Complex Numbers

The One Unforgivable Sin

I don't possess creativity.

PROMPT November 25th

Write about tinkering, brainstorming, or the process of creation. What brings out your creativity?

I know I've been over this before. Few things strike as much fear into my stony heart than the admonition to "Be creative!"

What I am is methodical and technical.

Now, I get that some people might question my self-assessment, what with my writing and all. But all I ever do is rearrange letters, words and concepts into something that's -- sometimes -- unique. What others might see in my stuff as creativity is more a result of randomness -- by which I mean, I literally pick things at random and then hammer them into some semblance of a form. Or, as with poems, the form exists and I just have to find the right words and rhythms and/or rhymes.

Having no creativity is, it seems, an unforgivable sin in our society. If I believed in such a thing as a soul, I'd say that the creative spark is the soul, and I never had one.

Take Legos, for example. Most people have played with Legos. Other people can take individual Legos and turn them into something new. Me? I have to follow the instructions or it becomes something indeterminate. You know in the first Lego movie where the entire theme was "don't freeze Lego creations into permanent form; be creative with them?" Well, that made it a horror movie for me. Everything is NOT awesome.

Or music, for another example. My attempts at making music sometimes followed the right form and structure, but there's no influx of creativity.

Fortunately, I went into a very technical, rules-oriented profession, where the soulless can, if not thrive, at least find a place. Hell, even my photography was more about the rules of composition, lighting, etc., than about any kind of artwork.

How, then, do I plan and plot a piece of writing?

Generally, I start at the end and work backwards. If I know, for example, that I need characters A and B to hook up at the end of the story, I can come up with plausible scenarios as to how they get together. If I'm working from a prompt, I find another prompt, usually through randomness, and combine the ideas. That's my theory on how writing works, by the way: not just one idea, but two or more, combined in what is hopefully a new way. If a single idea can be expressed in three ways, for example, when you get two of them together, you don't have six possibilities but nine. The more ideas, and the more ways in which they can be expressed, and the possibilities become, not infinite, but large enough as not to matter. Like shuffling a deck of cards: it's unlikely that any particular arrangement of a thoroughly shuffled deck of cards has ever been made before in the entire history of cards.

I try to find through-lines. It's an old design trick, to repeat a certain theme in different ways. A particular necklace, or the concept of "necklace," for example, can take on a different meaning in different parts of the story.

Mostly, though, I just write. When I feel stuck, I freewrite. This usually helps shake something loose, just vomiting ideas onto a screen.

The thing about technical stuff is, these are things that can be taught, learned, improved. Creativity isn't learnable. You either have it or you don't. It's kind of like how some people are born blind or deaf: they can get along just fine, and they even have the advantage that no one is going to judge them for their missing sense, the way they judge the uncreative.

I can admire creativity when I see it, though when it's not paired with technical skill I'm generally not impressed. I'm also not impressed when a bunch of people get together and try to out-create each other, like at Burning Man. Want to impress me? Have the courage to change the name to Burning Woman and deal with the inevitable backlash.

At this, I got curious about this year's Burning Man, something I've never been curious about before. Usually stuff about it is background noise for me when I'm looking for interesting stuff on the internet in the summer, but I just realized I didn't hear word one about it this year. Obviously there's good reason for that, but I didn't even notice its lack until just now. Turns out the festival was all-virtual this year.

I bet they got creative with it.

I don't care.