The title of this post is a line from Seth Godin taken from The Practice: Shipping Creative Work.
In the book, Godin argues that when we choose to produce creative work, we’re solving a problem for the recipient. Creativity can sometimes feel self-indulgent, especially when there are so many other ways to spend our time, but per author Steven Pressfield in The War of Art:
Creative work is not a selfish act or a bid for attention on the part of the actor. It’s a gift to the world and every being in it. Don’t cheat us of your contribution. Give us what you’ve got.
I’ve thought this before about social media influencers, or YouTubers, or anyone else who is going out of their way to share their thoughts with the world. While it’s easy to roll our eyes when we see influencers in the wild, these people are putting their work out there. They are sharing what they produce.
With this in mind, I wanted to sit down and write something about my own creative process.
My creative process
After recently reviving this newsletter after a 2.5 year hiatus, I’ve needed to think deeply about what creativity means to me, and how I plan on putting out creative work every two weeks going forward.
Writing My Morning Routine: How Successful People Start Every Day Inspired was a unique writing experience in the sense that the majority of the book consisted of interviews with other people.
That said, it still required a lot of our own words, and what I found worked best for me was combining uninterrupted writing time with allowing my mind to wander freely throughout the day.
Here’s what this looks like in practice:
Set aside uninterrupted writing time
In his 2016 book Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University Cal Newport describes deep work as:
Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capacities to their limit. Their efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.
Deep work is your most important work, and I’ve found that I can only do deep work within a structured confine. Back to Newport:
Without structure, it’s easy to allow your time to devolve into the shallow (email, social media, random web surfing). This type of shallow behavior, though satisfying in the moment, is not conducive to creativity.
Constraints foster creativity. In The Practice, Seth Godin notes that “All creative work has constraints, because all creativity is based on using existing constraints to find new solutions.”
As part of my creative process, I set aside dedicated writing time to sit down and lay down some words. They don’t have to be very good words—they often aren’t! But I’ve found that if I write a few hundred words, then a few hundred more, then I tweak them and change them and cut half of them, I end up with something I’m comfortable putting out into the world.
Like many others, I’m inspired by Anne Lamott’s idea of writing shitty first drafts. Quoted from Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life:
Shitty first drafts. All good writers write them. This is how they end up with good second drafts and terrific third drafts.
I would love to be able to write perfect prose the first time every time, but that’s not how it works for me, and I’ll bet that’s not how it works for you, too. But shitty first drafts—shitty first drafts are easy. Just smash your fingers on the keyboard, fixing typos as you go—or not. When you come back to read your work, half the time you’ll think “Jeez, this is deranged,” but the other half you’ll realize there is something there, and that it just needs a little tidy up.
Allow my mind to wander freely
While laying down words largely has to happen when I’m in front of a screen, much of my writing—or rather my explorations on what I may or may not write—happens out in the ‘wild.’
We’ve all had those moments where we’re unable to remember something in the moment, only to have the answer come to us when we’re doing something else entirely.
The same is true, for me, of creative work. A large part of my creative process is letting my mind wander while walking my dog, washing the dishes, or folding the laundry (see my post on the benefits of rote activity). Sometimes I’ll come up with specific lines that I want to include in a post and write them down on my phone, but most of the time I’m just fleshing out thoughts and ideas. (Often many of these ideas won’t be as connected as I first thought, so I’ll move them to a “Fragments” note which I dip into whenever I need inspiration.)
knows a thing or two about making connections. In Keep Going the writer who draws lets us into his messy-by-design studio. In his studio Kleon intentionally cultivates his mess, and he encourages us to do the same:Creativity is about connections, and connections are not made by soloing everything off into its own space. New ideas are formed by interesting juxtapositions, and interesting juxtapositions happen when things are out of place.
Living in a New York City walkup, I don’t have the space to create much of a mess, but the way I allow my mind to wander freely is a similar embodiment of this ideal. I’m essentially daydreaming as part of the creative process, which is just as well because as per journalist and author Bonnie Tsui in Why We Swim, this is critical to problem solving and creativity:
Scientists now know that when our minds are wandering without any particular external focus, the brain’s “default-mode network” is active. It’s what makes fresh, unexpected connections possible.
I want to end this post not with practical advice on the creative process, but with a call-to-arms to begin racing toward it in the first place.
From Upstream: Selected Essays by Mary Oliver:
The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.
What is your process for producing creative work? Do you have any tips that could help others get started (or unstuck)?