I really enjoyed our in-class discussion today on creativity and writing. Some thoughts that really stuck out to me are:
- The audience and author need shared experiences in order to engage with the piece. Shared experience is by nature “borrowed.” Does that mean that writing about universal or popular experiences is not creative?
- Another way to look at the formula for creativity- is it surprising but inevitable? These correlate pretty well with originality and usefulness.
- Is there a spectrum of creativity, with more creative on one end and less creative on the other? Does this spectrum correlate directly with how original and how useful the content is?
When I first read the proposed definition of creativity being equal parts originality and utility, I agreed with it for the most part. However, this class discussion changed my mind about the originality element. As someone said, no idea can be truly original. We create based off of our experiences and perceptions and understandings, and are inspired by the work of others. Ideas cannot just be pulled out of thin air, but must develop and be grounded in something familiar to us. This brings up a question for me- is there a formula for how much material is “acceptable” to borrow? It seems like every situation would be different and nuanced in a way that could not allow for a blanket rule. Is there a way we can encourage creativity while preserving intellectual property rights?
One Paige At a Time 
That’s a really intriguing, insightful, and poetic point that shared experience is necessarily borrowed experience. The audience always loses something in borrowing that experience — something is always lost in translation as we inevitably reconstruct another’s experience in our own terms according to our own experiences, which will always be different. However, rather than an extreme existential, nihilistic conclusion that we can share nothing with each other, I think we still can share something even as we borrow. And the identification that happens with this borrowing process does help us relate to each other.
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