Creativity

So I was talking to my dad tonight: we were pondering the meaning of life (or, more specifically, the meaning of all this education-stuff I've gotten in the last 22 years) and trying to reignite the passion I feel for editing. See, perhaps as a strange side-effect of my looming graduation, my psyche seems to have decided to have a mid-life crisis... BEFORE life actually happens. Pre-emptive, but not very helpful. So cue all the doubts about loving what I do, am I really in the right career, do I want to spend my life doing this stuff, maybe I should quit and go to beauty school, yada yada yada. You get the picture.

So Dad reminds me that, hey Lynnae, you really do love this stuff, remember? What do you love about it?

And I got to thinking.

What I love most about editing is being a part of creating something beautiful. A book (or a magazine) is just as much a work of art as, well, a work of art. The editor is not the sculptor who takes the raw clay and fashions it into something, but rather the... okay, so I can't think of a good sculpting metaphor for an editor. Back to simple summation: the editor takes the author's work and finishes it. There's a refining process that all books must go through (though I suspect, judging by the quality of some literature, that not all of them do...) to take them from merely acceptable to truly memorable pieces of work. Authors do a lot of this work themselves, but often under an editor's watchful eye and helping hand.

I love being a part of that. I love working with authors, watching them improve, learning from them, and ultimately, working together to create something we both can be proud of. (Which is why, in some of the technical editing I've been doing, my morale has been suffering: the people I edit for only care about lack of errors and acceptable printability, rather than the art of making something read beautifully. It gets hard to pour your heart into something that even the creator doesn't care about.)

To my surprise, my dad understood exactly how I felt. He began to tell me about how he loved using physics modeling software to re-create the world around him, making it as realistic as possible. It was thrilling for him to take the basic tools of physics, mathematics, and software and use them to build a virtual reproduction of his literal world. To him, that was beautiful.

And then I got to thinking again. (I know, right?)

I thought about all the different things people have told me about why they love what they do. It doesn't matter what it was: designing a successful ad campaign, saving a life, raising a family, becoming a teacher, programming a computer, training for a race, you name it. When it comes down to why people love doing what they do, it always taps into the power of creation.

What follows is the Doctrine of Lynnae. Don't take it for 100% truth. It's a working-epiphany I had with my dad tonight, but I thought I'd share it.

We tend to think of creation in a limited sense: the cosmically miraculous way God created the earth, or the creation-process of bringing actual life into the world, or an author developing a new world for people to get lost in. A lot of times we forget that we can utilize our God-given powers of creation in a million different ways. And because creation is a trait inherited through our divine lineage, we are drawn towards it. When you find people who absolutely love what they do, it's because they are involved in creating.

Writing a new computer program that solves a problem better or faster than the program before. Using medicine to create healthy new cells where only diseased ones existed. Taking simple, unassuming ingredients and creating a culinary masterpiece. Assisting in the development of young minds as they learn about the world around them. Training a body to run faster, work harder, or endure longer.

So what about people who don't love what they do? I suspect they just haven't delved deep enough into their field to find where the creative processes are actively at work. Or perhaps they are better suited to creating in another field and chose money or job-security over doing something that they were truly good at.

It's all about creating. About making something better out of the materials we're given to work with. It doesn't matter how rough or how refined those materials are when they get into our hands. When we improve upon them, we are contributing to the creative process.

Even if, as President Uchtdorf once said, we are simply creating smiles.