The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without the work.

That’s a quote from French writer Émile Zola, and I’m John Fanning and this is the Create with John Fanning podcast.

How’s it goin out there. Hope all is well with this crazy Corona virus.

This is Episode 9 of my series of episodes on Imagination and creativity, based around my book Create.

Last time I talked about black sheep and difference but today I want to talk about a few Walls that build on each other, genius, talent and originality. In a later episode I’ll talk more about talent, but today I want to talk about these three ideas in an inter-connected way.

“I don’t know if I’m talented enough. I don’t know if I have a gift.”

Christ. The amount of times I’ve heard that one. Even from established creators in their fields. The mind/ego loves this I’m not talented I’m not original I’m not a genius crap. Again more Walls it throws in front of your creation.

In school I was convinced too, convinced I was talented at nothing. I was thrown out of classes, except a few like English. I never got good grades at English when I was younger, but when I was fifteen I wrote a story for a competition a bank held in connection with schools. I mentioned this before when I talked in an earlier episode about family. Anyway, I got third prize. My immediate reaction: they must have made a mistake. The usual imposter syndrome Wall. Then I went up to get my prize. Coming back down I still couldn’t accept it as reality. It was only when a friend started to say well done that I realized, there was no mistake. And that’s when the maybes started slipping in. Maybe I’m alright at writing essays, not school ones, but ones I like writing? I secretly started writing bad poems.

Everyone’s talented at something. Everyone’s gifted, original, at something. Again, artists and writers don’t own creativity. They don’t own Imagination. Some of us think visually, others through sound, others again through movement. However, what makes the difference is some people persist, keep doing that something, whether it’s writing code, novels, movies or painting canvases.

The fear of not being original, of being laughed at, of creating something awful, has crept into the heart of every creator since we first started putting hand prints on the walls of caves or telling stories around open fires, in the same caves.

Fact: Nobody’s original. This podcast is not original. I’m sure there are many like it. “Hamlet”, “King Lear”, “Macbeth” are not original. They were all plays before Shakespeare ever wrote his versions. Take up Bartlett’s “Familiar Quotations”. Look up Churchill. Nearly every famous quote attributed to the man can be found somewhere else, said a little differently, by someone else, usually by someone who lived in ancient Greece or Rome. Look at the footnotes to his quotes.

Mozart in one of his letters says he never aims for originality. Mark Twain, also in a letter, to Hellen Keller, said all ideas come from other “sources” and that we color them differently because of our moral and mental character. He wrote that every great orator re-interprets centuries and the thousands who went b...