If what we make is an accumulation of what came before, as well as curating our tastes to create eventually our own opus, then what is the secret if any to creativity ?
I believe the actual talent to creativity is enough time to create layers to our creations to the point that it's lore carries itself along for a fanbase to dig into enough to enjoy for long enough to distract themselves for a little while.
And those who repeatedly enjoy the creative works, will speak highly of the work, so then it creates a mystique around the work itself, when really its just like any other creation that started off with simple ideas made complex.
I'm very likely wrong. Because I aint that good at creativity. They say, genius is the ability to take from 30 sources and create a new form of creation from all those little pieces. Others say great artists steal, while good artists borrow. I'm in the borrow phase, as well as only taking inspiration from one or two sources.
So I aint no genius. But maybe you are ? What do you think ? Is creativity an illusion of obscure references to create something new to a different audience from the origianl media ?
I think given enough time to create, one would naturally gravitate towards creating depth to their work. Hence why a lot of people do it full time, writing novels, making albums, making art that takes hours to put together.
But then again, maybe creativity is the simple act of showing you who you are through the medium you choose. And it aint more complex than that.

I feel like creativity comes naturally basically from various sources of inspiration being funnels into one creative output and obviously like the person's world view and mind can shape the final result. I don't feel like talent is really needed to make something meaningful but more an artistic vision and drive talent will just come as a mean of fulfilling that vision. as someone who makes music as someone who loves music sound and all the science and history around it I almost feel as if it's like my duty to keep an open ear to like different types of work? if that makes any-sense. though I realized a bit ago I really never have heard anything similar to the stuff I have been making recently only approximate descriptors like "dark ambient" or "drone" but nothing I found sounds too similar... so I imagine it's the overwhelming amount of input I get though out my day-to-day life + the physical world resulting in the sort of reacquiring sound I am making.

I do try to be original but no matter what you do it's human nature to take inspiration from everything around you even without realizing and in general I feel like creativity you need to have like a reason to act upon it.

To me, creativity involves two essential components: curating your influences, and openness to experience. As a writer, I find that it's been important to read widely so that it opens up my perspective on not just ideas, but also different styles of writing. I also think it's important to give yourself permission to have bad ideas, because sometimes you can't know if it's a bad idea unless you execute. In my opinion, creativity isn't fully something that's innate; it can be learned just as much as it can come from talent.

Regarding genius, I heard a good phrase: talent hits a target no one else can hit, but genius hits one that no one else can see. That's why openness to experience is so important; it helps you build new perspectives that inform your own process.

To build on creativity being learned, not only is it important to give yourself permission to do things wrong, but it's also important to refine with each passing iteration. Life itself is iterative, so I try to let myself go through that process each day and figure things out along the way.

Creativity is born when necessity to express meets atleast minimal preparation and skill to do so. Nothing magically just pours forth, but a burning necessity can compensate for a greater part the lack of skill than mastery of technique can artificially stimulate necessity.

>>1

only taking inspiration from one or two sources

I'd say it's better to know the cream of the crop intimately than waste time going through a vast catalog of half-decent, or even good, imitations. I strictly mean if you're seriously trying to learn something about a creative craft, I'm not talking about personal enjoyment. You don't have to like the best to acknowledge its merits and learn something from it. But, to repeat what others have said, that shouldn't exclude openness to experience: being a little bee and gathering bits from all kinds of flowers along the road to make honey, too. And I mean road in a literal sense. Go for a walk.

to create layers to our creations to the point that it's lore carries itself along for a fanbase

I think you're confining yourself to a too narrow a sense of what creativity can be and the forms it can manifest in. There's creativity that is needed in overcoming everyday obstacles and the aeshetics of the mundane. Also one's own self and self-image, if deliberately cultivated, is the product of a creative process; the disposition towards certain kinds of behaviour and awareness in making moral choices. This hearkens back to the origin of the word genius as a kind of guardian spirit.

>>3

talent hits a target no one else can hit, but genius hits one that no one else can see

This reminds me of Pound's categorization of literary types (paraphrased):
1) Inventors. People who create a new process or in whose work a new process is first exemplified.
2) Masters. People who combine a number of those processes and do it equally well or better than the inventors.
3) Diluters. People who strive after types 1 & 2 and can't do it quite as well.
4) Good writers without salient qualities. They're (un)fortunate enough to exist in a time when there is already much great work being done.
5) Writers of belles-lettres. People who didn't invent anything but specialize in some particular niche or gimmick, etc. They possess technical merit but don't capture life or the current historical moment in its fullness.
6) Inventors of crazes. Randoms who go viral and get their 15 minutes of fame.

Creativity is given to you by the creator or ideas are given to you by spiritual entities that put them in your brains or reveal them to you in dreams. Your soul is like a sensor. Some people don’t have this sensor and in some people it’s weak.

>>4 on "confining myself too narrow...", i purposefully put this as a fixed belief to see what could proveme wrong. And so your response intruiges me, particlarily the creativity of mundane aedthetics and the creation of ones own image is interesting too. How can one cultivate a self image creatively ? And id love to knoe what can be done to be creative around the aesthetics of mundane

creativity to me has always been the ability to synthesize multiple sources into something capable of standing on it's own. i think people are kind of incapable of literally 'making something up', as all things in this reality come from somewhere. it's the way you mix, alter, and iterate on these things that breed creativity.

>>7
this essentially and creativity comes from being able to view these pre-existing things in a new light i think atleast part of it

>>7
I think about this a lot. I'm not willing to say there's nothing new under the sun, nothing thrown together from whole cloth, but so much of creativity stems from combining what you've seen that I would be hard pressed to actually defend that view under pressure.

