It starts from somewhere. Creative means it's a creation that is yours. Unless you're plagiarizing.<-- not very inspired. Cool article. i think Charles Dickens said that originality is stuff which is original without even trying. I'm paraphrasing. I think that's related, and I think that he's wrong. People try to be original. And sometimes it works. Accidents happen. that's when genius kicks in. But creativity can drive you mad. I consider myself a pretty creative person. And I need to express it otherwise I resort to doing stupid things I regret later. Hopefully, more artists shape their work with care. Not just random "internet-only creative writing". Kinda like forum-writing just for a forum's sake. I see that with this site's poetry a lot. Kinda peeves me out a little. okay. ta-ta
It's an interesting concept, and one I kinda want to have a go at now. When I started writing this post I put "I'm finding it hard to imagine how I'd plagiarise a story to say something new", but now I've deleted all that because I don't think it's true. I still don't think there's much artistic merit in just taking a story and putting my name at the top - there's certainly self-expression in the choice, but even collecting a group of pre-written stories together to make a point of your own is nothing new, it's just being the editor of an anthology. Creating a story entirely out of existing text does sound like an interesting project, though. Buried on a CD somewhere I have a mash-up of Enya's Orinoco Flow and Prodigy's Smack My Bitch Up, and it's fucking genius. There's not a new note played but it's miles better than both original tracks. Trying to do a literary version of that sounds like fun. And I have to admit, I lol'd when I saw who the article was credited to.
I'm not so sure 'creation' is actually possible. It's a concept that we've come up with to describe the process of mixing or blending that artists do when they work but, if you look at the nuts and bolts of it, they're not actually creating anything. It's completely and totally impossible for us to create something that doesn't already exist. I suppose you might say that someone, somewhere, invented the dragon at some point, right? That person would've had to have experienced every single aspect of what makes a dragon 'unique' already in their lives prior to inventing the dragon. Fire, wings, scales, breathing, predatory instincts, you name it. In that sense, this 'creation' was simply a new image of several different things that already existed and that is case for all forms of creativity. It's actually an obsolete word; incapable of fulfilling what it's designed to be. In that, uncreative writing doesn't exist, no more than creative writing does. What you have, instead, are literary works of varying colours and shades, some obviously far brighter, far richer and far more aesthetically pleasing than others. Imagine asking a colourblind man to describe the colour red? Fuck, I'm good at being pedantic.
Just found this, and while it tellingly doesn't talk about writing, it seems relevant to the discussion: http://timharford.com/2014/01/there-are-no-new-ideas-only-remixes/
