Inspiration

No crazy update with hyper links left and right today. Just some simple musings from a guy with time to muse.I was watching a video from E3 today from Will Wright, the creative mind behind the upcoming Spore. He talked about the fact that when he was a kid, science and creativity were a big overlap in his mind. The more I thought about that, the more I liked it. It's true to. Pure science, the desire to explore, develop, learn, create, is one of the great forces in our lives.
Of course this creative drive is not limited to science. I explore it in different terms, or rather with different tools. All the same, I know when I'm really exploring, and when I'm just mucking around in the sandbox. However, this experimentation is often a vital step towards higher creative work. I've certainly found this to be true in regards to my creative pursuits.
Just today, I went to touch up the short draft I'd written before. In doing so I looked up an older piece that had more appropriate formatting, and ended up expanding on that instead. So much of my life has been structured around completion, and not experimentation, that it often impedes my creative efforts.
Of course, it's fine for me to have a number of projects in various stages of completion. It's also more than acceptable, and in fact desirable to simply try something in order to see what happens. You need never finish it. This can be as simple as writing an idea down. All of this, however, builds a toolbox that we can employ in the future. There's no rule that says we have to finish everything we start. In fact, this is one idea that often keeps me from pursuing more creative projects. I don't like the idea of having something half finished, which means I more often than not have a project that's only in my head, not even on paper at all.
We start with something small, develop it, add and subtract from it, and eventually we finish with it. There is no universal judge to end a project. We do what we will, and then take what we have learned and employ elsewhere. This is the evolution of creativity, and what seems to be the core of Spore. It doesn't matter how we get there, as long we get somewhere.