Up until relatively recently, creating original characters from scratch wasn't a major part of an author's job description. When Virgil wrote The Aeneid, he didn't invent Aeneas; Aeneas was a minor character in Homer's Odyssey whose unauthorized further adventures Virgil decided to chronicle. Shakespeare didn't invent Hamlet and King Lear; he plucked them from historical and literary sources. Writers weren't the originators of the stories they told; they were just the temporary curators of them. Real creation was something the gods did.All that has changed. Today the way we think of creativity is dominated by Romantic notions of individual genius and originality, and late-capitalist concepts of intellectual property, under which artists are businesspeople whose creations are the commodities they have for sale.
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About Lev Grossman
Lev Grossman was a contemporary American novelist and journalist. Lev Grossman is an American novelist and journalist who wrote The Magicians trilogy: The Magicians (2009), The Magician King (2011), and The Magician's Land (2014). He was the book critic and lead technology writer at Time magazine from 2002 to 2016. Read more on Wikipedia →
Themes
- Creativity — The spark of original thought, invention, and artistic vision