The Drive to Create

The game designer, the artist, the painter, the author, the crafter or words are all creators. We all have something in us that drives us to make something on the empty canvas or the blank page. We seek the void that must be filled. Why do we do these things? Like Strickland in W. Simerset Maugham's book The Moon and Sixpence says, " I paint because I must." We create because we must.

It's like an incredible force grabs me by the front of my soul and my neck and my head and pulls me off the cliff of thought downward into the looking glass at a thousand miles an hour to shatter on its surface. And from there I sink into the oblivion of emptiness that is the reflection of my thoughts. I melt and diffuse into the glass and become one with it. It is there that I create. When I am driven to this breaking point, I find that something must come of my emptiness in order to remake myself.

On the other side of that silver gilded glass, I find myself spiraling slowly looking around me and I am surrounded by a thousand worlds. Each one is imbued with its own rules, its own heroes, its own life. Each world contains an infinite amount of creative energy that is apart from my own and a part of me all at the same time. I look into a world to see mountains I have never seen, float down lazy rivers and watch the lives of heroes unfold before me. They help those in need, the help those who do not understand. The villains they fight are many and wild. Dragons and men, Goblins and fairies number among them, and I see it all. From the age of "This way be Dragons" to the age of "Every cyber avenue contains a multiplicitude of draconic beings."

Every life on every world contains a thousand words that beg to be set down on paper, on digital parchment, or on canvas. Each one has its own ideas and philosophies, and I am impartial to them. Not so that I care not, but impartial to which one fascinates me the most. Should I ponder upon the Policemen of the 125th precinct of the galaxy patrol, or the policemen of the 53rd precinct in another New York not to far different form our own.

For those people who say they can't think of anything to write about or paint, are they really just confused as to the extent of their own imagination, or are they confused as to where their imagination is? In a thousand worlds, there are a thousand stories, epic and grand, that depict an entire history of what-ifs. For every second of everyday, we could have had a different thought and after that a different one still, so that in three seconds of our life, the world could have done a complete 180 degree turn to the better, or the worse.

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