“The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him… a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create — so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating.”
– Pearl S. Buck
Yes, it describes me. THOUGH through the years I've learned to screw with it a little bit, and have some fun. NOT be so serious, and come to grips with who I am.
Peal S. Buck is right. Writers are happiest when the "creative" writing is going well. And when it's not going well, writers tend to be grouchy.
For me, a few years of therapy took care of the over-sensitivity portion of that description, daily toiling in Final Draft takes care of the second part!
Eerily enough, though, dead on.
(what scares me is how well that describes my 8 year old daughter as well… I do not wish a life of Fade Ins, Fade Outs, paradigms, and weekends in McKee seminars for her. Is it inevitable though? Yikes.)
That gave me chills…that's how perfectly it described me.
No way. Creativity isn't the act of a fragile person. It comes from the imagination.
If you have a big imagination, you generate a lot of ideas. Ideas are nothing if you don't communicate them, so you look for a way share them, be it writing, design, cartooning, music, etc.
No need to get hysterical about it.
I agree with James Hutchinson. Creativity is the ability to draw connections to things that are otherwise not apparent. To reshape thoughts, ideas, constructs, even feelings.
I would argue that for someone like Buck, her creativity was a response to her hypersensitivity, a way for her to exerts some sort of control over a world she felt all too acutely.
I never tried any drug of any kind, but it can't be better than riding on the creative flow. I'm an addict to writing. I'm still alive and thinking if I don't, but it is writing I'm longing for and could cross Hell to get time to do.
Yes.
And thank you for pointing me to Pearl S Buck, who I need to know more about.