Creative Originality...

    So I have a bit of catching up to do I suppose. I did just make a blog post but I have had so much rattling around in my noggin - sometimes I jut need to get it out.

    I have always craved creative outlets. In the same breath though I strive to set myself apart, or really just excuse myself through originality. I mean I feel like many people try to be creative, or at least feel like they are. It is impossible to create something wholly original. We are constantly bumping into other people and their ideas; sifting through a dirge of information that they put through their own filters before it hit us and ours. But while the task of creating something perfectly from my own original thoughts is hardly possible, I try. I don't really feel honest about it unless I can feel like I own at least a significant portion of the intelligence that went into a particular creation.

    Over the years this outlet has taken many forms. A few hobbies have never progressed to the point where I tried taking the creative reigns. For example, origami has been a favorite hobby from time to time. I have created some beautiful models, but none of them were my own design. Many, many years ago I was into remixing songs. I had a great little program called SoundForge I believe, and I made some fun remixes. I had just started bringing some of my own music out when I stopped. By 'stopped' of course, I mean that I shifted my focus on other things. Card magic was my #1 hobby for about a year straight. I ate up everything I could understand from archaic books and videos. I know how most card magic is done when I watch it on the screen, or at least I know how I would do it and make it look the same. I have created a few of my own reveals and some of them are pretty spectacular, but in no single case can I say that the entire trick is mine; most of them are cobbled together from various other tricks I know, with or without my own variations. And then we come to writing.

    Writing has always been a special passion of mine. My mother is a published novelist and it is something about her that I have always admired. I remember a few stories that I tried writing when I was a kid. I wrote a story about a special forces team that got stranded underwater and had to disarm some weapons (sound familiar? Like every submarine movie ever and The Abyss had a butt-ugly baby?). I wrote a story about a team of astronauts that went to Mars to build a base and they had a run-in with a dangerous alien. Now this story was a little special I suppose. I had never read any books or seen any movies about colonizing mars (other than Total Recall, but that was a completely different story). I also was writing the story in a journal entry format and this was before I had read or even heard of that style of writing (as seen in Dracula). I put an obscene (for the age I was) amount of research into the design of the ship itself and how the mission would work. This was before the internet - before it was much easier to figure out things like fuel consumption and such. Making the same story today would be much more difficult for me because I am so detail oriented I would never rest until I felt like I had answered every question. I felt at the time (and still do really), that the story itself was very much the product of my own original thought. But here's the thing: the entire story - the premise for the entire plot, was produced in my mind by a piece of art that was on a binder folder that I had. A picture of a creepy looking, clawed and lanky alien on an alien planet that was clawing at an astronaut that was obviously trying to take off in a ship to get away. Now in no way would a person look at this picture, read my story, and say that the story was anywhere in that drawing (aside from a conflict with a dangerous alien). But I am telling you: if I hadn't seen that picture, I couldn't have written the story.

    One of my more recent stories is a book about a girl named Marecia (which I learned some time later I had misspelled as her name originally was a feminine version of Maurice. I am of the opinion that "Mauricia" looks clunky, asks to be pronounced just a bit differently, and most importantly, is not the name of the little girl in my head who I wrote the story about. I will, in fact, continue to misspell it). The Marecia book is darkly humorous and is based on what my wife calls "Marecia(sp) stories". Stories her dad used to tell her when she was very young wherin the titular character finds herself in deadly, and deliciously non-sequitir outcomes for misbehaving. The catch was the stories he told were really just gory punchlines. Morbid one-twos embraced for both their shock value, and brevity. If you had to ask me to make one up that was in the original style it would be this: "There once was a little girl named [Marecia] who was always getting into things that she shouldn't. One time she was playing with power tools in the garage when a thousand spiders attacked at once and drained... her... dry. The End" My own novella is quite a bit longer than that and is in a chapter format. Each chapter ends with the description of a scene which I hoped would paint a picture of an intractable situation resulting in the grisly death of the girl. Each consequent chapter begins with an explaination of how she survived. In some ways the book feels like a series of cliffhangers, but the goal all along was that the story could be read to basically any length and it would end with the certain death of the protagonist. The longer story requires a bit more logic than a classic [Marecia] story; the situations she finds herself in need to have a bit more cause and effect, but if you boiled down my book into a 'punchline' it would go like this: "Once there was a little girl named Marecia who didn't listen to her parents. One night, after a long day of not listening, she choked on a marshmallow and died. The End."

    One of my favorite stories is called "The Boy Who Ran Out of Time". It is about a young boy who grows up, moves out, gets a job, and becomes the oldest man alive, all in a summer vacation. It is very short, and lots of fun. It is based on the idea that setting your watch ahead by 5 minutes will help you be prompt.

    A story I am working on currently owes its pedigree to "Back to the Future", which is a favorite movie of mine. The flick is great, but it has always bothered me that Marty's photo was disappearing slowly. The discovery of the photo moves the story along quite effectively, but it has always niggled at me. I have no problems with watching movies that have made up technology, wizards, mythical creatures, or the like. But a story bothers me when it doesn't follow its own rules. I mean, you can make up anything that you want, so at least try to explain your exceptions. The point is that Back to the Future has a type of time travel where changing the past will change the future. Fine. But then Marty goes back, changes something and it is shown quite clearly that his changes have altered the future. Altered it in ways that would result in his having never existed. So shouldn't he have just popped out of existence? One explanative sentance from Doc would have quieted my brain. "Your brother and sister are disappearing, you must have changed the future. Feedback energy from your travel here must be keeping you from blazing out of existance, perhaps along with the entire universe, but that won't last forever! We need to fix whatever changes you made and get you back to the future!" Roll credits.

    The point is, if Doc had uttered that line I never would have started writing my own story where my #1 goal is to follow my own clearly defined rules about how time travel behaves. If I had never been given the tip about setting my watch ahead that boy would never have lived the American Dream. If my wife had never told me about poor little [Marecia] I never would have written 15 thousand words on the subject. And had I never seen that binder folder or watched The Abyss I wouldn't have been able to write my earliest attempts. None of us exists in a vacuum. In the words of the great philosopher Pink Floyd, "Our thoughts strayed constantly, and without boundary". In some ways I feel like copyright law is tasked with the impossible. If you asked anyone who created something where the idea came from, and they are honest, they would always cite it back to some external source. That doesn't mean that their creative project is not their own. It just means that it was a product of a chaotic mind, filled with experiences and ideas, viewed through their own myopic internal lens. It's a beautiful thought that the atoms that make up our bodies have been recycled to the point where we each have specific particles in us that were in every human throughout existance.In the same way perhaps our thoughts are passed down by each person having changed the world that subsequent people experience.

    Banana tunafish...