by Nigel Percy

Created on: July 30, 2009

Art is formed from the interaction between the artist and the environment, whether that environment is inside the artist or in the world outside. An artist, a true artist, is able to share that vision, that interaction with the world. And what wonders they can share! Michelangelo, Picasso, Shakespeare, Beethoven, and any one of hundreds, if not thousands of names you can add... They enrich us and our world. They can shake us awake, pacify us, amaze and startle us and even fracture our world.

And how do they do that? Through the creative act: the act which allows them to penetrate their own insight and the world and, somehow, blend them together into something unique, something never seen before.

And isn't that what writers, the best writers, can do? The telling of a tale, the laying out of a world they have seen first and best of all other people, the care for a character so deep, so clear, so wonderfully, tenderly described, that we, the second-hand sharers, the readers of the words can cry, can laugh, can, above all, share with this fictional construction so that we remember them for the rest of our lives?

How can great writing be anything but creative and how can that creation be anything but artistic? The two are so impossible to separate that we don't even bother to think about the difference. We just seek to revel in the result of two such wonderful forces; creativity and art.

The impact of a story early in life remains always with us. The great tales, the enduring stories, hover round us for ever. I remember being unable to put Coral Island down when I was about nine years old. I can still draw upon my memories of pirates and cannibals and the fears and terrors R M Ballantyne described. Long dead before I was born, his creation, his artistry sparked something within me. A dead man spoke to a nine year old boy and drew from him the same sense of vicarious terror that other readers down the intervening years had experienced. That is the power of art, the purpose of an artist.

Of course, not all writers are artists. Some are workhorses and dependable ones at that. Others are less engaging. The self-same spark of creativity lives in all of us, artists or not. It is what happens to that spark, whether it is allowed to grow, and whether the ground it finds itself in is fertile enough to encourage its growth, that counts.

I can look at an old tree and think about what tales it could tell, but Tolkien can make the tree talk and let me know that its tales are endless

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>