Late blooming creativity

Wow. For anyone who creates, I highly recommend Malcolm Gladwell's article on late bloomers. The article was published in the New Yorker this October, but can also be found on his blog.

If you like to create (written work, visual art, whatever), and you talk to a lot of people about your creative aspirations or projects (which I counterrecommend, for reasons mentioned hereafter), you'll likely stumble across a lot of rigid ideas about how "creative" people should work, whether or not you bear the mark of a creative genius, and how you shouldn't give up your day job.

Gladwell's article was a refreshing counter to that utterly uncreative way of thinking by people who nonetheless have a lot of things to say about creativity. There are different modes of creativity, and genius isn't always associated with precociousness, Gladwell contends. I, for example, identify well with the artists he described who need to experiment, who create without necessarily knowing what they're trying to create. When I work on my bigger writing projects, I rarely know what's going to happen next. I just have to sit there and write, and I literally experiment with different things that could happen or different ways that characters can develop. It's puzzling to me when people are obssessed with "But what's going to *happen* in the novel?" or "Oh, that's original... yeah, that story's been told before."

What happened in Catch-22? Things happen, but what makes Catch-22 so great is that the way the story is told. For me, it wasn't so much what happened to Yossarian as the punch that Heller delivers with every sentence. Good writing, I submit, is about execution at least as much as the story being told.

Speaking of execution of writing, consider this passage from Gladwell's article, in which he quotes Roger Fry discussing Cézanne (a late bloomer):

"All these qualities of his inner vision were continually hampered and obstructed by Cézanne's incapacity to give sufficient verisimilitude to the personae of his drama," the great English art critic Roger Fry wrote of the early Cézanne. "With all his rare endowments, he happened to lack the comparatively common gift of illustration, the gift that any draughtsman for the illustrated papers learns in a school of commercial art; whereas, to realize such visions as Cézanne's required this gift in high degree." In other words, the young Cézanne couldn't draw.

When I read passages like that, I wonder why Fry didn't just write "The young Cézanne couldn't draw," as Malcolm Gladwell summarized. I guess if he wrote that, he couldn't use big words like "verisimilitude," and "endowments."