Response to Uncreative Writing

I immediately found the concept of uncreative writing to be an interesting topic to read about but more so the ideas behind it, rather than the uncreative writings themselves. The most interesting thing about the whole process was the encouragement of plagiarism and the unapologetic stealing of the work of others. At a university which places a heavy value on its honor code, Mason students are constantly bombarded by threats of consequences for plagiarism. I’ve even heard cases of students who truly did not plagiarize a certain assignment but were accused of doing so by their professors and were faced with a serious threat to their academic careers. That is why the idea that Kenneth Goldsmith and the process of uncreative writing encourage you to copy from other peoples’ work was so shocking to me.

However, it is apparent that the process of taking others’ work without permission and using it for whatever purposes the “theft” wishes could be a relatively constant practice in our society. This is clearly the case with the use of file sharing through computers and the internet. Uncreative writing can employ the stealing of a news article or other written work and subsequently create something entirely different but not new from it, all while using this written work in a manner that is inconsistent with its author’s intent. This same process can be seen with something such as music or movies obtained through file sharing. Someone could take a song or film and reedit it to create something that is, again, something entirely different but not necessarily anything new or creative. Essentially, both could have the same result: using someone else’s work to create something that someone else calls their own work.

Additionally, I found Goldsmith’s discussion of the current state of creativity to be very interesting but only somewhat accurate. I tend to think that that his notion that creativity is dead is not entirely correct. He makes a valid point that the themes and ideas that we see in movies, books, etc. are recycled. However, these major themes and ideas are usually redeveloped and have small but still new components. I strongly believe that people get tired of seeing/hearing/reading the same things over and over again and even though new pieces of film or music or writing may contain similar themes or frameworks to those that preceded them, they must contain some new elements, otherwise few or no people would choose to make use of them.

Goldsmith’s statement that it is hard for students to rid themselves of their creativity seems to be entirely true to me. Many of the assignments that we have completed in this class thus far this semester have required at least some level of creativity. With things like flarf and spoetry, the topic of choice and the ordering of words can allow for great use of creativity. In the production of uncreative writing, it is interesting to see how much a person can remove their personality and reduce their amount of creativity. In essence, the goal of this process of uncreative writing is to work against everything we have been taught in our prior courses involving writing. This uncreative process wants us to be as boring as we possibly can.