Let’s talk creative process!

It's a curious issue I have been thinking about lately as I try to work seriously on getting good at choreographing dance. I think I realised that I've been trying to approach it the same way I do writing, and that this is probably harming me.

When I write, sometimes I simply write linearly, the writing process mirroring the reading process and the thinking process. And sometimes I use outlines—this method basically comprises a fractal structure: starts with an overarching theme, goal, question, etc.; then breaks up into supporting points or lower-level structure, minutiae, eventually paragraphs and words. Starts with a blurry but coherent picture, and gradually sharpens it until all the fine detail can be resolved.

When choreographing, the linear approach can sometimes yield interesting results, but broadly it just doesn't seem to go anywhere—it lacks structure and thematic coherence. (I think this is partly just a matter of degree—I am prone to have the same trouble when writing, if I am writing something longer, so must balance the linear approach for smaller sections with a modicum of an outline for the higher-level structure.) Outlines, meantime, don't seem to work at all with the medium—although I have found value in keeping in mind a coherent theme, past a certain point further top-down decomposition just ... seems kind of incoherent. What I realised I can do, and seem to be having some success with, is following a bottom-up decomposition. Start with simple, repetitive rhythmic movements, almost in isolation, and then slowly build them up and work out how they fit together and what broader thematic structure they express.

(It now occurs to me is that this could be an interesting way to write. Start with disparate scenes and then slowly piece them together. The approach seems broadly less suited to the medium—more reminiscent of mad libs than serious writing—but still seems like it could go to interesting places, especially if one has difficulty committing to things, as I do.)

I mainly draw and paint digitally for work. I don't really have a ritual or anything that is specific to the creative process.

My ritual is more of trying to maintain waking up early, exercise and impose office hours on myself as I do freelance work from home so I can split work and play hours without mixing them up. Sleeping on time and all that.

I used to kind of wait and do rituals when I first started out, but when I started working in a studio it got drilled in me that as a professional you need to be able to produce at any given time. "We need this by lunch! Go!"

Basically, if you practice enough, you don't need to wait for inspiration to hit. You draw as much as you can and some days you draw better with inspiration and other days you don't draw as good without inspiration but it's still decent.

But then I also realised work killed drawing for me. I got burnt out and got anxious whenever I wanted to draw my own thing. I got sad about that for a while and produced nothing outside of work.

But then I had to learn to separate things. Since work and play was so close together, I had to to find ways to physically separate them so I could mentally separate them too.

So now I do digital art for work because it's faster and more versatile profit wise, but I do traditional paintings for fun. I will not attempt make money from traditional work because I need something to not be work.

I also like making and building things. So I buy random interactive things to play with and build physically. I have a mars biodome kit for kids that I've still not built. Haha.

Since I also sometimes do work for games, it has also killed games for me to a certain extent. But I do the same thing now. I don't play PC games. Not because I don't like them, I just associate work with the PC.

The Steam deck is a solution, but I can't afford that at the moment.

So now I play console games instead so I can be away from the PC. But you still end up thinking about work sometimes, so instead I've been into tabletop games and roleplay.

Basically digital for work, analog for fun. Just like painting.

I've been finding more fun in things I do again now that I've been separating things like this for a while. We just ended a roleplay campaign and I liked the world so much and how my character ended, I was asking my GM (a writer) if we could work together and make a very short comic about it or something.

My current freelance job is to make art for a board game and I'm actually enjoying it compared to when I normally do other work. But that's because the client came to me for my style and subject matter. So it just has been feeling like I'm doing my own thing for fun instead.

Although this is risky. I don't want to to associate board games with work. But eh. It should be fine for this particular situation.

I also come up with stories in my head I work on them over a long period of time and then forget them when I move on to something else. I really should write them down.

I have a few artistic endeavors, but in order to be successful in any of them I need to get a little bored. I partly hate the internet for making it so easy to doomscroll and prevent myself of precious boredom. It works out best if I just walk into a room with nothing to do and sit and let my mind wander a bit. Music is my main jam, so I reorganized my apartment so one bedroom is the media room, one is the sleeping room, and the music room is smack dab in the middle of them. I pass the music room no matter what i have to do - it's right next to the kitchen. Get some water; hit the drums. Take a shower; play some chords.

