Journalist Kathryn Schulz said, in her phenomenal TED Talk “On Being Wrong,” “The most amazing thing about the human mind is not that we can see the world as it is, but that we can see the world as it isn’t.”
In a sentence, that sums up “creativity,” doesn’t it? When artists, musicians, and writers create, they’re saying, “This is what the universe looks like through my eyes.” Or… what we want the world to be, what we think the world could be, or what we fear the world might become.
It’s why we writers often revisit the same motifs in our fiction. A recurring theme in my books—one you see in stories as different as Sephirot, The Communion of Shadows, Lock & Key, and my current work-in-progress, The Accidental Magician—is second chances, people regretting the fact that they’ve done little of significance in their lives and suddenly finding they have the chance to make a difference.
Might be some wishful thinking on my part that it’s not too late for me, even though I never got a letter from Hogwarts, found a magical wardrobe, or received a visit from a wizard and twelve Dwarves.
The fact that creativity is such a deeply personal expression is why I get frustrated when I hear people say that there’s no point to (fill in the blank: writing, playing an instrument, drawing, pottery, dance…), because there are so many people who do it better, and besides, it’s all been done before.
Yes, but it hasn’t been done by you. No one speaks with your voice, hears with your ears, sees with your eyes, and no one will create the way you do. And the world needs more creative people, especially in troubling times. We need those different perspectives to remind us that losing even a single voice makes the entire chorus weaker.
There’s a quote attributed to Winston Churchill—historians say it’s apocryphal, but it’s still a message worth hearing. During the middle of World War II, so the story goes, Churchill was being told by one of his advisors that to fund the war effort, financial support to music and the arts needed to be eliminated.
Churchill responded, “Then what are we fighting for?”
It’s a point well taken, even if the great man probably never said it. In fractious times, which these certainly are, we need all of the people who “see the world as it isn’t,” to borrow Kathryn Schulz’s trenchant phrase. To show us what the world might be, good or bad. To remind us that everyone sees this weird, chaotic, magnificent universe a little differently.
To say—“hey, just for a moment, look at it all through my eyes. Maybe you’ll see something you didn’t see before.”
