The Creative Process

Years ago a critic told me, “John, you are not a writer; you are just a synthesizer”.

That hurt.

I bristled.

I defended myself thinking that it was a terrible thing to be called a synthesizer who only collects things someone else has created and combines them, as opposed to a real writer who imagines stories and creates characters out of whole cloth.

One just patches things together; the other creates.

Over the years, I’ve come to realize that the critic was right. I do take bits and pieces of this and that and glue them together to tell a new story… Take the history of our fire department for instance. In 288 pages, I cite 174 source footnotes. I’ve gathered materials from microfilm, old newspapers, books, magazines, websites, museum exhibits, personal conversations, tv news broadcasts, phone interviews…

I weave all this stuff together into a panorama of adventure, thrills, information and inspiration.

My fire history book portrays the brave and the bizarre Like a Christmas-time plane crash in the ’50 when they knew the airliner carried 22 crew and passengers, but they recovered 23 bodies—That created a puzzle till they found out the plane had been carrying a corpse who died in Miami back north for burial.

Anyhow, for humans, to create is to combine existing things, we can’t even imagine anything original. Only God creates out of nothing. All of our creative processes are derivative.

We take what He has made, and imagine new combinations for it. Even our mythology does this. Attach a woman’s body to a fish’s tail and get a mermaid. Put a man’s torso on a horse’s body and get a centaur. A man’s head on a lion is a sphinx. Substitute snakes for hair, and you have Medusa.

The gods and creatures we imagine are mere composites of original things, they are not original in themselves. All the gods of the nations are idols. Cold stone chiseled or wooden logs sawn into combined shapes of existing things.

We can’t come up with anything original, that has never existed before. Even the brightest of us synthesize.

Even real writers do that.

Take Sherlock Holmes, a unique detective. Arthur Conan Doyle did not create him out of air. Doyle exaggerated the qualities of Joseph Bell, one of his professors at the University of Edinburgh. The fictional character is based on the unusual talents of a real man.

Ian Fleming knew some suave, debonair, handsome rake and combined this person’s qualities to make James Bond…. Maybe Fleming had me in mind. Have I told you that I resemble a very mature James Bond and that although I’m only 69 years old, around the Agency they already call me Double-O Seven-O…

My point is that there is but one true Creator. He needn’t combine existing things to make anything. With Him all things are new.

Of course, when He hit on a design that worked well, He didn’t scrap it, but used it with endless variations. For instance, any living thing you may think of is essentially a tube with a mouth at one end and excretory organs at the other. Repetition with variation, from mouse to giraffe, all are hollow tubes.

Hey, it works.

Why change it?

Also, both the mouse and the giraffe both have exactly seven bones in the neck; all mammals do. Yet, each creature is unique. We are fearfully and wonderfully made.

God need not rely on any existing thing to create a new thing.

He is original in Himself…

Although I have heard a camel described as “a horse designed by a committee”.

My point in this ramble is that now that I have a few years on me, I feel honored to be a synthesizer. I think I’m good at it. In putting things together, we imitate Our Father, and sometimes He lets us tape our crayon drawings on the refrigerator.

He creates, we imitate.

Nothing wrong with that.

Children should imitate their Father—the goal of the Christian life is to become more and more like Him, to be godly, to reflect the brightness of His glory. The Scripture says, “When He shall appear, we shall be like Him for we shall see Him as He is”.

There is but one God and one go-between between God and man, Jesus Christ, Himself both God and man.

That’s heavy.

But, Wow! Back to me. Think of it: 174 sources cited in a 288-page book.

That’s plagiarism on a grand scale—only, to make it respectable, I call it thorough research.