In the past, i tried to force myself to practice regimens like a good music student. Doesn't work for me. I just need to let things happen organically; I can't force it. For some reason, lighting has always been key to get me in the mood, though. I like my lava lamp and a mix of low power cool and warm LEDs spread around. Something a person might enjoy while high. I don't really need any drugs to feel like i'm high if I set up the environment like that and start playing some music.

I used to write prose, but due to a serious lack of ability I have switched to poetry which people tell(people who won't lie to me) me I have a modicum of affinity for. I write when I have an idea. An idea can come from almost anything and at any time. Last week I remembered a scene from a movie that I last saw over ten years ago, and that remembrance gave me an idea. The idea turned into a tidy little poem that I am fairly proud of.

I can only write on a pc with a physical keyboard. I can't write on a laptop, I make too many mistakes while typing, nor can I write with a pen because I can't keep up with the words when they are flowing. I rewrite with a pen and paper, the physical act of writing manually helps me to slow down, see, hear, and feel the words that I am transcribing. This allows me to correct the flow, condense the idea, and get to the pithy little core of the piece.

Writing is an individualistic endeavor, which to me makes it difficult to utilize ideas from other writers because their ways never seem to work or mesh with my ways. I have read a ton of books on writing and the only advice that seems pertinent to me is to make yourself do it, put your ass in the chair and get those words in your head down on paper. All of the other stuff, write fast and with the flow, cut, cut, cut, is what works for that particular writer, but disciplining yourself to get it down, that is universal and works for everyone. That is my 0.02.

I guess I have a ritual, of proving to myself whether an idea is one I really want to pursue. I daydream a lot (a lot), and can pretty quickly come up with what first steps of a project would be, but I am also guilty of overloading myself. So usually, what I do is pick one thing, and try to do it for about 15 or 20 minutes. That's the Evaluation Period. If I'm into it and keep going, thats gonna be a project I finish. If by the end of that 20 minutes I'm tired and without motivation, I drop it/move on, and maybe I'll try again some other time. The important thing (for me I mean) is that I don't structure it like work, and I don't linger on ideas that didn't pan out.

I do that stuff primarily for me, I'm not trying to sell stuff or become anything, so I don't hold myself accountable for producing or finishing really any of it. I do have some completed projects, and feedback when I showed them to folks has always been pretty good. I go until I don't wish to go, and it's the weight of the idea that provides inertia if that makes any sense. I must not have meant it as much, if I get to work and find quickly thst I don't wish to continue.

That's all pretty unstructured, I can't imagine it works as any sort of advice. I allow most daydreams to just come and go. But sometimes I can't let one go, so I'll try to make it real, and if then I find I'm enjoying myself, I commit until I feel it is what I wanted it to be. Knowing when it's done is a visceral sort of feeling, a sense of "completeness" happens where I suddenly can't think of anything more to do with it. When that feeling occurs I tend to take a break, and when I come back, decide whether I am finished.

For me, it begins with inspiration. That feels a little cliche or generic, since that can be found in many ways - most of the time it’s simply that I want something to exist and it doesn’t seem to.

Similarly to you, I don’t have many rituals and will work just about anywhere I can take my laptop. I’m particularly fond of typing away while laying in bed (maybe too fond..)

As for deciding when something is done… Nothing ever feels done 😄 Typically something is ‘finished’ when my short attention span has moved on to a new muse :)

I'm a composer, specifically of soundworks. A lot of my work involves working with field recordings, and wanting to interrogate the relationships between self and place. So my process starts with thinking about a general theme that I want to explore. Then I'll think about what sort of place might embody that (geographically, culturally). While I'm in a place recording, I make a mental note of keywords that pop up while I'm there, such as what memories and sensations I'm experiencing, what sorts of sounds I'm being drawn to and why. All of these aspects will inform my compositional process.

