Comments on: Creative Genius? http://www.tomcottar.org/2009/11/02/creative-genius/ ...conversation for the Journey... Wed, 05 Oct 2011 14:54:58 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 By: tom cottar http://www.tomcottar.org/2009/11/02/creative-genius/comment-page-1/#comment-18838 tom cottar Fri, 06 Nov 2009 13:09:38 +0000 http://www.tomcottar.org/?p=764#comment-18838 <p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 21px; ">"Every time I'm on stage, I leave drained."</span></p> <p>interesting.. that's how i feel after worship each week.  I think i especially liked the way she articulated her process...it made me feel less looney... </p> "Every time I'm on stage, I leave drained."

interesting.. that's how i feel after worship each week.  I think i especially liked the way she articulated her process…it made me feel less looney… 

]]> By: scott http://www.tomcottar.org/2009/11/02/creative-genius/comment-page-1/#comment-18826 scott Mon, 02 Nov 2009 17:31:44 +0000 http://www.tomcottar.org/?p=764#comment-18826 Thanks for the video. I don't think I even find Ruth Stone's story unusual. Unique? Certainly. But not unusual. But then, I grew up surrounded by creative sorts. Her reflections made me think of one of my mother's books. It began life as her first Master's thesis (in psychology), a case study on Virginia Woolf. It ended up published in the seventies as Just This Side of Madness: Creativity and the Drive to Create. In the nineties, it was reworked, expanded, and published by a university press. Periodically it gets used as a textbook or resource for a college course. I have no intention of ever being a "published writer" so I've removed the part of the pressure of making that my job. (Of course, my career is application development, which remains a creative venture, so I haven't really escaped it entirely. And there are days everything flows and I create these beautiful things in hours. And there days when I work and work and little useful comes. As she said, you still have to show up and do your part.) I haven't escaped writing, though there are times I wish I could. Once they begin to build, if I don't let the words out by typing, they just bounce around my head more and more and more. It becomes a cacophony that drowns out everything else. And acting? I realized early on that could never be my career. Every time I'm on stage, I leave drained. The more I connect with the audience, the worse it is. It's like I'm feeding every one of them a little piece of myself. And most of the time, my reaction is that there simply isn't enough of me. Thanks for the video. I don't think I even find Ruth Stone's story unusual. Unique? Certainly. But not unusual. But then, I grew up surrounded by creative sorts. Her reflections made me think of one of my mother's books. It began life as her first Master's thesis (in psychology), a case study on Virginia Woolf. It ended up published in the seventies as Just This Side of Madness: Creativity and the Drive to Create. In the nineties, it was reworked, expanded, and published by a university press. Periodically it gets used as a textbook or resource for a college course.
I have no intention of ever being a "published writer" so I've removed the part of the pressure of making that my job. (Of course, my career is application development, which remains a creative venture, so I haven't really escaped it entirely. And there are days everything flows and I create these beautiful things in hours. And there days when I work and work and little useful comes. As she said, you still have to show up and do your part.) I haven't escaped writing, though there are times I wish I could. Once they begin to build, if I don't let the words out by typing, they just bounce around my head more and more and more. It becomes a cacophony that drowns out everything else.
And acting? I realized early on that could never be my career. Every time I'm on stage, I leave drained. The more I connect with the audience, the worse it is. It's like I'm feeding every one of them a little piece of myself. And most of the time, my reaction is that there simply isn't enough of me.

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