Myth, Magic, and Metaphor : A Journey Into the Heart of Creativity

Rating:
Summary: A Journey to Your Creative Powers
Review: For anyone looking for their creativity button this small, dynamic book is a must read. Ms. Daly leads the reader through an understandable path to finding your creative juices without wandering too far off the journey to finding your writing powers.

With the many exercises she includes within the chapters it makes this 107 page book even more valuable. I found this journey to writing can also be applied to other arts that the reader may be interested in pursuing.

This is definitely a book you will want to read several times and keep as a handy reference.

Rating:
Summary: Myth, Magic, and Metaphor
Review: For me, this was a delightful and refreshing book to read. I found myself underlining and asterisking numerous phrases throughout the book to refer to again and again. I would highly recommend it to anyone involved in or interested in the creative arts.

Rating:
Summary: A confused, rambling mess of contradictions and mistakes
Review: Normally I love books on the subject of creativity, but this one just doesn't make the grade. If you cut to the back of the book, you find that "some of this text was also used as part of [the author's] doctoral dissertation." Many dissertations are written in a thick academic language that hardly lends itself to a "simple creative writing classroom scenario," which is what the book bills itself as.

If there's a sin against writing, it is probably committed somewhere in this book. Parenthetical etymological notes appear too liberally throughout. The author throws out references and comments without any context. The text consists largely of quotes with a few of the author's own thoughts used to string them together--I'm unconvinced that there's anything new in this book. Of course, the quotes are both the saving grace of this book and its downfall. While they cause one to eventually realize that there is very little substance to the book, they are what give the book its only grace-notes.

The author talks about mystery, excitement, enthusiasm, and wonder being central to creativity. I agree with that thesis, so I had trouble understanding why I disliked her approach to the topic so much. Then I realized that the academic style of writing robs her words of exactly the emotions she was trying to express.

There are comments in this book that make no logical sense (I've shown them to a handful of people--no one could guess what they were supposed to mean); maybe they made sense in a missing context. The author also makes some fairly contradictory statements. She insists that science and technology require inspiration and creativity to get anywhere, and yet says that the more cognitive society gets, the less creative it gets. She says at one point, "Unlike animals, man had a brain..." Animals don't have brains?! And you can add to this list a bunch of mistakes that make it look as though she had no editor--a page on which she repeats the same quote twice in two paragraphs; etymological notes and quotes that repeat on different pages; not to mention a whole bunch of incorrect or missing punctuation marks.

I cannot recommend this book unless you have a real love of thick, quote-heavy rambling. It starts out with a wonderful premise, and I wish I could say that it does anything good with that premise. But alas, the only real value this book has is as a collection of cool quotes--which you can find elsewhere.