Warning : Optimists, stay away. This is not a feel-good article, this is a rant.
If there is one thing that drives me completely ’round the bend, it’s my (much more than) occasional lack of creativity.
This awesome writer friend of mine neatly parceled up all my pent-up frustrations regarding this topic into one statement : Everything I have to say, someone else has already said better.
Which is ironic, considering that by saying that, she said what I wanted to say better. ARGH.
How does one CREATE something? How do you pull out fabrics of your imagination and weave from them something completely new and different, something that no one else has ever even thought of creating before? Well, the truth is, you can’t. We all write, draw, shoot (with a camera) and compose things based on the inspiration we’ve derived from somebody else’s work. That somebody, probably derived it from somebody else’s work. And so on and so forth.
All those somebodies probably went through the same rut of feeling like inartistic frauds at some point in their lives. Let’s face it, it’s an infinite loop of paranoia. At least, I like thinking so.
What’s funny is, creativity isn’t really create-ivity. It’s just a feeling of being able to think and execute ideas that were most likely already better thought-out and executed by someone else on the other side of the globe.
I just noticed, I’m wearing a shirt that says : “How can I think outside the box when I live inside a cube?”; No jokes. It has a picture of a kid hiding in a cardboard box on it. It’s quite Pink Floyd.
-sigh-
That awesome writer friend of mine, after saying what she did, also said this : But, I think a little bit of being good to yourself is realizing that the point lies in saying what you have to say.
So, yes. People have stolen your words and images and thoughts and have expressed them better. They have said things you meant to say.
Say them, anyway, though?
If there is one thing that drives me completely ’round the bend, it’s my (much more than) occasional lack of creativity.
This awesome writer friend of mine neatly parceled up all my pent-up frustrations regarding this topic into one statement : Everything I have to say, someone else has already said better.
Which is ironic, considering that by saying that, she said what I wanted to say better. ARGH.
How does one CREATE something? How do you pull out fabrics of your imagination and weave from them something completely new and different, something that no one else has ever even thought of creating before? Well, the truth is, you can’t. We all write, draw, shoot (with a camera) and compose things based on the inspiration we’ve derived from somebody else’s work. That somebody, probably derived it from somebody else’s work. And so on and so forth.
All those somebodies probably went through the same rut of feeling like inartistic frauds at some point in their lives. Let’s face it, it’s an infinite loop of paranoia. At least, I like thinking so.
What’s funny is, creativity isn’t really create-ivity. It’s just a feeling of being able to think and execute ideas that were most likely already better thought-out and executed by someone else on the other side of the globe.
I just noticed, I’m wearing a shirt that says : “How can I think outside the box when I live inside a cube?”; No jokes. It has a picture of a kid hiding in a cardboard box on it. It’s quite Pink Floyd.
-sigh-
That awesome writer friend of mine, after saying what she did, also said this : But, I think a little bit of being good to yourself is realizing that the point lies in saying what you have to say.
So, yes. People have stolen your words and images and thoughts and have expressed them better. They have said things you meant to say.
Say them, anyway, though?
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