Giving Thanks: Authors, artists, and creative minds

Hi everyone, and welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! I’m so glad you stopped by! All month long, since it’s the month of Thanksgiving (if you’re in the US, of course), we’re talking about things to be thankful for, as writers and creators. Last week, we talked about the real reasons why we should be thankful for words, linguistics, and writing—as well as for wordsmiths and editors all around us. And this week, I have a few more things to get you thinking about the things you could (and should) be thankful for.

Giving Thanks: Authors, artists, and creative minds

Sure, these are all things I’m sure you’ve thought to be thankful for at some point in your life. If you’re a reader (which you should be, as a writer), then of course you’re thankful for the authors you love. And if you’re a writer, then I hope you’re thankful for the artists from whom you’ve taken inspiration. All of these are creative minds—and all of these have a great importance to us, as creators ourselves.

Both artists and authors play a huge role in the lives of other authors and artists. We’re in a bit of a symbiotic relationship, as it were. We’re constantly using each other as resources of inspiration, as ways to escape our own lives and the things around us, and even use them as ways to point to our own works of art. Without authors, we wouldn’t have stories to draw on, ideas to learn from, tales to enjoy and escape into on a daily basis. Without artists, we wouldn’t have fantastical images of beauty and horror, visual interpretations of the things we read every day. We need them both, in order to fully enjoy our own creativity, in order to fully explore and invigorate our own creativity. So of course we should be thankful for them, every day of our lives. Whether we’re authors or editors or artists or none of the above—because we all take part in the arts, whether we realize it or not.

So I’m thankful for authors and artists, because without them, I’d never find inspiration the same way.

And then there’re creative minds. I highly doubt many of you have taken any significant amount of time to consider the importance of creativity, in general. It’s something that’s stifled, these days, in schools all across the world. There’s a trend in the school systems for everyone to be taught to think the same, to think through a specific lens, and not to look outside the box in which they’ve been placed. That’s a problem, if you ask me. Because without creativity, without an ability to think outside that box and ask the questions from which great stories come… there would be no great stories at all. There would be no innovative art. Everything would be the same, rote, and boring. And that’s just not okay. We need creative minds—in fact, every one of us should embrace the creativity of our minds. By doing so, we expand our minds, we learn to understand and even embrace things we couldn’t do without that creativity. We become new, when we embrace our creativity. We become a shell, when we deny it.

So I’m thankful for creative minds, for unique beings, because we’re all pretty awesome when we let our uniqueness out.

Let’s embrace that creativity, shall we?

[love]

{Rani Divine}