More small updates - gallery is up, and there’s no longer a need to directly copy images across. It’s surprising how long it actually takes to set everything up satisfactorily. I’m still definitely not impressed with the stylesheet, but I think it’ll take more time than I’ve got at the moment to fix. So, it stays as is.
We went to the rainforest today. A long drive - the scenic route, so to speak. All up, about six hours of driving. It was fun, but it’s probably easier to let the pictures speak for themselves:
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Taking photos is always nice. I think it stimulates a largely dead area of my psyche - the honest to god creative part. We all exercise creativity of a form at work, but I think there’s a massive gap between what’s creative in a work sense and what’s creative in spiritual / artistic sense. It’s kind-of sad to reflect back on what one’s done over the last ten years and to realise that very little has been creative in an artistic sense. It’s like living in monochrome. Realising it is confronting, but enlighening.
I think the difference between work and art is the same as the difference between synthesis and creativity (for a given meaning of synthesis and creativity). They’re not quite the right words, but they’ll do for a Sunday night reflection. One is low risk (in a personal exposure and likelihood of failure senses) with a high probability of success, the other high risk and completely orthogonal to success.
Synthesis is all about standing on the shoulders of others and making the ‘value-add’ - it’s about reuse and extension. Creativity is about doing something differently for the sheer joy of it and not worrying about the consequences. I think it’s about revelling in the exploration of creation without worrying about where you’re going to end up. It’s all about the route taken, not the destination. Synthesis is always clouded by a constant concern about whether or not it’s going to achieve the outcome.
True creativity isn’t normally appreciated or encouraged at work, as true creativity is both highly personal and bears no requirement for productivity or efficiency. I think you impart a little bit of yourself in everything truly creative. When asked for a application that delivers certain business functionality, there’s little room to come back and say “mu” and expect a positive reaction. Or, to return with an abstract sketch of a pony riding across a lunar landscape with a dog on its back.
I’m sure it’d engender a creative response though.
Synthesis is well suited to commerce - the process actively encourages optimisation and refinement. It’s almost like the scientific process in that sense - if followed correctly and long enough, success is (almost) guaranteed. Creativity is more like chaos - sometimes it hits, sometimes it misses.
Of course, where does that leave most writers, artists, and the like? I think people like Stephen King don’t write for pleasure and pain of writing - I think they’ve done it for so long and so frequently that they no longer concern themselves with creation. Writing has become a form of synthesis for them, no different to banging out 10,000 lines of Perl or developing a tried and true marketing campaign. Every now and then though, they can’t resist falling back into their old ways. For Stephen King, I think his release was the Dark Tower series. I think on some level he knew he was locked in a circle of soul-sucking synthesis, and books like The Dark Tower series gave him an out.
I think that others, like Douglas Adams, never lost sight of creativity. Every new piece by them was an exploration in its own right. Not all were necessarily good, but all were unique in their own way. Neal Stephenson is another interesting one - I think his connection with creativity comes through the discovery process he goes through with each new novel. I get the feeling, reading his books, that his interest lies in researching and communicating. I also get the feeling, though, that his creativity has been declining since his earlier works. He’s become too familiar with writing. I still love his books though.
Writers like Robert Jordan are so deep in a rut, I swear they’ve gotten confused and think they can dig themselves out of it. The Wheel of Time has become the poster child for synthesis - quite well written in a technical sense, filled with character and plot development, and infuriatingly boring. He’s lost the spark that originally led him to the series, and I think it shows.
As much as it pains me to say it, I think Terry Pratchett is a master of synthesis. I love his writing, his characters, and his humour, but I think he’s firmly in the synthesis camp. Not formulaic (especially not in terms of plot), but getting close.
Not surprisingly, when I read over what I’ve just written, there’s a pretty strong theme coming through. I think most blockbuster writers adopt some form of synthesis - that’s exactly why they’re successful . Creative writers are sometimes successful, but they’re frequently one-hit wonders. One-hit wonders of mind-numbing brilliance, quite frequently, but still one-hit wonders. I wonder whether that’s because they wrote in a state of brilliance, whether they only had the one book in them, or whether they created for the sake of creation, and when they were done, they were finished with that concept and / or style and had to move on. I think it could be the third.
So, enough blather. It all comes back to how difficult I find it to frame my thoughts properly. Ask for a strategy, I’ll whip one together in a day. A marketing plan, a block of application code, some web programming, an economic analysis, some econometric modelling, or some feasibility analysis? Not a problem - I’ll get it done within a week.
Ask me to explain myself and my thoughts?
Duuuhhhh ……
Writing is difficult. Much harder than I remember it. I guess I’m hoping that this whole process will reignite the creative portions of my mind. In many, many ways I miss them. I don’t think I’ve done anything properly creative (or reflective) since high-school. It probably had a lot to do with being an inwards-focused bag of hormones back then, but still - at least I was using my whole brain.
Enough for tonight. Bed calls.