Reposting this not just because it's relevant to the "creativity" aspect of my blog, but from an angle that I can't speak from (physical disability).
That said, it does make me think of stuff from my own experience. I've already been against the idea of there being "one way" to creativity over the years, because there's already other good reasons for taking that stance.
If you prescribe to the idea that there isn't such a thing as "objectively good" art in general, then it follows that there can't be just one way to learn it. If there was, the underlying assumption would be that everyone's working towards the same goal, and there could only ever be one person in the whole world who's best at it, so why would anyone other than the top 1% even bother?
Yeah, there's certain aspects of art, skillsets, that a lot of artists want to improve at, like brush control or understanding of anatomy. But even with these, it's rarely a linear thing, it's usually a combination of things, and different artists will naturally come into different skills faster than others--and so the interplay between those skills will highlight different aspects of those abilities, and how those abilities function, that we wouldn't notice otherwise.
And that's part of the point of art, too. Not only that, but how these skillsets interact with all their other skillsets and points of focus will be different from artist to artist, too.
And why would you want every artist's pathway to progress in the same way, and end up in exactly the same place as everyone else, anyway? Wouldn't it be a lot more interesting if every artist just studied whatever it made sense to them to study in any given moment, and we end up seeing all the wild different directions that art goes as a result? If we let every artist show us a brand new path, and every artist inspired by that would make even more paths to branch off of those?
I don't have any physical disabilities, but recently I've been coming to terms with the idea that I'm autistic, and how people's perceptions of art, and perceptions of me, limited what I was able to do--or what I let myself do--growing up. I've spent the past few years working hard to overcome those kinds of mental blocks, and do everything I'm capable of doing.
And not just autism, I already knew I was different in other ways. I didn't always know I was queer, but I could always tell I didn't fit in with straight people. And being queer used to be considered a disability, too, which leads me into another point I want to make.
One of the clearest examples of queer art that I can think of is the visual novel Heaven Will Be Mine. Its art draws from experiences of queerness, its art is about queerness, and the very method of the art embodies queerness. I say this because the structure of the game is fundamentally abstract and physically paradoxical: its prose is poetic and dreamlike, it alludes to concepts it never fully explores, it combines conflicting emotions into each other and leaves everything else vague and ambiguous. This is part of what it means to be queer--to never truly settle into a single state of being, to never fully understand yourself, to sometimes be more than one thing at once even though it sounds impossible when described out loud.
I played that game, and then sometime later I saw someone emphasizing writing guidelines, things like the importance of being clear to the reader, of being concise and not introducing story elements unless they contribute to the overall plot, of following a certain flow of progression... and I just thought, as much as these types of guidelines sound like they make sense in certain contexts, the fact of the matter is that they are severely limiting the exploration of everything life has to offer, the full gamut of emotions that a living being is capable of experiencing. Because life isn't always clear and concise, and strong emotions rarely are.
And looking at any kind of art guidelines in this context, it becomes easier to see how they can be used to enforce--and in fact were most likely developed to enforce--the idea that being a certain kind of person is wrong and should be avoided. Like a queer person. Or an autistic person. Or a disabled person. (And again, being queer used to be considered a disability, which suggests that the mere word "disability" is often used to mean "something you are not supposed to be", which is bullshit.)
I want to be clear and say that I don't think everyone who emphasizes traditional guidelines is meaning to silence marginalized voices or anything like that. It's one of those cases where the less marginalized someone is, the less aware they are of the idea that someone else's life experiences can be so fundamentally different from theirs that, yes, that person literally can't approach very basic life things the same way that they do (especially the more that approach involves mental or emotional processes as opposed to physical ones).
But I do think traditional guidelines ultimately have that effect of limiting or silencing marginalized voices, intentional or not, and that's why I've been doing my best to deconstruct those guidelines in my own head, and overcome the idea that I have to stick to them to be a good artist. And I want to encourage other artists to show me all the weird, cool, meaningful stuff that I know they're capable of creating, if they just let themselves let loose and be their full, honest selves.
A famous author once wrote that "the goal is to SPEAK YOUR WAY and BUILD YOUR WAY and FILL THE VOID WITH LOVE", and I'm doing my best to keep to that idea. I hope you all will, too.
