It's Sunday...and yes, I know, I haven't really talked about anything religious or spiritual for the majority of the week, but that's not going to stop me from taking my sabbatical. Also, this is my lent blog, so the topics are really up to me. I guess I haven't felt overly connected spiritually this week, which sort of ties into an earlier blog about how I should really get better about incorporating my faith into the rest of my life. I'm also breaking my other promise, because I'm totally going to talk about school again. I'm just a horrible, horrible person.
Today, I was inspired to think about lacking inspiration. I'm increasingly impressed with people who are able to go out into the world and see things I would never have noticed before and then turn them into amazing things like works of art and literature, or new inventions. You people out there? You're amazing! Keep doing what you're doing because we need more people like you...and it's very tragic to say that the current direction our education system is taking is limiting the opportunities children have to develop these aspects as they grow.
I wish I had more of a creative drive. When I see things, I can take them and bend them a little into something interesting for me, but often times it's nothing so unique or fundamentally new that it's really 'interesting'. It makes me wonder whether the same message is really worth repeating again and again with slight alterations, or whether all this is doing is saturating the market with less interesting versions of creative things which already exist.
Take all the literature on zombies out there for instance. There is a ridiculous amount of it. You can't walk into a book store without running into something. I'm sure some of it is good, but there is too much to sift through. One has to wonder if it's worth the time and effort to sift to find the good stuff. There are a few things that have come recommended, mostly books which were at the forefront of this necrophilia, but the gag has gone on too long and it has become tiresome, even for those who used to enjoy the campy old movies or the newer spins on older innovations.
Something else will come along, but then I remember a few of the other fads in recent memory. Harry Potter sired a multitude of "knock-off" literature (I use this term generally because I'm sure not all of it was Harry Potter inspired and the idea of a wizarding school was not first seen in Harry Potter alone). Then came the Sookie Stackhouse novels and...no, I'm not even going to say the name. We all know about what sparkly hell was wrought upon us by fangirls everywhere. This was quickly followed by a plague of movies, television series, and other literature which-one could argue originated years ago with Anne Rice's novels more than anything else-really hasn't been all that good or inspired either, generally speaking.
So my question, the one that has had me grappling with my ability to continue in my devotion to writing is: where is the line drawn? If you love to write, but the message or the content is utter rubbish, should you pursue publication for vindication? If you have nothing else that's really new to offer, should you proceed anyway? Is the same story retold in a more (but often times, less) compelling voice worth adding? Am I over thinking things?
Maybe it's better to look on the positive side. The book which dwindles in the hour between day and night inspired people to fall in love with reading...and then girls to become infatuated with boys solely because they are painfully good looking, but that's not really anything 'new' anyway (and from what I understand, there's another teen series out there somewhere that's even worse with the latter currently). I suppose that even if a piece lacks inspiration, it shouldn't just be discounted as 'nothing' or 'worthless'. I suppose that if the end result is improvement in the life of someone else, whether it's confidence for the artist or benefits for the audience, that this is something of significance, a kind of good, and that's ok too. Perhaps in the end, it doesn't really matter what anyone else thinks. There will always be the kind of people who will see something and become inspired and make it beautiful and there will be those appreciating it and critiquing it, but that's just life. In a way, lacking inspiration can kind of be inspirational too.
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