For all you creative-types...

It's always a good day when I find a story, or a book, or a film, or whatever, that teaches me something new or deepens my understanding of something I already have learned. I found this essay through the blog of John Maeda (President of the Rhode Island School of Design) and was quite simply blown away.

Edgar Allen Poe, to me, is a guy who wrote spooky poetry (best read by Vincent Price) and died under questionable circumstances. Now I come to find him also a literary critic, as well as a very astute commentator on the creative process. Check out this excerpt:

There is a radical error, I think, in the usual mode of constructing a story. Either history affords a thesis--or one is suggested by an incident of the day--or, at best, the author sets himself to work in the combination of striking events to form merely the basis of his narrative--designing, generally, to fill in with description, dialogue, or autorial comment, whatever crevices of fact, or action, may, from page to page, render themselves apparent.


I prefer commencing with the consideration of an effect. Keeping originality always in view--for he is false to himself who ventures to dispense with so obvious and so easily attainable a source of interest--I say to myself, in the first place, "Of the innumerable effects, or impressions, of which the heart, the intellect, or (more generally) the soul is susceptible, what one shall I, on the present occasion, select?" Having chosen a novel, first, and secondly a vivid effect, I consider whether it can be best wrought by incident or tone--whether by ordinary incidents and peculiar tone, or the converse, or by peculiarity both of incident and tone--afterward looking about me (or rather within) for such combinations of event, or tone, as shall best aid me in the construction of the effect.

Yes, it's full of statements that on their surface appear to only address writing and literature. The ideas in the essay, however, encompass a much larger world if you apply them globally.

Seriously - read it!