its development for a dozen years are so. I just went all the way through a fifteen-minute aria without using the music, since I’m planning to do so in a recital in a couple of weeks. My teacher and the accompanist said, “You did it!” –why yes, I guess I did.
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One of the meta-lessons of singing lessons is that the voice is already okay the way it is, even though it will probably be ‘better’ any given time later. Another is that (like my life, anyway) the instruction to ‘Not Do’ is at least as important as the instruction to ‘Do’ something.