Creativity is just connecting things
Listening to Andrew Huberman's podcast about the science of creativity yields some interesting thoughts. According to him, a creative act must be something novel that reveals something fundamental about the world or how we (humans) work.
It includes combining or recombining things in the world in a way that appears novel to us and other people. I posted an article in this week's Footnotes newsletter which mentioned how creativity is just connecting the dots, and the way to be more creative is to accumulate more dots and more practice connecting them.
Today's writing session brought that to the forefront. I've spent over a year on this book. I got the idea in October 2021, started drafting in April of 2022, and soon, in April 2023, I'll be turning in a draft for line edits.
This draft has been built up over again almost from scratch. I've salvaged maybe 10-20% of the original words. So going in to today's writing session, I had no idea what I was going to write. I had a basic framework that I'd arrived at yesterday via brainstorming, but I just set my hands on the keyboard with the timer on and started writing. I was connecting the dots, though. In the middle, I paused to research, to answer a question I had about one of the cultural bases of the story.
This book's magic system and worldbuilding pull a lot from West African culture, and so I needed to check something. In the few short hours of my writing session, I'd made some amazing discoveries about the story, which flesh out aspects that were in there that I didn't exactly know why they were there. It's fascinating how that works!
It's been happening for the past few weeks though, as I approach the blank page and scenes that need to be completely reconstructed from the ground up, I've been getting these gifts. Ideas and snatches of inspiration. Terms to search which lead to fantastic and unpredictable results. All of which fit the theme and the world and the characters I've been creating.
So, putting in the work up front for months or years can lead to moments when all that work coalesces into a flood of inspiration, and all you need to do is catch and harness it. Creativity at work!
As to whether it's novel or reveals something fundamental about the world or us as people, I think it has to. I think, by nature, the creative act does that, even if the creator had no intention or no idea of the revelation at the outset.
