My son and I play what we’ve come to call “The Doodle Game” whenever he’s home sick from school.
It’s simple: one of us draws the same doodle on two pieces of paper. We each take one and “finish” the doodle into a drawing. Sometimes we might put a limit on the doodle – no faces, for example, when it obviously looks like two eyes. When we’ve both finished, we show the drawings to each other. Then the other person starts.
Almost without fail, we finish the doodle in different ways. We take it in different directions, and see different ideas in the same start.
That’s the beauty of any creation – that you can start with something that is universal, and end with something uniquely yours. If I gave twenty composers the same first chord, the same text, even the same melody, no two compositions would be identical.
Isn’t that beautiful? They start the same, but they always finish differently.