There’s a hot topic afoot that all focuses around one question: where epiphanies come from.
Many best-selling authors and legendary artists have indicated that their genius work wasn’t theirs; only some sudden, abstract, potent source of inspiration that suddenly hit them. And when it did, they couldn’t put their pencil down.
Below is one of the most popular videos from TED that addresses this fascinating theory:
Most recently, another story on these epiphanies popped up–this one is from the creator of the Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Paul:
If L. Frank Baum had been listed on the stock exchange in 1900, his shares would have been trading near historic lows. The soon-to-be famous author of “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” had at that point failed at a long series of energetic attempts to find a career. At 44, Baum had already been a chicken farmer, an actor, a seller of machinery lubricants, a purveyor of novelty goods and a newspaper publisher. All his life he’d written lively prose — plays, ads, columns — but most of it seemed to go nowhere.
Then, suddenly, it did. The story of a girl named Dorothy who with her little dog, Toto, travels to the wondrous land of Oz burst from Baum’s pencil, almost taking him by surprise. “The story really seemed to write itself,” he told his publisher. “Then, I couldn’t find any regular paper, so I took anything at all, including a bunch of old envelopes.” Turned into a proper book with defining illustrations by W.W. Denslow, the story most of us know as “The Wizard of Oz” was an immediate sensation in 1900. In a review, the New York Times commended it, saying that it was “ingeniously woven out of commonplace material.” Baum would produce 13 sequels, though none had quite the sparkle of the first.
Baum recalled the experience of writing “Oz” as an epiphany: “It came to me right out of the blue. I think that sometimes the Great Author has a message to get across, and He has to use the instrument at hand. I happened to be the medium, and I believe the major key was given to me to open the doors to sympathy and understanding, joy, peace, and happiness.” That was about as far as L. Frank Baum ever went in analyzing his work. In “Finding Oz,” Evan I. Schwartz argues that Baum really wasn’t equipped to explain his own imaginative processes.
I’m not yet sold on the idea that these works of genius are the result of invisible “geniuses” that float from one individual to the next. But, I’m not opposed to looking into it more. Obviously, through the law of attraction, one experiences and interprets life when looking at it through a new lens.
In the video above, Elizabeth Gilbert asserts that a “genius” came into play whenever one’s work attracts a wealth of money and attention. She reasons that her other works didn’t make money or attract widespread attention because she didn’t have a “genius” guiding her at the time. In other words, she’s saying that when a book or piece of art makes money, and is popular, it’s the result of a genius. The problem with this centers on the fact that you can’t always judge genius by monetary metrics or popularity. Many forms of genius are ahead of their time. Lord of The Rings, Picasso… I can drone on about this.
Bottom line: It’s an interesting concept. Something to definitely contemplate.