I’ve never heard of Elizabeth Gilbert before.. but through a happy series of links, including Olga Nunes blog (someone else I’d never heard of before, but find myself so incredibly moved by) I came across this from the last TED talks:
This notion of creativity coming from without, as a “genius” that visits us when we work, isn’t completely irreconcilable to a humanist like myself.
Whether it’s writing, making music or even crafting code; we are all standing on the shoulders of giants. And it doesn’t matter if we call the well-spring of our creativity God, our cultural heritage or the people we connect to, it feels natural and rational to acknowledge an external source – a “genius” living in the walls of our lives.
I’m not religious in any sense – I’m firmly convinced that I just don’t know – but I can accept that I don’t own the ideas and forces that inform my creative life. The transformation of these forces into something new may be peculiar to me, but the source is elsewhere.
Another proto-novel is now online. I’ve been loathe to put this one up for a couple of reasons. When I read the first few pages of this out at a writer’s group meeting years ago you could have heard a pin drop. Eventually a little old lady piped up with “it made me feel sick”. At the coffee break she later said “I guess you were trying to make me feel sick, so I guess it works as a piece of writing” – which I think was terribly nice of her to say.
I’m not convinced that it does work, but it’s out there now and we’ll see how it progresses. I didn’t want it to be the first piece I put up because I didn’t want the content to distract from what I’m trying to achieve in terms of using Rails as a content management system.
Keeping in with the idea that Rails is a language for expressing web sites, I’ve had to extend the language with a helper. I got sick of typing <%= link_to 'next page', :action => 'next_page' %> – indeed as I said I would – so I built a simple helper to remove the repetition. So now each page ends with a <%= link_to_page 'next_page' %>. The convention is that text is the same as the action, with underscores replaced with spaces. I’ll be in trouble if the text varies from this, but it hasn’t so far and I can always fall back to the old link_to approach.
