Attacking Non-Creativity With Creativity

By Less Lee Moore

Utne Reader recently discussed an ISO50 blog post on ways to get over creativity block. Not just writer’s block, mind you, but the inability to create.

This suggestion from Tom Muller caught my eye:

To be honest, I rarely get stuck in a creative rut, there’s more than enough ideas swirling around in my head, its [sic] just a matter of priorities and time.

And there’s the rub. How in the world do I choose from the zillion paths in front of me, all leading me towards creating something?

It seems like this is even more difficult in the current age of media saturation; Utne warns us to “stop surfing YouTube” (although I have personally found YouTube to be a fantastic source of inspiration), while typographer Erik Speikermann thinks we should “avoid Google—it takes too long to find anything useful. . . ”

I’d add the caveat that it’s not the lack of useful information on Google, it’s the overwhelming amount of information available that makes concentrating difficult; the inevitable result of Googling is falling down the inspiration rabbit hole.

Of course there is always the tried and true method of thinking about the project (let’s say an article, for example) and then waiting until the absolute last minute to write it, so that panic combined with days and days of ideas and false starts (or if you’re lucky, full paragraphs) seem to fall into place perfectly. The result can often be somewhat inspired, if not a bit insane (not always a bad thing).

One method I would not suggest is addressed in another Utne piece, “When Creative Writing Gets Too Creative,” which exposes the “true fiction” hypocrisies of writer John D’Agata in “What Happens There,” a story that “traces the final moments of Levi Presley, a 16-year-old who killed himself by jumping from the top of the 1,149-foot-high Stratosphere Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas.”

Obviously real life is the inspiration for many created works (even when those works take place in fantastic, fictional worlds), but in this article Keith Goetzman details how hijacking a true story to create a fictional one but presenting it as non-fiction and/or journalism is not only unsavory, but also possibly unethical and irresponsible.

Naturally, this recalls the James Frey and JT Leroy debacles of recent years, but their names are not mentioned. One of the commenters states, “I do not see this form dangerous or misleading unless one is unaware that this style is being used. However, what I think is a dangerous form of Journalism is that of bloggers.”

Although this seems promising, the paragraph veers off into some sort of weird spam about left wing media liberal bias. What I would have liked to read, however, was what I consider one of the drawbacks of “citizen journalism”: it frequently eschews simple fact checking in favor of up-to-the minute reportage.

I’m not talking about coverage of world disasters and political strife (factual reporting can prove thorny due to media bias and blackouts), but film and music reviews. No matter how good the writing may be, it’s difficult to take someone seriously when they are reviewing something with no historical context whatsoever. It’s great to scoop everyone else, but it renders your credibility extremely suspect when you obviously haven’t done a modicum of research before you hit that “Publish” button.

The great irony of publishing articles on the real-time Internet is that in many cases, it doesn’t seem to be used as a tool for fact checking.