The Creative Process

Following a discussion about the creative process, I have to start by saying, no, I cannot make a person more imaginative by telling them how to be.  Much as I think that would be really cool.

I think with a lot of artists, it begins when we're very young.  The same way the love of baseball or love of pro-wrestling seems to seize some children in a way that makes them unconsciously fascinated, to where they can never get enough of a particular thing.  But I do not think that it has to begin when we are very young.  It is possible to be alive for forty years and not be aware of a thing, and then get fascinated by it to the point of obsession.

I became fascinated by D&D when I was 15.  But it was not the first thing that fascinated me.  Before I was 15, I progressively fell in love with maps, astronomy, bowling, human anatomy, adventure fiction, science fiction, drama, baseball, history, golf and sex, and most particularly with writing ~ primarily because this last thing would allow me to write exhaustively about all my other loves.  The difference between D&D and those others is that D&D became king ... well, over everything except sex.  Sex exists as a goddess in a universe by herself.  But that is a post I'm not going to write.

And, I suppose, writing has also found its way to stand shoulder to shoulder with D&D.  That is because both D&D and writing enable me to do something that gives zest to both activities: which is, essentially, to deconstruct the world.

Deconstruction was the source of my intellectual pursuits.  I had a human body and I wanted to know how it worked.  I lived on earth and I wanted to know how that worked.  The stars fascinated me and I wanted to know how they were put together and history ... well, I saw all these references to things that had happened before I was born, and wanted to know what those were.

Walking back through the logic of how I got to be creative, I'd have to argue it was the urge to deconstruct things because I wanted to know.  D&D and writing let me do that; and in turn, I can use those same skills to deconstruct D&D and writing.  That is what this blog tries to do.

To first have a compulsion to know about something, we must begin by admitting that we don't know.  We start from admitting ignorance.  We don't see this as shameful; everyone starts from ignorance about every thing ~ we only know anything from the time of our birth because someone has taken the time to teach us, or we have gone after the information ourselves.  If, as it happens very often, we're a person who takes what's told to us at face value, without ever questioning it, then we grow up knowing only what we've been taught ~ and unfortunately for us, many people teach not to inform, but to control.  Including parents.  I was told god existed, I was told that people on welfare were lazy, I was told that being gay was funny, I was told that an adult was entitled to drink as much alcohol as he could "handle" ~ and I was told to shut up because children are there to be seen and not heard.  These things seemed wrong to me; they did not seem wrong to my brother.  I do not talk to my brother.

The first rule of admitting ignorance is that what makes knowledge cannot be decided before knowledge is gathered.  That is why Werner Herzog says in the video I'm going to link below, about Wrestlemania,

"... because you must not avert your eyes!  This is what is coming at us; this is what television, what a collective anonymous body of majority wants to see on television ..."

The most common reason that people remain ignorant is because they are willing to watch only things that they like to see.  People who spent hundreds of hours ranking things that they like are the type who deliberately, systematically work every day to keep themselves ignorant, because they won't watch something they don't understand or something they don't like.  They avert their eyes and as a result, they learn nothing about everything that brings discomforture.  This is not how we acquire knowledge; and it is not how we change.  It is how we make sure that we don't change.

And so ... let's look at something I don't like:



I saw this the first time because I liked Tony.  Tony of Every Frame a Painting was my kind of deconstructionist.

Rather than get into something as mundane as how this the reader is supposed to learn from this deconstruction or what we get out of it, I want to go bigger and express how the process of watching thousands of deconstruction talks can change our intellectual and creative nature.

Every day I open youtube and get a spread of videos that look roughly like this:

With the exception of one video shown here, I don't watch any of this crap ~ but because of what I do watch, youtube thinks this will interest me.  That's news to no one; we can all drag out a page like this from youtube and it makes us all wonder why people are so impressed with algorithms.  Because they're shit.

