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The Meaning in the Making

The Why and How Behind Our Human Need to Create

ebook
2 of 2 copies available
2 of 2 copies available

Become inspired, find your voice, and create work that matters.

Why are human beings driven to make?

It's as if we collectively intuited, long before science gave us the language, that the universe bends toward entropy, and every act of creation on our part is an act of defiance in the face of that evolving disorder.

When we pick up a paintbrush, or compose elements through our camera viewfinders, or press fingers into wet clay to wrestle form from a shapeless lump, we are bending things back toward Order and wrestling them from Chaos.

But making things is often not enough.

We also want the things we make to be filled with meaning. We're each trying to describe what we know about life, to create a collective sense of "safety in numbers." When we reach the end of our traditional descriptive powers, it's time to weave collective meaning from poetry, painting, writing, dancing, photographing, filmmaking, storytelling, singing, animating, designing, performing, carving, sculpting, and a million other ways we daily create Order out of the Chaos and share it with each other for comfort.

On this journey we need a creative philosophy which will help us find our voice, discover our message, deal with the responses to our work, maintain inspiration, and stay mentally healthy and motivated creators as we strive to find "the meaning in the making."


Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Order
Chapter 2: Logos
Chapter 3: Breath
Chapter 4: Voice
Chapter 5: Ego
Chapter 6: Control
Chapter 7: Attention
Chapter 8: Envy
Chapter 9: Critique
Chapter 10: Feel
Chapter 11: Shadows
Chapter 12: Meaning
Chapter 13: Time
Chapter 14: Benediction
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    • Kirkus

      A wide-ranging inquiry into the wellsprings of human creativity. Tucker's book starts during his boyhood years in Africa, looking up at the unspoiled night sky from the middle of the Botswanan bushveld and feeling a surge of wonder at the grandeur and mystery of it all. The author views this inner restlessness as fundamental to the human experience. "That's the point: we human beings don't leave anything to their own devices," he writes. "We control, we influence, we change, we bend and even break, and at our very best, we create." The bulk of his book considers creativity and art and their various origins and patterns. Art ignores neat, definitive answers, he writes; rather, it's a reflection of the primordial human desire to extract order from chaos. As Tucker elaborates, that desire itself can be incredibly complicated, verging everywhere from feelings of inadequacy to the gnawings of envy to the desire to oversimplify. "Applying labels and placing things in neat boxes is always reductive," he writes, and the real remedy for envy is a greater peace with one's own accomplishments. "If you've been dangling the 'promise of guaranteed success' in front of yourself as motivation," he writes, "I hope you can find a way to replace it with 'pride in your work' as the reason to keep going and doing the very best you can." In clear, often compelling prose, Tucker asks his readers a series of deceptively simple questions: What do you make? And what constitutes a reward for what you make? He urges his readers to recall their earliest experiences of producing their art--before the corrosive expectations of others existed, when there was only the excitement of trying new things. And because Tucker has chosen a narrative tone of open encouragement not tied to any particular creative school or philosophical outlook, his call for that type of inner renewal will likely reach a wide range of readers. An optimistic, cleareyed call for people to reconnect with their imaginative urges.

      COPYRIGHT(2021) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. (Online Review)

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  • English

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