I recently finished reading the book A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking. It was a good read, while this book won’t make it into my list of top favorites, it certainly is far superior to many other stories I attempted to read last year. However, the point of this post is not to talk about this book, but rather how it got me thinking again and elaborating on the concept of creativity.
In this book, a magical girl with the power to “only” work with bread (from the dough to the baked goods), she can animate gingerbread cookies, create a living sourdough starter (like a blob) that eats or dissolves anything you put in it, make stale bread more or less appetizing, and much more. The list goes on, or even better, the list could go on, and that is my main point.
As a young woman that spent most of her conscious life in a bakery in a medieval setting, with no access to books, entertainment, education, or pretty much anything beyond the corners of the bakery, she lacks creativity. And this here is a huge point to the author, T. Kingfisher does a fantastic job of ensuring this character acts and thinks exactly as her background allows, which isn’t much.
Page after page I found myself thinking about what I would do in her situation, given the limitations presented in each scene. And, to no one’s surprise, I was more “creative” than the character.
But are these “creative” ideas really mine? If I were in that exact setting, a young person who only bakes from before sunrise to after sundown every day, with very limited education, no entertainment, no life outside the bakery, could I be at least as creative as the book’s character? I dare say I would not.
My current “creativity” does not truly belong to me, but to all the authors of the thousands of stories I have consumed throughout my life. Why can I think of dragons, for example? And why can I think of ways to defeat a dragon? This knowledge, these ideas, they are not purely mine. Sure, when I link concepts from different fields and sources, I can come up with something slightly novel. But without those inspirational sources, I would never conceive those new ideas.
And there is also an ironic twist, even the idea that creativity does not exist, isn’t new. For a couple of milliseconds I imagined that I had thought about it first, but as you might expect, creativity doesn’t exist. It turns out far more intelligent people (1, 2, 3) have already realized this and published scientific papers and books on the topic. So yes, creativity is a myth. We are simply recombining ideas from various sources that we are absorbed and making sense of them inside our heads.
Humans are just skilled copy-cats. With minimal modifications to existing ideas over time, something very different and “new” can emerge. But that “new” thing could never exist without the countless sources that preceded it.
Creativity is a lie.
Leave a Reply