I have read a lot of books over the years. I mean a lot I have read trilogies in 2 days. I hurt myself moving my paperback collection.
Looking at predesigned adventures I see stories similar to things I have read and I judge them often wanting.
I look at my own adventures and see where I stole ideas from books and it bothers me.
I look at the superstar entries and see items and characters from books with many common traits.
I cannot name characters from most books because they all have run together.
I have friends who read one or two series a year and they know everything about them. I read them and think it is ok but nothing special is this just a jaded perspective. Should I stop reading books in order to enjoy RPG's more ;)?
Just some random thoughts.
Discuss
OMG! STOP READING IMMEADITELY! You are doing irreparable damage to your creativity by reading too much. Maybe if you stop now, you can save whatever creativity you have left...
You are right that way i can rip entire campaign plots and characters from books without even knowing i did it right :)
I look at my own adventures and see where I stole ideas from books and it bothers me.
There's nothing new under the sun.
True, with the shear volume of written word out their i guess every sentence written is in fact plagarism. :)
True, with the shear volume of written word out their i guess every sentence written is in fact plagarism. :)
You've got to keep reading. You wouldn't want to end up like Casaubon and write the key to all mythologies only to find out that it's all been written before. . .
The only reading that I found has hurt my writing was when I was teaching and reading freshman papers--I saw the same errors so many times that I began to doubt what was correct. . .
my major issue seems to be thinking of a creative idea for a concept with out the nagging feeling I have seen this before.
Sometimes ignorance is bliss, if only i was a beer drinking sports nut ( i do like watching sports ) who ony cared about hooking up and haveing the best pimpest ride around....
O well guess i can blame my mother for teaching me to love reading.
my major issue seems to be thinking of a creative idea for a concept with out the nagging feeling I have seen this before.
Sometimes ignorance is bliss...
In my opinion, ignorance is NOT bliss, because ignorance is temporary.
Once, in the late 1990s, I spent a couple of years writing a science fiction novel, thinking that although there was nothing new under the sun, I was, at least, coming up with a semi-original spin on an old idea. Imagine how I felt, a few years later, when I was reading a book of old science fiction short stories, and I found out that Robert Heinlein wrote the very same thing.
In 1941.
Better to know from the start that it's been done before, rather than raise false hopes.
I think you're not recognizing that taking elements inspired from various sources and synthesizing them together is a creative process.
Reading too much does NOT hurt creativity, it gives creativity more to work with. Though if you're reading so much that you're not remembering what you've read (at least not easily), then maybe you're not reading with as much care and concentration as you could. You might want to just slow down a bit, not to protect any creativity, but to savor what you're reading more, to absorb more of it.
I read.
Not for speed.
i simple read and good books create images in my head so i stop reading and start seeing and feeling what is going on. Best i can say.
In my experience, it's the opposite: not reading enough damages creativity. Every time I hit a slump, I realize it's because I haven't taken in any new media recently. I go read a few books and watch a few movies, and the tank's full up again.
When I was 16, I used to worry constantly that the songs I wrote were too close to existing ones. Eventually I realized that whole genres (blues, punk, etc.) were built on the same three or four chord progressions, and quit worrying. It's better (and easier) to be good than it is to be totally unique.
Or, as I believe Dave Barry once pointed out, half of being funny is remembering other people's best lines and forgetting to cite them.
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Reading is necessary for writing. It's like listening & speaking...sure, you can do one without the other, but it just doesn't work out quite as well.
So, if you feel you're hitting a wall, I would recommend you branch out into other literary genres.
I find myself attracted to SF/Fantasy (especially action-heavy war-based stories) almost by default. So, I read those (because it's fun), but I also make an effort to read, say, Kerouac, or the Biography of Benjamin Franklin, or Alice in Wonderland.
Diversify your collection, and you will enjoy it.
Also, if you're like me (and since moving your paperback collection causes pain, I would imaging you are), you like to keep your books around. Switch that up...go to a book trader / swap meet / local library and divest yourself of some of those titles. I guarantee there are stories and authors out there you've not heard of that will blow your mind.
