THE MEANING IN THE MAKING

A wide-ranging inquiry into the wellsprings of human creativity.

Tucker’s book starts during his boyhood years in Africa, looking up at the unspoiled night sky from the middle of the Botswanan bushveld and feeling a surge of wonder at the grandeur and mystery of it all. The author views this inner restlessness as fundamental to the human experience. “That’s the point: we human beings don’t leave anything to their own devices,” he writes. “We control, we influence, we change, we bend and even break, and at our very best, we create.” The bulk of his book considers creativity and art and their various origins and patterns. Art ignores neat, definitive answers, he writes; rather, it’s a reflection of the primordial human desire to extract order from chaos. As Tucker elaborates, that desire itself can be incredibly complicated, verging everywhere from feelings of inadequacy to the gnawings of envy to the desire to oversimplify. “Applying labels and placing things in neat boxes is always reductive,” he writes, and the real remedy for envy is a greater peace with one’s own accomplishments. “If you’ve been dangling the ‘promise of guaranteed success’ in front of yourself as motivation,” he writes, “I hope you can find a way to replace it with ‘pride in your work’ as the reason to keep going and doing the very best you can.” In clear, often compelling prose, Tucker asks his readers a series of deceptively simple questions: What do you make? And what constitutes a reward for what you make? He urges his readers to recall their earliest experiences of producing their art—before the corrosive expectations of others existed, when there was only the excitement of trying new things. And because Tucker has chosen a narrative tone of open encouragement not tied to any particular creative school or philosophical outlook, his call for that type of inner renewal will likely reach a wide range of readers.

An optimistic, cleareyed call for people to reconnect with their imaginative urges.