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Ray Bradbury found his voice by reading Melville and watching Universal monster movies. James Joyce built a modern epic by laying Homeric structure over a breakfast of Dublin kidney. Vladimir Nabokov layered trilingual puns and complex literary structures alongside parodies of Ogilvy advertisements.<\/p>\n
These writers did not stay within the boundaries of \u201chigh art.\u201d They ate everything.<\/p>\n
Years of studying English, French, and Russian literature did not make me stop watching sitcoms or professional wrestling. It made me more interested in what happened when I put them beside each other.<\/p>\n
True creativity often happens at the collision of the sophisticated and the common. Feed your mind a diverse diet of both high and low culture, and you create the fertile ground… or manure, necessary for original ideas.<\/p>\n
I draw upon thousands of hours spent watching sitcoms: The Facts of Life, Diff\u2019rent Strokes, Webster, All in the Family, Growing Pains, Family Ties, ALF, Seinfeld, It\u2019s Garry Shandling\u2019s Show, Married… with Children, Parker Lewis Can\u2019t Lose, and Malcolm in the Middle, along with years of professional wrestling.<\/p>\n
Later, I force-fed myself a steady diet of the best English, French, and Russian literature, then dug backward to the ancient Greeks and Romans, moved sideways into ancient Chinese wisdom through Sun Tzu, add kept Bach and Nirvana cranked up to 11, and all of it becomes useful material packed away somewhere in the subconscious.<\/p>\n
The interesting part is not any single influence. It is what happens when they start colliding.<\/p>\n
Sun Tzu walks into a Seinfeld episode.<\/p>\n
Dostoevsky gets body slammed by Andre the Giant.<\/p>\n
That is where combinations appear that someone staying inside a single intellectual neighborhood is less likely to find.<\/p>\n
To expand your own creative range, look for the collision between your most serious interests and your most casual entertainment.<\/p>\n
RW
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Ray Bradbury found his voice by reading Melville and watching Universal monster movies. James Joyce built a modern epic by laying Homeric structure over a breakfast of Dublin kidney. Vladimir Nabokov layered trilingual puns and complex literary structures alongside parodies of Ogilvy advertisements. These writers did not stay within the boundaries of \u201chigh art.\u201d They […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,5,21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-595","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-copywriting","category-mindset","category-storytelling"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/richardwinser.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/595","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/richardwinser.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/richardwinser.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/richardwinser.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/richardwinser.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=595"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/richardwinser.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/595\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":597,"href":"https:\/\/richardwinser.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/595\/revisions\/597"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/richardwinser.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/richardwinser.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/richardwinser.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}