Finally, just a suggestion:
If you can find Vurt and Pollen by a guy named Jeff Noon, they are fantastic and definitely NOT your "standard story" fare.
Does reading to much hurt creativity?Apparently it DOES damages the ability to spell correctly ... :)
What damages grammatical correctness? :)
I am a working american with a degree in history and political science selling Steel for a living.
Besides to , too, their, there can go to hell hell
I blame public school edumacation. Fer real, yo.
Never cared for grammer it just gets in the way. :)
I will look for Vurt seems interesting.
In someways I envy those that focus on one or two series and learn everything there is about it. I never had that focus/obsession for any one thing. I have played over 20 different rpgs over the years so I tend to merge things after a while.
BTW
What is with the grammer police around here?
I have seen comments numerous times on posts.
Looked up to and too I use also. English is a horrible language.
I'm with the guys saying that reading fuels creativity. I've been in several cases where I've been stuck for an idea and just lifted a general idea out of something I read recently only to branch it off and make it something altogether different. As an example, recently I was asked to to GM a game where I only had about 30min to come up with an idea. I had recently read some H.P. Lovecraft and decided to throw some cultists at my players. They didn't say "hey, those guys are from 'The Call of Cthulhu'!" they said "oh man, remember when I cut that guy in half? That was sick!". Now they'll be investigating (and killing) a cult in the area based loosely on the cult of Cthulhu. Eventually I want to have them do something epic, but we just started and I don't really know what they want to do yet.
You mentioned that you feel like everything you write has been writen before and to that I say, well yeah, but it hasn't been writen quite like you write it!
Keep reading, but if you're forgetting things maybe you should slow down a little. You might be missing a lot of finer details like themes and symbolism and junk like that too. You can always reread stuff as well.
Think i need to read a history book for fun. Have not read one since college. It sucks when you take what you love and turn it into work.
I did like a comment by Michael Moorcock: He argued that the science fiction/fantasy field had become incestuous; writers were largely reading other science fiction/fantasy, and all the books were starting to look alike. His recommended solution was to read other forms of fiction, and non-fiction, to broaden one's horizons.
But never stop reading.
+1
I am enjoying one of the best fantasy novel I've ever read (La horde du contrevent, Alain Damasion, in french, not translated to english yet..) and I enjoy it even more because I have read Deleuze, Foucault, Bergson and french philosophers of the 20th century, as he construct a fantasy world out of their philosophical ideas.
It's a masterpiece. A immersive and strange world. The only book I could compare it too would be Christopher Priest's Inverted World.
Is Damasio creating everything out of his mind? No. Is he using other's work in a way they never dreamed of? Yes. Does it works? Hell yeah!
Look for inspiration outside fantasy novels. Read in other fields: philosophy, science, linguistics, computer science, politics, anthropology, etc. Read non-fiction.
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I don't think that it is mean-spirited most of the time. I am the head of the history dept. at my school and I know that the head of the English dept. hates when people use the word "like" in conversation or "good" instead of well. It does not bother me but I understand her position. It would drive me crazy if someone was constantly confusing George Washington with Lincoln or kept saying that Napoleon conquered the Persians. When something is really important to you it is hard not to comment.
To quote Arlo Guthrie, "creativity is just forgetting who it is you're plagiarizing."
I am guessing from what you wrote, Xyll, you want to be creative in your DMing, not writing stuff yourself.
If this is true, I wouldn't bother worrying about it at all. As long as it's a book your other players haven't read before, just steal the whole damn plot.
Imho, DMing isn't about originality, it's about immersive, communal fun. My group doesn't particularly read a lot of fantasy or science-fiction. If I wanted to spring a whole campaign set in Melnibone, say, or Cimmeria, my players would have a blast and they might never know that I didn't make it up.
So, while I agree that reading doesn't damage your creativity, if we're talking about DMing, I'd go a step further and say your creativity (in the sense of original or unique) doesn't even matter.
"Good artists borrow, great artists steal" -Pablo Picasso (one possible attribute)
the more you have, the better you steal.