The joy of original creation

"The arts are not the way to make a living.  They are a very human way of making life bearable.  Practising an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake...  Do it as well as you possibly can.  You will get an enormous reward.  You will have created something."

I have slightly abridged this quotation, which is attributed to Kurt Vonnegut, and I read it at a time when I'd just started rewriting yet another old novel. After months of tedious cutting and pasting of information between different versions of Snowbird, I've finally moved on to something new,

A few years back i wrote a young adult novel which didn't work, but I loved its central idea.  Now when I look at it I see how shallow the storytelling was, how lacking in depth. That's the usual problem with my older manuscripts.  But as I read through that manuscript to review the story I realised there was a great story just waiting to get out.  But the catch is that, to capture that story, I'll have to totally rewrite the novel from scratch.

You might think I'd be more daunted by that than the prospect of cutting and pasting existing chapters, but not a bit of it. I can see where I've pulled my punches in the original, and where I haven't described things in enough detail.  My characters are on a new planet, but I'd never described fundamental things like the colour of the grass and sky.  And even the system's sun didn't have a name.

But I relish fixing things like this.  They're acts of  original creation, forcing me to use my intuition,  creativity, and storytelling skills to weave together the story of a real and compelling world. Original creation is active, sorting and sifting through myriad possibilities, weighing and discarding alternatives.  It's a powerful feeling, and I never feel more joy than when I'm in original creation mode.

Maybe that's why I watch less and less TV these days. TV programmes are other people's original creations, and watching them is a passive experience.  I can't give anything to that creation that I am passively watching cross my screen.

No, give me a pen and paper and set me to work creating a world of my own.  Give me original creation any day.