>>6
The two main operations in a creative act are a) discrimination and b) taking a perspective. By discrimination I mean choosing between possibilities and discarding some in favour of others, consciously or not. By taking a perspective I mean intentionality; either assenting to the perspective you already have or changing the angle. Error occurs when you either seize on a possibility and discover later by taking a different perspective that it was the wrong one, or you miss the window for possible right action in considering the perspective(s). The application of these in human action is quite obvious but as an example of the latter in works of art think of a movie (or a novel) that goes on for too long and could’ve used editing and cutting down. The author applied intentionality to the wrong place from the wrong place and ignored the possibility of stopping, cutting, moving on. An example of the former would be simply a boring work, a compound result of seizing on many wrong possibilities. But a failure is still a creative act even if not a very compelling one for an audience and potentially disastrous for the one who took it.

A self-image should be truthful and that requires knowledge, even if it is simply the knowledge that you don’t know. Self-knowledge requires you to look at what’s inside you and distinguish between the mutable and immutable characteristics, what is there by nature and what by nurture, what can you change and what you can not, and then consider these in relation to the situation you’re faced with and the situation in relation to the entirety of your life, and your life in relation to other lives and so on. You have to take innumerable perspectives into consideration, in the situation and looking towards future to your ideal self, and choose your actions carefully if you want to realize that self. Often we’re confronted with strange new situations that require choosing possibilities that we were not even aware existed. Does it not take creativity to conceive of and then seize them? Or to withold from seizing the possibilities that are present to you in the current moment in the absence of a perspective that you can assent to in good conscience? Inquiry into certain subjects allow for more creativity because you can only grasp them at such and such a level of clarity and precision before you have to accept some ambiguity in the results and move on. There’s a creativity that goes into the taxonomy of plants but something with more ambiguity like ethical theorizing and moral action allows, and demands, more creativity and greater genius.

On “aesthetics of the mundane.” I kinda just threw this vague term out there and moved on quickly because the concept is still kinda hazy to me but I’ll try to pluck some things out of the void to get more insight into it.

Initial angle of attack: Interior design in its barest form. You’ve got an empty room and you place a single chair in it, but where you place it, which side up, facing a window or facing a wall is up to you. Depending on your choice the room will feel different and it may negatively affect your mood, making you feel on edge and unable to concentrate. That’s a problem that can be solved by creatively changing the position of the chair. Of course in a real room there’s many more moving parts, but the principle applies. If you’re always losing things is this a matter of having a bad memory or could it be solved by creatively rearranging things so that you live more effortlessly in the space and the relations of objects reflect their usage (or the symbolic importance they hold)? Interior design is just arranging of visual information based on the frequency you access certain things and giving your eyes enough empty space to rest when turning 360 degrees, not being cognitively overloaded at any point, and your gaze should always be automatically directed to the right place, the less frequently needed or less important things within sight but not in a place of prominence. Picture a more sophisticated bird building a nest.

Another angle: As a series of images with duration, cinema is as much a form of thinking as it is an art, “Thinking in concepts emerged from thinking in images through the slow development of the powers of abstraction and symbolization[...].” Since the camera lens is fashioned after the mechanics of the human eye, what differentiates me looking at a scene and me filming a scene? Does the scene become art only once I press record? Does the camera complete the act of creation by making it more concrete and communicable? Is an audience of one--myself, seeing through my own eyes and embodying the scene--not enough for it to be creative? I could as well not see anything in the scene and only later notice something in it worth my attention, and I think this movement of thought, from disinterest to interest, can constitute a creative act. Maybe it’s just a preliminary stage of creation, but is there also not a skill or sensitivity, a creativity, in getting oneself, deliberately or not, consistently in these kinds of situations or becoming aware of their presence in midst of the mundane? Pathos makes memories more lasting and vivid, and by manipulating the scene, by simply moving your body or other things around in it and changing your relation to the environment or choosing what to pay attention to and for how long, you’re making a decision that will create a slightly altered whole that generates a different kind or stronger pathos in you, and if you’re successful you end up creating meaningful memories, or, discovering new thoughts and connecting the dots. Since the mundane is that which is around us everyday these memories compound and build up over time like a patina that gives meaning to the ordinary. We give meaning to the ordinary and the ordinary gives meaning to us. I suppose I’m talking about growing old now (as opposed to getting old), but don’t mistake this for mere sentimentality. To get obscure for a minute, it’s not a living in-some-environment but a living-in in some environment.

Third angle: This deepening or focusing of perception operates on the same two principles I laid out at the beginning. I don’t believe in the death of the author but the audience plays a role, a creative role, in bringing out the meaning of a work. It can be helpful to step outside a strict subject-object dichotomy for a moment if you can. Consider folk-ways, the habitus and the material culture of the people in some village, for example: their ways were born through generations of creative work and adaptation to the environment and they belong to no single person, but every person who lives those folk-ways partakes in and makes up the particular genius, so to speak, of the village that gave birth to their traditions because they were raised up and live in a peculiar consciousness of them as opposed to an outsider. Now, turn your thoughts to your own being-in-the-world and broaden your scope from particular folk-ways towards the scale of the cosmos, or the creative principle itself, and then consider your surroundings.

I sneezed.

This is a narrow and too contemporary view ("lore", "fanbase", "engagement") of artistic creativity. Creativity amounts to unveiling what is hidden: new possibilities, new genres, new techniques, new perspectives of the same, new assemblages of inspirations and references, and so on. Intentionality, talent and skill can help, but ultimately, it's a matter of luck and of what has been achieved before.