Just Thinking…

I wonder if anyone ever does anything all by themselves, if any idea is unique to one person or if all art, all life, actually, functions on collaboration and interdependence. Where do my stories come from if not from a thousand different sources collected over years of life experience, conversations, observing and reading books. People have been feeding me creatively all my life.

We tend to focus our praise on an artist, writer, composer, inventors…. But ideas don’t spring from a single mind. No one lives life without being impacted by others. God made us to need one another. Relationship started with Him, and all things point to Him.

How do I explain what I mean?

Writers write, but we also talk story. I’m part of two groups. One is a group of brain-stormers, and each member will toss out twenty questions to get the creative juices flowing. Those sessions can be in person or online in Zoom. In the other group, we read to one another and encourage and challenge one another. When I finish the manuscript, my agent and several editors get their hands on it, and they have creative input that changes its structure, characters, plot. We’re all working together to make something the best it can be.

Margaret Mitchell needed her husband, John, to write Gone With The Wind. His hands were all over it. They shared ideas. Her name is on the book, but it was really a beautiful collaboration. Editor Maxwell Perkins helped shape the writing of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway and Marjorie Rawlings. Shakespeare wrote his plays while on a stage with actors who undoubtedly made suggestions. As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.

Rick and I went to the Rijk Museum in Amsterdam where we saw some of Rembrandt’s paintings. In some portraits, he only painted the face and allowed others to finish the rest. Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel – with the help of Perugino, Pinturicchio, Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, Rosselli and others. Who influenced composers James Horner, Jerry Goldsmith, Hans Zimmer, John Barry? Possibly Handel, Mozart, Chopin, Tchaikovsy, Wagner, Rachmaninoff? Great inventors are interdependent. Rick loves aviation. The Wright Brothers were inspired by Alphonse Penaud who invented a rubber band powered toy helicopter and by Otto Lilienthal who was a pioneer in gliders. Ideas spark ideas. And those ideas can come from the past as well as the present.

Interdependence is in every area of life. I eat eggs for breakfast. God created the chicken to lay eggs. A farmer tends the chickens. Someone collects the eggs. Someone else inspects them. Someone else packages them. Someone else loads a truck so a driver can bring them to the supermarket where a stock clerk puts them in the refrigerator so I can put them in a cart, put them on a conveyor belt for the cashier to check me out. We can go further. Someone came up with the supermarket idea, someone invented the grocery cart, the conveyor belt, computer-cash register, the supermarket. All those people are involved in my breakfast. I have a lot of people to thank!

Bottom line: God created us for relationship. Love and give all praise God who blessed us with creative minds and interdependence so we can dip into an ocean of ideas. Be thankful and love one another.