The Creative Process #50 - The Standard Advice

To celebrate the 50th issue of this newsletter, I thought I might strip it back all the way to the bones and offer a cache of the "standard advice" in the creative process. This is somewhat inspired by this fantastic video:

Creating a thing and putting it out into the world can encompass a vast array of options. Some of that is concerned with turning creative products into money, which I will not cover here. I care about taking an idea and putting that idea in someone else's head. In short, the creative process.

Start by copying

Find art that you like and copy it. Open up a book that you like and transcribe what you're reading. Feel the words and rhythms as you copy it across. Note where you expected to write something but the author chose something else. Build up the muscle memory.

You can do this with any creative genre. Emulate a famous acting scene. Paint the same picture. Trace over a comic book. Cover a song.

Over time you might tweak it. Make a gentle, loving mockery of the original. Invert a key element. This is stretching your wings and starting to fly.

This last month I learned ChoiceScript, a way to make interactive fiction stories. The documentation for it was not the greatest, so there was no way for me to just rationally understand the system and start writing. I took an example project. Instead of copying the files across, I slowly replicated the directory structure. I typed in the same text. I poked at this bit. I changed that bit. Through use and repetition I got pretty confident with ChoiceScript in a day, from scratch.

Building taste

Creating something is assembling things you appreciate in a way you appreciate them. Part of learning via copying is to figure out what to copy. There's a great quote from Ira Glass:

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have.”

Failing is learning. You need to make something, be disappointed or frustrated or ashamed of it, and learn what that is so you don't include it next time. There has to be a next time.

Write ideas down

A beginner's mistake is to have an idea and protect it like a precious egg. This is often where new creatives get very interested in copyright law.

Ideas are cheap. If you're not blocking yourself, ideas should come fast and furious. They may not be good, fully-formed or even sensible. But you should let them come en masse. Remembering them is a burden, so don't. Write them down.

One version of this is the grail diary approach:

Imagine you are Henry Jones Senior, and your creative project is the literal Holy Grail. Keeping all the loose threads, striking concepts and dead ends in your head is too much, so you write it down. Putting it into a digital file works, but there is extra juice to be found in actually writing it. You can draw, annotate, collage and map out all the different ideas in your project. Your brain is more engaged and typically you are writing slower than you think, so you think more about what you're doing.

In Adam Savage's book Every Tool's A Hammer, he shows his creative process which is enabled by recording ideas, making checklists, and drawing.

Countless people through history have had commonplace books to turn their ideas into creative wells they can draw on in the future.

Editing is easier than writing

When making something, we can often jump to the end of the process and worry about how a particular idea might be received. Is this character interesting? Is this scene evocative? Does this joke land? Worrying too much about this can jam up the creative process.

The first draft of anything should be just for the creator. That's where they learn what the thing is. What the shape should be. What is important and what is not.

I've seen this advice in a few forms, but I like Zach Cregger (of Weapons and Whitest Kids U Know fame) phrased it well:

In summary, writing is hard, so pretend your first draft is subcontracted to an elf. The elf is cheap and dumb. He can write, but not very well. You get him to just smash out the first draft. You have an idea of the sequence of events, so you just get him to flail at the keyboard until the first draft is done. And it won't be any good because you're not paying the elf much. But afterwards, there is content there. You can go through, fix the elf's mistakes, tighten up the writing and replace bad stuff with good stuff. You can't fix nothing, so the elf just makes something you can work with. Over a few iterations the whole thing gets better and closer to your ideal. But you need the elf to lay the foundations.

Elves aren't paid enough to care, so when you're facing that empty page, just go for it. You're on the clock, but just do five minutes. Five minutes of garbage is fine to do. And often if you do five minutes, you can ride the momentum to five more. Or ten more. Or maybe an hour.

It's important to not over-think it. Or really think it. Just do.

Know your limitations

In bringing your resources to bear on a creative project, you need to know what they are. This informs scope.

Recently my daughter has been excited for the yearly agricultural show, because they have a wide assortment of competitions you can submit something for, from photography to cake-making, knitting to Lego, sketching to herb-growing. She went through the long list and ticked all the ones she was going to enter. Her shortlist was about 30 competitions. She has about 60 days. And she still needs to go to school, do ballet and all the other things she does. There is no way she's outputting a finished product every two days for two months. No way.

But I shouldn't be so smug. I am excited to write some gamebooks, but every idea expands the scope. So it's just a little experiment, just a dozen full-sized gamebooks in a few years. One every six months until I retire.

Maybe I should set a better example.

In general, scope your projects to your resources, rather than the other way around. And time is a vital resource. Don't blow it out to match your scope.

Feedback

Feedback is hard. You hope that your ideas have been taken from your head into the project, and assembled correctly, so that when another mind encounters it, they see what you see. But it's hard. They might not get it. Or get the wrong thing. Or just wake up grumpy and hate it.

Before seeking feedback, ask yourself: What do you want from the feedback? What were you trying to do, and is this something you want another person's opinion on?

In more one-on-one situations, get an idea of what you think the person offers and what perspective they can offer, if any. Have an assortment of people that be relied upon for certain feedback. And yes, even the friend who just loves everything you do. Occasionally we need a pick-me-up before we toddle on our merry way.

Record the positive feedback. Analyse the negative feedback. Write it in your own words so you understand it. Assume the provider of feedback is earnest, but it's only their experience of your creative output, not an objective judge of it. It's evidence but not directions.

Small, fast, stupid

The only creative project that is useful to someone else is a finished one. Try to set a stopping condition. Know when a first draft is considered done. Know when the project is considered done. Make it explicit and realistic.

It is very alluring to use a project to improve your tools. "Because if I improve it for this project, it'll enhance so many others down the line!" Learning and producing should be two different tasks. While both benefit from making mistakes and fixing them, learning is an area of responsibility that can spin on forever, whereas producing something should have a stopping condition. Improve your tools, but don't let that get in the way of making something.

Projects should be realistic in scope and complexity. There's an adage about debugging that I like here:

Debugging code requires you to be twice as smart as the person who wrote it. Therefore, if you write code as cleverly as you can, you by definition cannot debug it.

Editing is identifying faults and fixing them. If you are writing at the edge of your capability, you sure as heck better not make any mistakes.

Consistency

Part of the creative drive is finding ideas that excite you. These are great, but they aren't sustaining. If you only turn up to the creative desk when you're motivated, you're cutting down on your total time devoted to the project.

Discipline is greater than motivation, so try to make the creative process regular. One way is to set a pace, and you can do that by setting a realistic deadline. It needs to be done by this time, so keep it moving.

This also applies to how you spread your interest over a project. Doing just the fun bits can be fun, but occasionally you need the connective tissue to be rock solid. Eat your vegetables and your meat.

Coda

This is a concentrated version of all the usual bits of creative advice I've seen whilst keeping The Creative Process going. None of it is original to me. Heck, some of it I only know conceptually but fail to bring it to my own practice. Regardless, it's regularly-stated advice. The tricky part is following it and making it your own.