Novelty is Overrated

"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes."
      -Marcel Proust

It seems that, as Creatives, we spend an inordinate amount of time seeking something brand-new:  composing a new song, writing a new poem, or painting a new picture.  Indeed, in many artistic fields, little credence is given to a person's output unless it is new, fresh, and exciting.

So often is this our goal as Creatives, that we often fail to realize that it doesn't have to be completely new to be "new."  Who among us -- regardless of your chosen field of creativity -- doesn't stand on the shoulders of giants?  No matter the type of music your write or play, you owe a humongous debt to the likes of Bach, Palestrina, and even Guido d'Arezzo (he who first wrote music on a five-line staff).  Write fiction and you pay homage to Thespis and the ancient Greek playwrights.  Visual artists go even further back, to those cave-dwellers who took ink in hand and drew on the walls of their homes -- sort of the first-ever graffiti artists.

With such long and rich histories in all the arts, how is a Creative to come up with something new?  Proust says it best -- it's not finding new landscapes, but in seeing the same landscapes in new ways.  Much like the optical illusion that looks like a vase or two faces nose-to-nose, depending on how you look at it, anything in this world can be seen in myriad ways, if only we have the creativity and the wherewithal to do the looking.

In my own creative life, most of my "compositions" are actually arrangements of well-known tunes.  Where I've managed to find a level of success is in presenting these old, familiar tunes in ways that cause a listener to hear them with fresh ears.  The tune is old -- hundreds of years in some cases -- but the presentation is new.

Music isn't the only art where this happens.  How many different novels, short stories, plays, or Broadway musicals are no more than disguised retellings of Romeo and Juliet?  Any landscape painting is just a copy of a scene from the real world, interpreted by the artist. 

Now, none of this is to say that complete novelty is a bad thing -- far from it.  Creating something unlike anything else out there is a wonderful feeling.  The problem is that it's so hard to find something that fits that description, more than one Creative has had his career grind to a standstill waiting for that one Totally Novel Thing to present itself to him.  Complete novelty is a great thing ... but it's not the only thing.

As you search for your next creative project, worry less about coming up with something completely new and utterly different than everything else, and instead take a different look at something you've seen a hundred times before.  If you can see something old with fresh eyes, good for you; if you can help others see it with fresh eyes, then the spirit of creativity is alive and well in you.