The courage to eff it all up

In my travels around the web I came across the video below from a TED talk by Sir Ken Robinson.  I'd never heard of the bloke before, but I found his proposition that we educate the creativity out of our kids.  If you've ever taken the Writer's Workshop training for elementary school you know this to be true:  fiction is not allowed.  Only non-fiction is permitted and absolutely no one could explain to me the educational validity of or even the rationale behind this thinking.  That's just the way it is.



I also agree with his supposition that you will never create anything great without the courage to make mistakes.  If you constantly have to play it safe, you often don't play at all.  To me it's like the little girl staring longingly at the others playing on the monkey bars and knowing she can never participate cause her mother dresses her like she's going to a mini cotillion.  You have to know it's all right to get mussed a little.

There's a reason why so many brilliant authors received so any rejection slips before they were published.  Okay, maybe more than one.  First, there were a lot more publishers out there from whom to receive rejections.  Now publishing is so many conglomerates that no matter what name goes on the spine of the book, there are about a dozen big players in the field.  Second, their work was ahead of its time and the people in the ivory towers of publishing had no idea what to do with them.

So how to tell if your work is ground-breaking and creative or the same old crap with the names changed to protect the guilty?  Study your craft.  Know what the rules are and break them skillfully. Know what everyone else in your field is writing and give it your own spin.  Let others whose opinion you trust read your work.   If someone tells you your work sounds like something they've read before, only different, you probably aren't as far out of the box as you think.  That's the problem with this paranormal series I keep trying to write--I can't seem to make it not seem like something I read before.  Which is why no one's read it.

Sometimes you've also got to have the courage to be right.