Authors or Artists

Authors or Artists

First of all let me apologise for my absence yesterday. I was baking a cake for my Mother’s birthday and didn’t get a chance to update my blog. While reading the recipe, it stated “Baking is a science, not an art,” and that got me thinking.

Many people would say that writing is their creative outlet, but does that make it a piece of art? Or do the exact ingredients of plot, characters and everything else required, make it a science? Just because baking a cake is a science, doesn’t mean it tastes bad, on the contrary, because of the science of baking, it tastes very good. Does this translate to the literary world? Can we obey all the rules of literature when writing fiction and call it art? Or do we refer to it as a science even if it is a creative endeavour? Different sciences (of the traditional sense) are always trying to create things, a clone in biology, to chemical reactions in chemistry and answers in physics to name but a few. There are some people who look upon the sciences as an art. They see art where the rest of us would see numbers and equations. To use the old cliché ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.’ I guess I mean that some of us may view some books as works of literary art, where as others may see the same books as a combination of verbs, nouns, synonyms and clichés cleverly mashed together to create an enjoyable read.

What are your thoughts? What is art to you? Can science be art? Can art be scientific? Let me know in the comments. Read, follow, comment and enjoy. M x