I did not carefully select this list; the collection of videos is always the same.  We have the desperate attempt by a poorly educated filmmaker to create a documentary on a scale that doesn't require a budget.  We have the attempt to mainstream the material by connecting it to pop culture or memorable people.  We have the do it yourselfer, which has some merit if the subject appeals and the creator actually does their own work and does it well.  For any of this to have value to me, it stands to reason that I have to a) be ignorant about the subjects being discussed; b) be gullible enough to believe that what I'm being told is true; and, most of all, c) I have to care.

The one credible video being shown is Hornblower and the Hotspur, which is the real audiobook published in 1962.  It's credible because it would not exist if it had not been vetted by persons with credibility, i.e., C.S. Forrester's publishers.  The rest of this is made up stuff that hasn't been vetted at all; it has be shoved onto the internet, just as what I'm writing right now will be.  This means that before it can satisfy a., b. or c. above, it has to prove itself credible almost immediately; and quite a lot of it fails to do that at first glance.

All this relates to a maxim that becomes fundamental to deconstruction:  the more you learn, the less valuable mainstream content becomes.  It is called becoming "jaded."

This is why almost everything about D&D on the internet is garbage.  Not because it always has been, but because the gentle reader here knows something more about D&D than they did when they were six, and now this all content looks flagrantly simplistic and even infantile.  When you see an amazingly poor video about D&D on youtube, and wonder how in hell it could have gotten 100,000 views, it doesn't hurt to remember that there are at least a million children younger than 12 who are playing D&D or have heard about it, for whom D&D does not fall into the realm of net-nannied material.

You and I, however, are not younger than 12; and while a content creator can amaze themselves with their prowess at obtaining a hundred thousand views, we must remember the source.

Oh my god, I am so going around the barn.

A jade is a worn-out horse, and less pleasantly, was used to describe worn out women as well (we're not supposed to use bad words like that anymore).  The double-edged sword that accumulates from the accumulation of knowledge is that while it increases the resource of ideas in our heads, being jaded also makes us inconceivably bored with most of them.  The result is two kinds of creators.

The first is where the author realizes, "Though I am bored by really crass character cliches and predictable plot-lines, I know that most of my audience (readers) are not, because they're not as educated as me.  They haven't seen as many movies or read as many books.  Therefore, I can foist this same old shit off on the general public and they will lap it up like dogs, because they always have.  After all, things become cliche because they are so popular."

The second is where the author resolves, "I am not going to write about shit that is beneath me.  If people don't get what I'm saying, fuck them; they can educate themselves and climb up to my level, or they can go hang."

For author, you can substitute the artistic creator of your choice.  Guess which kind of author makes money.  And guess which kind of author we still read two hundred years later.  Of course, you can spend money right now on bling, booze and jaded souls; you won't know that anyone is reading you two hundred years from now.

And you'll die uncertain if you actually made that cut.  Probably, like Edmond About, you won't.  Read any good Edmond About books lately?

So why would you want to be more imaginative?  It's just going to make you unhappy.  Sure, you've got all this bling and booze and *ah hem,* but you're heartsick because you know you've sold out and that even money begins to feel like a worn-out horse in not very much time.  Worse, you'll know you're brilliant, but no one else will, and if you tell them they'll say you're full of yourself and that you ought to shut up about whatever the hell you're talking about.  Because, you'll find, they don't get it.

Seriously.  They really don't.

Still.  It is nice to come up with an idea on a moment's notice.  Even if you find yourself sitting down to write about it and rambling all over the place in some haphazard way because it's almost impossible to put an esoteric fundamental problem like acquiring a subjective, non-defined skill into English words.  No matter.  It is all part of the creative process.

See, we start with a wall.

Then, we have a pile of shit deposited on the floor within throwing distance of the wall.  Got that?  I'm trying to keep this as simple as possible.

Now, reach down and scoop a hand into the shit.  Yes, I know, it smells.  And doesn't feel that good, either.  Never mind that.  You're an artist now.  You've got to learn to do these things.

Okay, have you got your handful of shit ready.  Are you sure?  Good.  Face the wall.  Check your stance.  The stance is very important here.  Carefully now ... swing your arm back.  Not too fast or hard.  We don't want shit all over the carpet and the furniture.  Nice and gentle.

Ready?

Throw!