Creativity is Naivety

I am someone who enjoys the creative aspect of English; the flow of words, the captivating narrative of a superb story, the excitement of piecing together the concept for a new story. Because of this I could not help but to feel alarmed when Dr. Sexson spoke to us about the story of a young Gallatin County native boy who was drug to his death by a horse some years ago. Dr. Sexson went on to tell us how this very incident could relate not only to a Greek who had experienced the same fate, but also to Hecuba who had to bury her young grandchild before his time. This story, which the Bozeman Daily Chronicle had deemed minor placing it in the ‘briefs’, had already been told time and time again.

After class I began to think, if this is to be true about something so constant as death could it not be just as true for something else more broad? I thought of the recent movies I had seen, one being the summer blockbuster The Dark Knight,and how the story of Bruce Wayne is the same story of the Homeric Heroes. I thought of the story of Andrea Yates, the woman who murdered all five of her children maliciously in the bathtub, and of Medea, the woman who murdered her two children in a revenge scheme against her husband’s abandonment. The more I thought the surer I was that none of the stories I will read in the Bozeman Daily Chronicle will be original, no movie I watch will never have been told before, and the television shows I watched as a child will be the same my children will one day watch.

Coming to this conclusion, I took things a step further. Would it not then, be an accurate statement to say that not even ones thoughts are original but have been thought by millions of people for hundreds of years. We ourselves are not unique and individual creatures, all of us are living in the same time at the same place watching and reading and hearing the same things. Our experiences are our own, but they are not original. All one must do is look back to the classics, the first books, to see the problems they face were the problems their ancestors before them faced too. So perhaps if one now wishes to be truly original they must answer the questions we have been asking for a thousand years, but just make sure you answer it first.