(A short interlude from my 'April Challenge'.)
A lot of people think they know the rules regarding creativity. There's a lot of 'thou shalt nots' spill from their mouths or pens. One of these rules I have fallen foul of: thou shalt not use ideas in your own writing that someone else has already employed in a piece of creative writing. I am not a bad person. Indeed, many think me a really good person. I go out of my way to help others. I work hard and care about the people I work with. I am sensitive and considerate of others and people come to me for help knowing that I am unselfish in that regard. I have always been thought of in this way - as good. Aside from a single speeding offence many years ago and a more recent parking ticket (the machine was broken and I left a polite and apologetic note in the window explaining, but I still had to pay!), I have never fallen foul of the law. I help people cross the road; carry bags for those struggling; help women with pushchairs down steps. The word hate is never in my vocabulary (unless we're talking the taste of blue cheese). Yes, so just your everyday good. So imagine my disbelief when through being creative I am turned into a villain and all because I had the affront to use some ideas that 'belonged' to others.
At the time I thought maybe I had done something wrong and so I pondered long and hard over the matter. I examined the problem intellectually. Seriously. I read up on the subject as much as I could. But in the end I came to the conclusion that there was something wrong in the way some people thought of ideas and that these very loud people were blind to how creativity worked in even their own cases.
Writers are products of their times and their cultures and the experiences they have. Their ideas belong not to them but to the world they live in, at least they do when they release them into the world. The existence of these ideas owe a debt to what has come before and will in turn have influence on the thinking of others and maybe even on the creativity of others. That's how it all works. I kept saying this but aside from a few articles (referenced much earlier in this blog) there was little science to support it - just common sense thinking. Neuroscience had yet to examine the whole question of creativity and how it works. I felt then that it was only a matter of time and that all I had to do was wait to find something that explained it all in a way that showed I was no villain (I had already had the matter investigated legally and was cleared of any badness... but we are talking morals here).
Lo! It might just be here. What I have been waiting for. A book being published this week by American scholar Jonah Lehrer called 'Imagine: How Creativity Works' and it just might make us creative types more aware of what happens when we go through the process of creating and tell us how other people's ideas steal into our thinking and creating rather than the other way around.
My copy arrives mid-week. I will report on the findings when I have processed them.
1 comment:
Ok coming back to this I see there is some scandal attached to the book and to the writer... charges of fabrication of material and self-plagiarism.
Some are saying that he is just a child of the internet age and so the self-plagiarism is an absurd criticism. We all are digesting so much more material through our internet wanderings that it will be impossible to reference everything and we are some of us producing so much 'printed' material through things like these blogs that it will also be impossible to not reproduce our own words.
I have just written a flash fiction piece which I know is in some way a reworking of a fuller short story that I have written that uses the same basic story. Is this allowed? Is this self-plagiarism? When writers so often in their works can be seen to be exploring the same themes and ideas and emotional landscape, can they be accused of self plagiarism? And should this worry us if they do?
The fabrication of material to support an argument in a non-fiction work, a work that purports to be a serious work of science, well that is a different matter. But I am not sure that Johan Lehrer doesn't still have important stuff to say about creativity and about other areas of neuroscience, though I also think the scandal will undermine what he has said in this book.
So, should you read it? Well, millions have, and there are things in the book that are at least food for thought about creativity. It's your choice to read it or not.
And plagiarism - well, it continues to set fires in the publishing world and intellectuals line up on opposing sides and the battle rages... and writers must tread ever more carefully, ignoring the examples of those who have gone before us and who are lined up as the greats of any canon of literature - Shakespeare, T.S.Eliot, to name but two - or writers must tread carelssly and not care for the mud-slinging.
I read somewhere that someone thinks of plagiarism as PLAY-giarism and so all an artist is doing is playing with the ideas and the words that alrready exist in the world... what do you think?
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