Creativity and Interactivity

I boarded a plane for Alaska the day after we graduated. I turned 18 on September 7, and left Alaska in late October. I joined the army on March 16, 1964, and was discharged on March 1, 1967. I stayed with my parents at their new place in Palos Park until June, and then I moved to Cheboygan. I had visited Cheboygan for a weekend in mid March, and didn't think much of it. My old army buddy, who was my contact in Cheboygan, wrote me a letter in June, and I could tell he was having problems. My intention was to visit with him for a couple of weeks and see if I could help him straighten out his head, and I've been here ever since. We got him stabilized for awhile, but his problems came back years later and we kind of drifted apart. He transferred to Green Bay, Wisconsin when the mill closed, and came back a couple years later. I saw him a few times after that, but then we lost contact, and I don't know where he is now.

I think that one of the differences between crafters and artists is creativity or originality. What you said about ideas coming from your subconscious seems to bear this out. It appears that your inspirations come from within, while mine are mostly external. I am capable of embellishing an idea and putting my own spin on it, but the core idea usually comes to me from the outside world. When I was writing songs, the tune was usually borrowed from another song, or it was some kind of generic folk tune that could have come from anywhere. The words usually came from experience, my own or somebody else's. Sometimes, somebody would say something clever in conversation, and it would strike me that there was a song in there somewhere.

I'm with you on the writing thing. I do it because I like to do it, but one thing I found out early on was that it's no fun unless somebody responds to it. They don't have to necessarily agree with me, or even like my work, but they have to respond to it in some manner. All my life people had been telling me that I should write because I was so good at expressing myself. When my daughter gave me her old laptop, she suggested that I use it to write down some of the stories I had been telling orally for years. At first I thought I would be writing for my own satisfaction but, before I knew it, I wanted to print the stories up and pass out copies to my friends and family. When that proved to be more trouble than it was worth, I went on the internet to share my stories with the whole wide world. While I got some positive feedback, I never had the feeling that the stories meant as much to others as they meant to me. It wasn't until I got into forum groups, and later into blogging, that I discovered that I liked that feeling of interactivity. You know, I say something, you say something back. It's kind of like regular oral conversation except that there is enough lag time that you can think about what you want to say next, and I like that. Exchanging letters by snail mail involves too much lag time, and oral conversation doesn't involve enough lag time. It's like Goldilocks trying out the three bears' beds: This one is too soft, this one is too hard, and this one is just right.

I never got into writing fiction, which is what you have to do if you want to become rich and famous as a writer. I suppose it's a skill that can be learned, but there are plenty of other people cranking out fiction. What the world needs, and has precious little of, is truth. I don't mean the great immortal truths of the universe, that's already been done. What I mean is the little day to day truths that somehow seem to evade the public consciousness. Sometimes I think that many people don't even distinguish between truth and falsehood. They're not exactly liars because that would imply a deliberate intention to deceive. They just don't seem to know the difference between fact and fiction, truth and falsehood, or reality and fantasy. It's all the same to them. I suppose, then, that I am a quester as well as a cruiser, and I think you are too.