from the Dept. of Cheering Myself Up

[bronze_ribbons]

In the New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell discusses creativity - especially the kind with late-blooming results:

[David] Galenson quotes the literary critic Franklin Rogers on [Mark] Twain’s trial-and-error method: “His routine procedure seems to have been to start a novel with some structural plan which ordinarily soon proved defective, whereupon he would cast about for a new plot which would overcome the difficulty, rewrite what he had already written, and then push on until some new defect forced him to repeat the process once again.” Twain fiddled and despaired and revised and gave up on “Huckleberry Finn” so many times that the book took him nearly a decade to complete. The Cézannes of the world bloom late not as a result of some defect in character, or distraction, or lack of ambition, but because the kind of creativity that proceeds through trial and error necessarily takes a long time to come to fruition.

Comments

[twilightsorcery.insanejournal.com]

What a great article. Malcom Gladwell always impresses me.

I'm reminded of a class I took in college -- I think it was on Modernism -- where we read William Carlos Williams's early poetry. It was genuinely terrible: the sentiment was cliched, the word choices were awkward, the rhythm was clunky, and when it wasn't clunky it was doggerel. It made me feel pretty good about my wretched teenage poetry. ;)