My Approach To Creative Endeavor

Figuring it out In real time

Im going to try to communicate my process here as I write this out. I don’t exactly know where this is going. I’m relying on intuition to get me there.

I. Dream

I can be found eyes closed, laying in bed or slunk down into a couch. Thats were I start, dreaming. Ideas float through my mind and I let them wander in and out at their own pace. At some point one sticks. Some inkling of a thing enters my mind as a blurry picture attached to a feeling. The wondering stops and I play with the daydream further. It tends to be a visual that is both clear and murky. The colors and the shapes are there, but if I try to focus on any one thing it all kinda dissipates. The details escape capture. Its a feeling the idea brings along with it that I dont want to let go of. If it sets off an excitement inside me I take a stab at making it real. At the start I go to paper, ink, mood board, and a smattering of apps that allow me to render out the first version of the idea. When Im afraid I dont know what Im doing I go to tutorials to find a nice little step by step process that someone else came up with to make me feel safe in building out the idea. But that never lasts. It falls apart at the moment I apply myself to the process. There tends to be a specific feel that Im going for that I cant quite be captured by someone else’s process. Thats when I know I need to break away. Usually Ill find the solve by blending two or more existing methods that maybe arent commonly used together. Some puzzle made of pieces of what I’ve learnt from others as well as my own methods. At this point I’ve birthed out this vague idea rattling around in my head into its first primordial self.

II. Play

I assume its the same for all creative forms. Some sense of a thing is known, there is something there. Then the real work begins of forming it. Taking that raw essence and bringing it down to our lowly physical plane. Where it has no choice but to lose its grandness, its infinitude.

With a nice heaping of perfectionism attached to my initial attempt at putting it down on paper or writing out some code to make it move and blink on the screen, this is where the story ends. The honeymoon is over and the malformed representation in front of me isn’t quite what I imagined. “What is this bullshit?“ I ask my as my mind starts to fold in on itself in the building belief that there is no world were I will be able to close the gap from “this thing“ to The thing I was trying to convey. Giving up happens here. The cycle renews and we are back to dream, then sketch, then disappointment.

Or…

III. Giving In To Toil

Or I set aside my inner critic. The dialogue of the one who thinks he is either great or nothing. Ignore it, accept it, fight it, there are better and worse way, but pick one and we are off into a land where the possibility that we can do this sticks around a little longer. The dream gets more chances. More formations. Erasers, thumbnails, trash bins, crossing outs and all the other methods of iteration across all mediums of creation.

Patience is the thing that has taken me the longest to learn to accept. Give it to patience. Its freedom. Once time is irrelevant possibility is present. There is no real way to know how long any given idea needs to reach its true potential form. With each iteration it become more clear how far or close I am to where I want to be. Distance is the other thing. If I want clarity I go away for a day or two…or a week… or months when I forget that I need to recreate that initial rush for myself to keep the magic alive. When I do come back its clear what I didnt see yesterday. The more distance I have the more I can look at the thing as if it was someone elses project to critique. Which is invaluable to fully see with dispassion what would make it better.

Iteration continues until Im at the limit of my skills. I even picked up a couple new skills along the way to push it to a place where Ill be happy stoping. Which is rare. There is always more to critique and improve.

IV. Letting Go

Now that iteration has instilled the belief as well as first hand knowledge that this thing will improve with effort we arrive back at something akin to perfectionism. An itch that says “one more change“. What it means is “ever more changes“. “I can do this all day“. This is a trap all the same as perfectionism because it missed another reality.

Ive notices this in myself and in the art of others that there is a border invisible to the maker that once crossed begins to steal away the soul of the creation. Before we can ever approach perfect we begin to arrive at “too perfect“. Something a little too trying, too wanting, too far removed from the messy raw human touch. We begin to move away from ourself and towards God. Infallible things aren’t interesting to the observer. They give off an uneasy vibe or no vibe at all. The attempt becomes offputting. We can no longer connect with the pursuit of the artist that can often be seen in a creation that stopped being touched at just the right moment. Like a parent continuing to bend a child to their will past adulthood. Now all you can do is hinder the thing.

If you fall in love with messy things you’ll learn to let go in time to save it from yourself.

V. Lie

When I started this little note to to myself I had no idea the format it would take. I didn’t know I would section it off into four parts or that there even were parts to be sectioned off. I figured if I wrote this the way I do my other creative process it would represent itself both in the writing and the final form. Its a work of its own design. I dont know what Im doing. I hope I never do. Any time Ive ever tried to grasp onto the process too tightly it has resulted in mediocre work. Heres a secret. I didn’t write this part at the end. I wrote up through toil and then I bullet pointed part three and four. Then I wrote this bit here. Because thats what happened. Who knows, those last parts may not even be written today. Maybe Ill get to them some other time.

VI. Some Other Time

Here it is, done. Everything I said above about how the process goes I used to write this note. I dreamt it up, sketched it out, tried to bend it to be “professional“ and then I let that notion go. I came back a few days later and did one bit reread and edit to make sense of a good amount of gibberish that was here before, and in the end I left it messy. Its the least and the most I could do for the thing.

V. OCD or something

I like seven better than six, so now there are seven sections. Yep, that’s were Im at.

……. …. .. joy.lull . .. 05.24.25