Dear Diary,
What makes the ability to formulate an idea? How does one unlock the creative act within the mind? Imagination. A leap of imagination.
Writing is easy. Writing well his hardly taxing. It's banal. Yet I met a pretty literary critic and student at this years conference. To her, writing was a challenge, nigh on impossible. Another fit bird I met ages ago (school, and then later in life) said, "There's lots of people reading, not many write." With the advent of computers every man and his dog has the ability to write, they just lack imagination. It's all copy/paste/pubish, with people appropriating any quality writing published for free in cyberspace.
I see writing, the same way as people years ago saw painting. Common. Cheap. Words are cheap. Sculpting silver or gold and gem-cutting was considered a much more prestigious art-form.
Nowerdays it's just "click" with the camera. Five minutes in photoshop and suddenly one is deemed an artist somehow. Tosh!
A photograph is information, it is not art.
Creative writing is common.
Music, painting, sculpting: now that takes skill. If one were to listen to four technically superior musicians I've known, all the quartet of are technically virtuosi: they all just lack one crucial factor - imagination.
How do we get imagination? Inspiration. Usually love, or lack of, sometimes scarring memories can prompt the creative act. Catharsis.
Instead of playing the same old same old tunes, try composing something.
Max.
