Living a creative life
Welcome back to the Creative Life Adventure. There is a romanticized image of the lonely artist, the tortured soul who courageously clings to a solitary vision while remaining misunderstood by the ignorant masses. Ayn (“Ayn the Pain”) Rand created an entire long-winded novel, The Fountainhead, around this image. The lonely artist is often portrayed in…
Welcome back to the Creative Life Adventure. I've been thinking a lot lately about inciting incidents and the different ways they can be used in fiction. An inciting incident generally launches the primary conflict or action in a story. Joseph Campbell referred to the inciting incident as a call to action. Sometimes our characters seek…
Continue reading ➞ Insightful Examples of Inciting Incidents
Welcome back to the Creative Life Adventure. My wife and I recently watched Julian Schnabel's 2018 film At Eternity's Gate. In the movie, Willem Dafoe plays Vincent Van Gogh during the years he lived in the south of France. During a brief scene of Van Gogh arranging the space where he lived and worked, I…
Welcome back to the Creative Life Adventure. I recently read George Michelsen Foy's 2016 book Finding North: How Navigation Makes Us Human. It deals with physical navigation and how our approach to navigation has changed over time. On a deeper level, it's a meditation on how we humans find our way in life and how…
Welcome back to the Creative Life Adventure Many of us played with building blocks, or similar toys, as children. Lego bricks, Lincoln Logs, and Erector Sets were common during my childhood, and they're all still available to kids today. I never had Lego sets, but I did have Lincoln Logs and an Erector Set. (The…
Welcome back to the Creative Life Adventure. It's easy to think of creativity as an act of creating something out of thin air. A novel, a painting, a sculpture; these are all tangible products that didn't exist until they were created. We shouldn't believe that creativity is always about making something up, however. Sometimes, it's…
Welcome back to the Creative Life Adventure. Currently I'm reading The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found by scholar and classicist Mary Beard. Pompeii is briefly referenced in my current writing-project-in-progress, so I'm reading about the city primarily for research. Fundamentally, however, I'm reading a well-researched book by a respected historian about life in…
