Room for one more?

Thoughts on creativity and Ripley

The feeling of being creative is a fickle beast. One moment it’s here and the next moment it’s gone. There is a reason authors, artists and creators of all sorts have historically surrounded themselves with muses, desperately trying to summon and hold onto that one thing that is guaranteed to inspire them time and time again and open up the channel to creating their best, most satisfying work.

Not to be pretentious but I like to think of myself as a relatively creative person and I think it’s probably fair to say that my muse is not a person at all or anything of substance. It is in fact quite the opposite: a void. Solitude. Being alone is when I get my clearest creative thoughts and my sharpest wits. It is when I get inspired and fired up to mould the metaphorical lumps of clay that otherwise just sit around waiting to be shaped into something.

I find crowds and the presence of others (their gazes, their judgement, their disinterest and interest in equal measure) to be the worst enemy of creativity. And I don’t mean creativity in the big word sense of the word necessarily. You can be creative while simply patching up a hole in your jumper or you can be creative while writing an entire novel. Who cares? That is to say, I’m not trying to pose as some sort of a tortured artist.

I think anyone can be creative, especially women who are by definition creators. Allow me to expand. Biologically our hollow wombs are designed to create and, even when they don’t for whatever reason, we women create anyway through other metaphysical babies, be it entrepreneurial start-ups, delicious meals, unputdownable books, PhDs, paintings, loving homes etc. We seem to have this built-in urge to create.

The presence of others kills creativity in me. For instance, I’ve found myself to be at my happiest when I’m not on any sort of social media. In the broadest sense, I’m at my best creatively when I don’t compare my work to others because guess what happens then? You end up thinking: “It’s been done, done to death, so so done. Is there really room for one more interpretation? Is there really room for me?” Might as well not bother trying.

What new things can you possibly add to the world of art or literature, especially at this point in the 21st century? This has always been my stumbling bloc but if this would have been how all creators think, no new culture would ever be generated. So why should it stop me or anyone else for that matter? They say there is a more or less finite number of life scenarios (scripts), just like in literature there are only so many archetypal plots but the thing is, your retelling of it will always be unique and will, most likely, add something new.

I don’t know about you but the most satisfying part of creating anything for me (a picture, a piece of writing, a meal) is those few moments right at the end of the product’s completion when you exhale and realise that you have done the best job you could, you’ve captured your feeling perfectly, you have layered just the right kind of colours onto your canvas, you have combined that perfect combination of flavours and you might never be able to replicate it again. That makes it very special indeed. Not the worries that come after of whether people see it, taste it, judge it… Although that can give any creator an ego tickle, I won’t lie.

So, how did I get onto this? Oh, yes. Ripley. The recently launched Netflix series which gives yet another interpretation of the famous novel by Patricia Highsmith: The Talented Mr Ripley. Did the world really need another cinematic take on the novel after Jude Law’s and Matt Damon’s impeccable (and world-famous!) film? Those were my thoughts as I tucked into the black-and-white world of Andrew Scott’s interpretation, awkward and odd (due to that familiar but unfamiliar feeling) at first because I simply couldn’t shake off the blueprints of what my brain deemed the original film characters. But I gave it a chance and continued watching, allowing the series to grow into its own beast and show its own artistic significance and integrity and that’s exactly what it did. It also led me to this:

There’s ALWAYS room for you, there’s ALWAYS room for another interpretation and another take. There’s always room for one more.