Believe it or not, this post isn’t going to be about Lego bricks.
I rewind back 35 years and remember building with Lego. The interesting and creative thing about Lego bricks is that they were just basic shapes, but you could assemble them in any way you wanted- sometimes in ways they weren’t intended. But the only limit to what you could build is how many bricks you had, and your imagination.
Today, there are every kind of Lego kit, with all kinds of special pieces, decals, and instructions. You don’t need any creativity to buy a Harry Potter or Star Wars Lego kit and assemble it. It just requires following instructions, and patience.
In the modern “Creative World” there are tons of people cranking out content, but there are precious few people that understand how building blocks of creativity work.
Let me explain:
Music, as we know it today, is made up of building blocks. There are certain fundamental parts to a song that you can assemble different ways, but in the end, they’re what makes something a song. Things like tempo, time signature, instrumentation, key, melody, lyrics, and such are uniquely identifiable parts of a song, but don’t make a song by themselves.
Writing is much the same way. If you’re writing a fiction story, say a sci-fi novel, there are certain things it’s going to have in it. Dialogue, main characters, secondary characters, plot, setting, and so forth. You can change out any of these elements and it becomes a different story- but it’s still recognizable as a story.
If you examine any one of these building blocks by itself, it doesn’t make up a complete work. But they’re necessary to make the whole. Continue reading “The Zen and Creativity of Lego”