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 want to say up front that I don't advocate gambling in the conventional sense. The house always wins, and there are no exceptions to this rule. However, I've been thinking this week about Kenny Rogers' 1978 song The Gambler (written by Don Schlitz in 1976). Specifically, the…
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. I've come across two works recently that got me thinking about the importance of analysis in creativity. The first was a passage from Steven Hyden's 2018 book Twilight of the Gods: A Journey to the End of Classic Rock. The book explores, among other things, cultural aspects of…
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…
"What a man thinks is his own business. What matters is what he does." -from The Honourable Schoolboy, by John le Carre Welcome back to the Creative Life Adventure. In a recent post, I referenced Robert Caro's diligent research process. If you haven't read any of Caro's books, either The Years of Lyndon Johnson series…
Welcome back to the Creative Life Adventure. As a lifelong insomniac, I looked forward to reading Benjamin Reiss' 2017 book Wild Nights: How Taming Sleep Created Our Restless World. I wasn't disappointed. Wild Nights is not a book about how to get a better night's sleep. Instead, it's a cultural study of the history of…
