Defining creativity with extra steps

Follow me as I try to tell you about a shower thought I had that has been holding my brain hostage for hours begging to be written down and thrown into the void that is the internet. It will be short and relatively painless. I promise!

The all-mighty Google tells us that any action that brings something into existence falls into the creation category. The act of creation is by definition a generative action and it happens through translation, compilation, or a combination of both.

Let’s look at the hit animated Disney film from 1994, The Lion King, as an example.

The Lion King is undoubtedly a work of high-quality visual art (argue with yourself if you disagree) and because we can draw a clear line in 1994 between a world that didn’t have The Lion King in it and a world (a more superior one, if you ask me) that does have The Lion King means that it counts as a creation, something made through the act of generation.

But a lot of the plot points in the Lion King are similar to Hamlet making it very likely that the story in Hamlet might have influenced the people who brought the Lion King into existence. This essentially qualifies the Lion King as an act of translation because someone (or god-forbid someones) likely had to suffer through either reading or watching Shakespeare in order to pick out plot lines…