Let’s get back to the benefits of understanding combinatorial creativity. It’s a truly liberating concept because it helps creators get over the anxiety that they are just copying and regurgitating things they’ve seen.
Of course they are! Everyone does.
With new creators, it’s painfully obvious. That fanfic you wrote is still good, it’s just relying too heavily on one person’s ideas. Once you start creating regularly (execution!) your brain becomes more adept at mixing and matching ideas until you come up with something that feels new.
Understanding combinatorial creativity is essential to overcoming this anxiety. I worried frequently while writing my novel, The Inevitable, because sometimes my main character felt like a copy of Lt. Commander Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation. I wasn’t copying, but the part of my brain that’s terrified of plagiarism kept sending up red flags every time my protagonist, who is a robot, acted robotic…
The funny part is that many people have pointed out similarities between my protagonist and Wall-E, from the eponymous Pixar movie (mostly because more people know about Wall-E than Data). The truth is, there’s a little Wall-E in there. There’s also some Data. Not to mention some Legion (Mass Effect), Andrew (Bicentennial Man), a half dozen other Asimov robots, and a few humans, both real and fictional. In other words, my main character is a product of many ideas and ended up becoming his own unique idea.
The other amazing thing about combinatorial creativity is that it helps you realize that everything is potential fuel for the creativity machine. Every show, book, play, painting, photo, tune, movie, website, and more are potential inspirations, future building blocks for characters, settings, images, songs, and ideas. Heck, even everyday objects, too. Take a minute to look at that tree outside your window. Someday it may help you come up with something "new." This is the same reason why many creators will often branch out into new genres they never tried before. Musicians frequently cite inspirations from bands in a completely different genre than what they perform. This is why! The elements of a new idea are everywhere!
Don’t forget that people are a good source of inspiration and information, too. Surround yourself with people who know lots of things. It will improve you and your creativity.
So go out there and don’t worry about being too derivative. Just pay attention to everything, and then do something. Start mixing and matching until you figure out your style. Execute on the idea. Create. Make. Do. It may be rocky at first; there will still be days when you feel like a hack or a blockhead, but the ideas will come.
I promise.
If you want more on this topic, the video series Everything Is A Remix is absolutely required reading … er … watching. I’ve embedded the first video below, and you can find the rest on the website.
Another interesting rabbit hole is presented at Kitbashed. It looks at the "ancestry" of the Star Wars universe; in other words, all the media that influenced George Lucas and helped him create Star Wars. There’s a wealth of information there, so if you’ve only got five minutes and are easily distracted, BEWARE!
This article originally appeared on Speculative Intent. Reprinted with permission.
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About Fiction Vortex
Fiction Vortex, let’s see …
A fiction vortex is a tornado of stories that pick you up and hurl you through a barn to find enlightenment on the other side. It’s a whirlpool of fascinating tales so compelling that they suck you in, drag you down to the bottom of your mind, and drown you with incessant waves of glorious imagery and believable characters.
Nope.
A fiction vortex is an online speculative fiction magazine focused on publishing great science fiction and fantasy, and is run by incredibly attractive and intelligent people with great taste in literature and formidable writing prowess.
Not that either. But we’re getting closer.
Founded in the 277th year of the Takolatchni Dynasty, Fiction Vortex set out to encourage people to write and publish great speculative fiction. It sprang fully formed from the elbow of TWOS, retaining none of TWOS’s form but most of its spirit. And the patron god of writers, the insecure, the depressed, and the mentally ill regarded Fiction Vortex in his magic mirror of self-loathing and declared it good, insofar as something that gives writer’s undue hope can be declared good. Thereafter, he charged the Rear Admiral of the Galactic 5th Fleet to defend Fiction Vortex down to the last robot warrior.
Now we’re talking.
Take your pick. We don’t care how you characterize us or the site.
Fiction Vortex focuses on publishing speculative fiction. That means science fiction and fantasy (with a light smattering of horror and a few other subgenres), be it light, heavy, deep, flighty, spaceflighty, cerebral, visceral, epic, or mundane. But mundane in a my-local-gas-station-has-elf-mechanics-but-it’s-not-really-a-big-deal-around-here kind of way. Got it?
Basically, we want imaginative stories that are well written, but not full of supercilious floridity.
There’s a long-standing belief that science fiction and fantasy stories aren’t as good as purely literary fare. We want you to prove that mindset wrong (not just wrong, but a steaming pile of griffin dung wrong) with every story we publish. It’s almost like we’re saying, "I do not bite my thumb at you, literary snobs, but I do bite my thumb," but in a completely polite and non-confrontational way.
We've got more great stories online, with a new story twice a week. Visit our website FictionVortex.com, follow us on Twitter: @FictionVortex, and like us on Facebook: FictionVortex.
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