FA 100 - "Creative Acts" Part One

In the readings for this course, many people seem to agree that creativity is a hard thing to pin down, but when it happens, it's a wonderful thing.

For a while now, I have been working on a story to put into the form of a novel, or a script for a film, or something else of the like. The working title for this story right now is "Identity", though that may be changed or not depending on wether or not I find a better one.

The device I have used to develop my story is something called F.I.T (Fabricated Identity Transplant). In the story, F.I.T was developed under the guidance of a group of scientists/criminologists that treated 'identity' as a physical organ. This procedure, this transplant, is a technology that erases a person's identity. (Identity being a person's memory.)

The theory being that, in a person who behaves in a criminal manner, their identity is diseased. What else do you do with a diseased organ? A blackened lung, or a nonfunctional kidney? You get a transplant. F.I.T was a technology developed to that end.

A great many of the ideas that I had in mind for this story were born from the many questions F.I.T gave rise to in my own mind. If one were to have no idea what kind of person he truly was, what kind of horrors could you have committed, completely unbeknowst to you today? What kind of wonderful, magical things could you have experienced, now completely blocked from your memory?

In my own mind, F.I.T is evil. This story was more or less born of the themes or ideas of sci fi and fiction that have excited me in the past. One of those ideas was that point that those few special stories have in them, when the characters discover something so evil, so terrible, that their goal becomes very very clear. Despite all of the conflicts, all of the troubles that have plagued this group of people, their minds become perfectly clear and the goal becomes very simple. This evil thing, whatever it may be, must cease to exist.

Moments like that have always been, in my eyes, a hallmark of a great story. Such drama as this is what I am trying to incorporate into my own story. There's a man who was (formerly) a dangerous criminal. A woman who loved him before he was changed. A victim forced into silence. F.I.T continues to be a great source of ideas for me.

I did not imagine this with any particular audience in mind. Stephen and Burke's thoughts on the impact of audience remind me of the reason I came to university, choosing my area of studies in Theater and Writing. I have a love of great stories. I want to create them, to be a part of them. That is more or less why I wanted to create a story such as this.

As for Social and Political ramnifications... who doesn't love a good story? Theater has existed as an artform for nearly two and a half thousand years. Perhaps I can inspire others to write, to continue the trend; but that's not exactly important, to me.


To reflect upon how I create... It definantly seems as if something has to inspire me. Perhaps some kind of film sequence, or some thought I had at the time. Whatever it is that inspires it, it spreads like a wildfire. As the cliche goes, "It just seems to flow". That one thought... that great film sequence... that video game... and my mind starts working.

In the readings for this course, many people seem to agree that creativity is a hard thing to pin down, to quantify. But when it happens, it's a wonderful thing.