Creativity is Overrated

Where do you get your ideas?  It’s one of the most common, and the most commonly frustrating, questions authors receive in whatever variation it comes, but its continued prevalence reflects something deeper about the conversation around, and conception of, artwork in the modern world.  Its significance is concealed in the assumptions it underpins and the worldview from which it emerges, for to wonder at the origin of a given artist’s ideas is to presuppose the importance of creativity and originality to their work.

Tucked into the last pages of CS Lewis’ The Discarded Image is an observation about originality and derivation in art, especially in literature.  Like so many of Lewis’ observations, it is characterized by an apparent simplicity that belies the significance and depth of insight embodied within it.  This one, though, requires a little more context than the reminder that as surely as the mighty oak comes from the acorn, the acorn first came from a mighty oak.  Lewis asserts that medieval artists would see the drive for creativity and originality in art as, not the pinnacle of artistic achievement, but the scraping of the bottom of the artistic barrel.

If you’ve read some of the medieval literature we’ve reviewed, you may already have the context to understand what Lewis means by this.  Otherwise, the short version that does not involve reading a dozen or so pieces of medieval literature amounts to understanding that medieval authors did not think of themselves as creative.  Their works are almost always derived from other works, often explicitly, and they did not see this as we would see plagiarism or copyright infringement, but as the finest testament to their references.  Except, they were not simply copying – they were retelling, coloring the stories of the ancients with their own worldview and their own ideas, which, it is true, is a kind of originality…but they did not think of it in those terms.  If writing the story of Troy, adding some elements, details, or digressions not in Homer’s version was not seen as modifying, adding, or inventing, but more as elaborating on what should have happened.  What we perceive as places where medieval authors were the most creative are places where they would have felt they were being the most faithful to their historical sources.

The medieval perspective amounted to, in paraphrase of Lewis’ conclusion, the notion that the world is so replete with compelling stories to tell (in whatever medium) that the role of the author/poet/painter/sculptor is not to invent new stories, but to bring the existing stories to light.  In other words, art did not exist for art’s sake, but merely to highlight some element of life.  Lewis goes so far as to suppose that people did not see Dante as the person who invented a notion of the inferno, but rather as the person who had been there, because they could not conceive of ungrounded invention.  Art did not, for the medieval, spring fully formed from the head of Zeus ala Athena, which is closer to how we might think of it today.  That evolution probably began during the late renaissance, reaching a point where art can exist for art’s sake, with no grounding in the “real” world, springing like Athena from the author’s imagination.  Modern ideas of copyright and intellectual property further entrench the notion of the intrinsic value of originality.

Looking at the kinds of art that tend to win prizes and critical acclaim, it is apparent where this doctrine of creativity can lead: to a place that values originality for its own sake, and not for its service to the idea being expressed.  This is not to say that originality is bad, but that it should not be an end.  Originality, rather, or creativity if you prefer, should be a means.  Something is not quality simply because it is novel.

Viewing the origins of our ideas with some element of the medieval mindset allows us also to reframe the narrative around the idea of telling new stories.  We’ve written a little about that debate before, this notion that there are no new stories to tell, because we’re all just retelling a few story archetypes even if we don’t realize it.  Time and again, we see this idea leading authors to try strange formats, unusual techniques, and subversions for the sake of subversions in an attempt to escape the shadow of the notion that they cannot tell a truly new story, which is, of course, antithetical to the modern enshrinement of originality.  To a medieval, though, the question would be meaningless.  To them, all stories come from somewhere – they are not new – and the storyteller’s job is not invention, but, well, to tell the story.

Incorporating aspects of the medieval viewpoint on originality and creativity may also allow us to reframe the debate around the role of AI in storytelling.  One of the major complaints about AI for storytelling (other than the kneejerk, wrench-in-the-works fear that AI will put traditional storytellers out of business by stealing the work of previous storytellers) is that these AI tools achieve their output by ingesting, copying, and rephrasing the work of other authors.  Thus, nothing an AI tool writes will be genuinely original or creative.  What are we flesh-and-blood storytellers doing, though, besides taking our many inputs and churning them out into a rephrased synthesis of a few different ideas?  Exploring this idea may be worthy of a separate post.

I’ve make no secret of the origins of most of my ideas.  They come from scientific papers, from the mythologies of other cultures, from the events of history which can be, at times, stranger than anything I would think to invent, and from observations of the world.  My contribution is of my mind as a kind of mixing bowl, in which these disparate ideas can swirl and tumble and meld into something different – not something new – which I can then put into words.  There may not be new stories to tell, but there are new ways of telling them, and that, to me, is the real purpose of this thing we call storytelling.