Writing can be taken up at any point. But you need to remember that the arts are fundamentally unfair. Hard work and diligence won't necessarily take you all the way. Talent, nepotism, influence, and pure luck play a huge part.
David BrinRead
It's how creativity works. Especially in humans. For every good idea, ten thousand idiotic ones must first be posed, sifted, tried out, and discarded. A mind that's afraid to toy with the ridiculous will never come up with the brilliantly original.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Creativity involves trial and error, requiring many failed ideas before achieving brilliance.
David Brin highlights the nature of creativity, emphasizing that the process often involves generating numerous poor ideas before arriving at something exceptional. He suggests that a willingness to explore even the silliest concepts is crucial for original thought, as fear of failure can stifle innovation.
Themes
CreativityIdeasInnovationFailureOriginality
In practice
Example use cases
During a brainstorming session to encourage team members to propose wild ideas without fear of judgment.
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All quotes →There's no doubt that scientific training helps many authors to write better science fiction. And yet, several of the very best were English majors who could not parse a differential equation to save their lives.
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Competition, by itself, always leads to cheating by the powerful, who try to establish pyramids of power, like feudalism. Yet, competition is the great creative force! So how do we save it from its own contradictions? By cooperation! By cooperating with each other, via politics, to make rules and prevent cheating, so that competition can thrive!
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Change is the principal feature of our age and literature should explore how people deal with it. The best science fiction does that, head-on.
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Human beings are inherently misled into subjective fantasies, but there's a saving grace. We all have different delusions. Other people don't necessarily share yours, and hence they will help you penetrate yours through the miracle of criticism!
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