The Creative Process

Mural at the Rhode Island Shopping Center (Mural Jam 2009). Photo by Ben Crosbie

My nails are nibbled down to the skin. It’s a disgusting habit but it usually means I’ve been writing a lot. Deadlines make me gnaw them even more. Perhaps it’s nerves, but I’m more inclined to think of it as an occupation for my hands while my brain is working on the next sentence. I can’t write in complete silence either. I need distraction, whether that be background music, coffee brewing, or a nearby conversation. I’ve become used to typing as part of the process. I can’t bear writing it on paper and having to either erase or cross out. I have to write a sentence, highlight it all and delete, write a few more, backspace, backspace, write another sentence, cut and paste. And I try to write in the morning, when my brain is fresh. Coffee helps too. But my grandest ideas come at night, and I always jot those down when I have them. So scraps of paper and notebooks are always useful to me. These are all quirky qualities and routines of my individual process. I’ve realized they help me produce, and so I continue them. But the nail biting, the eavesdropping and the piles of notebooks for scribbles are nothing if my attitude isn’t right.

Don’t wait for perfect conditions and lower your standards:

I’ve picked up two pieces of advice along the way that have helped my creative process. One is that you cannot wait for the perfect conditions to create. You may never have your zen space, you’ll always have bigger distractions than the ones that you crave at the coffee shop, and you may never feel quite up to the task. But you still need to just, well, create. Just keep producing.  And so that leads me to the second piece of advice: lower your standards and keep going.  We tend to want to make every creative product we put out into the world perfect. Certainly there’s something to be said for editing down your work and only exhibiting your best.  In fact, many famous photographers say that their work is only a condition of their editing process.  They’ll take a thousand pictures, and maybe 999 are total crap.  But if one is amazing, that’s all that matters, and that’s all they’ll show.  Reuters photographer Lucas Jackson was brave enough to blog and exhibit all his bad pictures of Iceland, which ultimately led to this stunning snap:

Lightning and lava in Eyjafjallajokul, Iceland by Lucas Jackson/REUTERS

The point of this story is to demonstrate that creating is a process and so mistakes are ultimately part of it. And art is never really finished. You have to draw the finish line for yourself; you have to find the point at which you are satisfied. And maybe that actually means lowering your standards. Gasp! Otherwise, in the pursuit of some measure of perfection, you’ll never put out anything into the world. I often see my work as a collection. Sure, individual films and articles are simply better than others, but as a collective work, they shine and they are constantly improving. If you begin to see your work as an evolving and continuing process and you see mistakes as part of that, you may actually produce more. And let’s face it, producing something even if it’s not perfect, is far better than producing nothing at all.

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