The Creative Process
And the key to creativity
I’m convinced that we are less of a participant in our own creative processes than we’d like to think we are. We’d like to think that we are the sole progenitor of our works; their proximate cause, their author, the hand by which they are formed. That we have created something from nothing. But this is not so.
By “we” I mean our conscious minds: what you think of as “yourself”: the part of you that is understanding these words, that has free will, if free will exists, and that knows the experience of creating something. But this aspect of yourself is not the sole or even the principal progenitor of things you create. Creativity is, for the most part, something that happens in the unconscious mind—that part of your mind of which you are not aware, which regulates your bodily functions and assimilates a day’s experience while you sleep and authors your dreams too and overall constitutes 95% of your brain function. What we think of as creative work—for instance, sitting down at your desk to write—isn’t creative work at all (how often do you feel creative in those moments?), but instead merely a tribulation to which you must subject yourself in order to prime the unconscious mind to do the actual creative work. The point of the sitting-down-to-create time is not to actually create, but to concentrate on the thing to be created, primordial as it may be, and struggle with the task of creating it.
Because it turns out that struggling is all you can really do. Struggle for an hour and concentrate on whatever it is that exists of your project, even if it is just a vague idea or a fleeting image. That is the totality of your role in the creative process. To feel that horrible feeling in your stomach. That and then to later capture whatever the unconscious mind produces. (It doesn’t entirely matter whether what the unconscious produces is good or bad, whether it is absolute genius or something functionally necessary or utterly appalling slop. Either way you capture it and you give your attention and consideration to it as it exists with the rest of the project. This consideration is an important part of the priming that the unconscious requires to do its work). Because it will produce something, so long as you have primed it sufficiently. And all you have to do to prime it sufficiently is subject yourself to that struggle sincerely for a period of the day. An hour daily is sufficient, in my experience, but more certainly won’t hurt. Well it will hurt but what I mean is it will also help.
What you’re going for is mental saturation with the thing you’re working on. You’ll know that you are in a healthy conversation with your unconscious mind when the subject of your work is asserting itself in your awareness constantly—you’re saturated with consideration for this vague idea or fleeting image. The unconscious mind is bathed in that idea or image and it processes it the same way it processes all of the other things that are happening to you and attempts to make sense of the world. And then, by some miracle, if given the proper space, the unconscious mind will do the actual creative work. The fruits of this labor will be given to you—the conscious mind—in moments when you are not giving your particular attention to anything. How many times has your creative work taken a leap forward while you were in the shower? While you were driving? On a walk? Countless artists and intellectuals have expressed the importance of mundane routines such as these for their creative processes. I myself have noticed that my essays seem to only really get written when I am away from my keyboard, in particular when I am forced to be in the car for an hour or more. I will find myself forming sentences and rearranging them in my head while my attention is occupied with little else. Then, the next time I sit down at my desk, I capture that progress my unconscious mind made while I was bored, solidifying it all in the real world. This takes about fifteen minutes. Then I am left to struggle at the page with that horrible feeling in my stomach for another forty-five minutes before I allow myself to move on with my day.
If this sounds like bad news, it’s not. It’s actually good news. Here’s the good news: you can relax. If you’re sitting down every day to struggle with your creative work, that’s enough. You don’t need to feel bad because you only managed to write one sentence today or you ended up throwing away whatever it was you were working on. If you’re showing up and sincerely giving your attention to the work, you’re doing your part in the creative process.
Well, I guess the struggling is not the actual totality of your role in the creative process. There are at least two other things. The first thing is ensuring that the unconscious mind has the space to do the creative work: boredom is the key to creativity, and with each measure we take to eliminate boredom we are harming our creativity as well. What do the routines which seem to permit advances in creative projects have in common?—a drive, a shower, a walk?—they are all a little bit boring, and they are some of the last situations a person regularly experiences in which they aren’t likely to have access to free, instant, and infinite entertainment. If you’re never bored, you’ll never create anything, certainly never any art. Part of the creative process is your shower, your morning commute, your afternoon walk, and whatever else it is you do during the day where your mind is allowed to wander. You need to protect those moments and, if possible, establish more of them. As many as you can.
One of the amazing things about regularly engaging with a creative process is that it tends to bleed into the rest of your life. You may begin to find that previously uninteresting things are potentially interesting as a fixture or background in whatever it is you are working on, or maybe just as an infinitesimal context that never makes it into the work in any way, but still informs it somehow; you may take an extra second to concentrate on the colors of the buildings you can see from where you’re eating lunch or the specific feeling associated with being in the waiting room at the doctor’s office, because your conscious mind is in conversation with your creative, unconscious mind, and you have learned that consciously noticing these mundane things gives more creative raw material to the unconscious mind. The other thing you will notice is that your consideration of works of art shifts, especially in your own medium but actually across all varieties too. It becomes more intricate, more hands-on; you change from simple enjoyment to sincere appreciation; it may tend to move you more deeply. And this is the other part of your role in the creative process: to notice these things—both the marvelous and the mundane.