Quote:
Originally Posted by Odee
I disagree. You do not let an idea brew in your mind in order to improve it. You work on it. You give it form and then improve it. You don't improve your ability to draw by envisioning the picture in your head for longer than necessary, the same is true of writing.
Secretum knows it well. The point of NaNoWriMo is to simply create. She wrote everything that I was too lazy to write. (Maybe that's why I only made it to 11,000 when I tried NaNo?) Creating great work doesn't happen right off the bat, every word is subject to revision the same way that every pencil stroke can be erased -- and will. It's all about creating, creating, creating, working, working, working, and less thinking about it! Letting anything sit in your head will never improve it. Giving it form is the only way.
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Sorry. I disagree with this theory.
The idea doesn't sit idle in the head, Odee. The mind organizes, plans, and thinks until some sort of meaning is established. Every writer has his own technique in creating, but unless the idea is spawned in the brain and given a reality there, there's very little likelihood, in my view, that a creative effort is going to be successful.
I would suggest that you read some of the works of people who treat the subject of creativity and how it is accomplished. That might give you an idea of how professionals feel about it.
Frankly, I was a little discouraged by the idea that one just writes and
writes and then edits and edits. There doesn't seem to be in that the
depth of character development that the mind is capable of originating.
To me, that would be like throwing everything out there and hoping that
something sticks. I just don't see depth in that, honestly.
Most authorities whom I've read suggest that the incubation period is
vital for creativity and often, a really great work may take years to complete because of the need to extrapolate from life the things needed to make characters really believable.
Poetry is a classic illustration of incubation in creativity.
Perhaps there is a misunderstanding of what incubation is. No idea
sits idle that incubates; it is there that the core of the work really gets its origins.
I have a feeling, after thinking about it, that you are young people who are being taught that creativity is a kind of "throwing it all out there and hoping that something sticks". That is a major theory in the business world where "think tanks" are generated to create ideas that are marketable. That's not the kind of creativity I'm thinking about.
Beethoven was deaf; you can't believe that he just put it all out there and
continued to edit and edit and edit, can you? That's a creativity of the
mind of a genius; however, so perhaps that isn't such a good illustration.
But valuable creativity is, in my view, largely a part of the creative mind's
ability to see,think, form in the mind, and even edit in the mind, to some
extent. Getting it on paper is a release of the mind's active creating.
I agree that it requires re-examination, editing, and refining before being
published.
Creativity is just the active mind in many ways.