The creative process is infinite. A person decided to draw on a cave wall tens of thousands of years ago—and it’s very plausible that telling stories and making music happened before that—and hundreds of millions of us have followed in their footsteps since.
It’s this limitless quality of the creative process that can make it challenging to participate in, as the trope of the tortured artist suggests.
Creative confusion kills work. A person who wants to make only what they love, and earn a million bucks will feel torn with their work, will feel torn. A person who wants their first piece of work to represent their brilliance will experience a creative block because they’re not capable of meeting their expectations yet.
If you’re making something, you learn along the way that finding creative clarity is incredibly useful. A big part of this clarity includes being present to actually express yourself. Many people have figured out how to break this creative process down into phases, making it easier to draw limits on what not to do, and focus. Here are three useful frameworks breaking it down:
The four stage creative process suggests there are four steps: preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification. Knowing which phase you’re in—and understanding that after intense research, you may need to rest before your brain comes up with an idea—is critical. (Some people call this “the shower effect,” named after the idea that great ideas can find you in the shower.)
One of my favorite frameworks is by Professor Betty Flowers, which I simply call, “Madman, architect, carpenter, judge.” The idea is in order to write—or, really, make anything good—you need to channel the energies of being playful and expressive (the madman) and evaluating it (the judge). The key is not to do them at the same time. You need to keep them separate. That’s why it’s common writing advice to write a shitty first draft, so you avoid writing and editing at the same time. I featured Professor Flowers’ framework in the prompt, “Say Yes,” in Creative Doing. Susan Sontag has riffed on something similar before.
Are you making your creative work for business, or out of love? If you’re doing it for business, you need to treat your work like livestock, the way a farmer treats their cows and chickens. Keep them healthy and productive, but know you’ll need to eventually sell them, because they help you feed your family. If you’re doing it for love, you get to treat your creative work like pets; they aren’t intended to do anything other than be loved. This framework helps you figure out which is more important to you and prioritize.
There are several other useful frameworks as well:
- Creativity as an infinite game (play to keep playing), not a finite game (play to win and stop playing right after). The longer you play, the more your skills will improve, and the more chances you’ll come across to get lucky
- Creative wastewater
- Creative stupidity (take risks!)
- Cold blooded creative work (needs little maintenance after completion—e.g., books) vs. hot blooded creative work (needs a lot of maintenance—e.g., an ongoing magazine)
- Roots, trunk, branches (focus on building a strong foundation)
- Finding your creative work’s right size (i.e., if you don’t have a lot of time, make things with more modest shapes. I call this sizeboxing)
The key is to keep things separate, as often as possible. Know which stage of work you need to do today, in this very hour, and do it. If there is too much work for one session, prioritize and make it smaller.
As finite people participating in an infinite process, which will continue long after you and I are gone, we need to make small and big decisions every day.
Creative clarity helps make the process less torturous, and more doable.