Not everything I write is good. Much of what I write rhymes thematically. I am obsessive about my cause and my mission. I return to the same watering hole again and again. I am attempting to find new angles and to deepen my understanding. Sometimes this is fruitful, and sometimes not. Sometimes I learn something through introspection. Sometimes I say something better than I had before. I rant without point and do so in mediocre prose. This is good. My writing is now more consistent. Both writing and thought are my crafts. These are how I express myself to the world. I can draw and paint and carry a not unpleasant tune. But words are my craft. As such, it is good to be consistent and it is good to build rituals so that the brain knows when and what I expect of it.
I do not believe in inspiration as a magical thing that strikes out of the blue. I build my inspiration by learning and experiencing. I seek out uncommon connections. I am to discover commonalities and weird discrepancies. Inspiration is taking two sets of Lego and creating a the space castle. It’s pitting Harry Potter against the Joker. We do not have inspiration hit us out of the blue. We grind it, like raising our level in a role playing game. We collect experiences and mess with them until we see something nobody else has seen. What appears to be inspiration out of the blue, rarely is. More often something new triggers an understanding of previously assimilated material.
I do not believe that creativity is a magical in born property that some of us have and some of us don’t. Creativity is jazz and hip hop and remixes. All creativity is remix. Shrek was a Fairy Tale from the point of view of the Ogre. RUN DMC rocked the music world with a collaborative remix of a Rolling Stones song. Shakespeare declared there to be nothing new under the sun. We are creative not because some magical creativity fairy gave us the power. We are creative because we practiced. As a child, I loved to write and tell stories. I wrote an Encyclopedia Brown rip off merged with a wolf-man/ King Kong story. And I wrote a Star Trek rip off that was notable for not having a Kirk character to have his shirt ripped off. Both were derivative and amateurish. Although there is that certain childlike charm to the first one. But that isn’t what mattered, what mattered is that I was playing with the idea. My mother tried to warn my that both were plagiarism, and she meant well when she said that. They weren’t, they were derivative knock offs, but not plagiarism. But who cares? I was less than ten years old. Young artists learn by copying other drawings. Young musicians learn by playing pieces of music written by others. And my mother missed that.
What I was doing then, and what I do now, is practice. I build skills and experiment. Much of this will be bad, so what. It’s practice, it’s not supposed to be good, it’s how you become good.
Professor Harbinger's School for Villains 