Sometimes I want to make a thing - either a physical thing from wood or metal, write a thing or make a photo or write some code - and I know what I'm doing so I just do it. That's the easy way.

But sometimes I need to make a thing, for example this week I've been making jewellery pieces for the staff at my kid's nursery. So I have an end goal but not necessarily any idea what I'm doing to get there. First and most effective thing I do is tidy up. I do keep my workshop fairly tidy most of the time because it's impossible to work in any other way - but there's always tidying to do. It's concentration without thought. It's an easy way to get into flow and while my brain is distracted worrying about whether I'd got all the dust from a place or where I should put these tools, my subconscious can get on with thinking things up. I find a whole lot of "creativity" is about distracting your conscious mind.

If tidying doesn't work I'll open some drawers, grab some materials and start making things at semi-random. Sometimes starting the process is enough to give me an idea which I can then develop into something useful (this also works for writing, just write any old shit - I can always and usually do replace it with something better later. And photography too)

Sometimes - and especially for engineering-like/construction projects which have more clear technical requirements - I spend what seems like far too long fiddling around defining the problem space, to find where the edges are. What are the dimensions of the thing I want to make, what are the problems the code will solve, what materials can I use or whatever. I have notebooks full of lists of dimensions and bullet points of requirements. This is all still distraction, but it's also furnishing my subconscious with the parameters it has to work within. Sometimes I'll hang around at this point for days or even weeks before suddenly realising exactly what I want to do within the space I've already defined (my yet-to-be-built elevated playhouse for the kid was one of those - took months of not "doing" anything then one morning a fully-formed plan dropped into my head)

On this week's project, in the end I made this terribly photographed copper and silver pasta pendant (and some more stuff too, obviously), which I'm really pleased with and I know the person it's for will love it.

I was a playwright in a past life. I'm sure you've heard the old adage before, but the most important rule to me was not to let anything be too precious. Don't obsess over one piece of work - produce, push yourself to try new things, and it will work out for the better.

The first couple years I spent as an aspiring playwright, I obsessed over one script that frankly wasn't all that interesting. What helped me was to implement routines that forced me to change gears and explore new ideas. I'd put on a playlist of music (usually stuff I wasn't familiar with) and write flash fiction - pump out a story, with the only limit being that I had to stop when the song was done and move on and start fresh. This meant I could sit for a couple hours and hammer out maybe 20-30 concepts, many of them not wrapped up nicely with a bow. Most of them would be shit. But if I sat there for a couple hours and came up with one idea I really liked, that was a success to me.

Once I started doing that I found myself able to create not just more work but better work, and it was only after that point that I managed to get any plays produced. It also meant that if I pitched/submitted something and it got turned down I wasn't heartbroken.

My creative outlet is photography.

So it rarely features a ritual (except "is the battery okay? Is there a SD-Card inside?") and given the hobby and the things I like to take pictures off when I start walking I don't know if and with what I'll end up. I just pack my bag with a little more than I hope to see and do (like walking at a river - better have the tripod and ND-Filter!)

A common thing I do however is that before I decide to take a shot, I set it up in my head, so I imagine how the exact framing would look like before I decide if it's worth taking the camera out or not. I might also go a few steps left and right, or make a squat, to see what changes it would have on the picture. A valuable lesson I learnt in photography is that a picture tends to be complete when nothing can be removed anymore. So I might not try to take a picture of the entire flower field and the mountains in the background and the half-timber house on the left. But I might focus on a single flower, with the half-timber house slightly outside depth-of-field so you can still recognize it. Or I might switch to black and white to see if this would yield a better result.

Controlled chaos. I might do some prep work, take notes, write lists, or whatever, but I like to just dive right into the first spark of an idea I have that excites me and work up some sort of rough draft. Then I take a step back and evaluate and decide from there. So many projects and endeavors I've seen can just send people walking around in circles trying to get things just right from the get-go or talking themselves into and out of something, but at a certain point, you just need to act on it. Whether it's right or wrong or a bad idea, you're not going to know until after you've done it.

Like I stopped trying to collaborate with some friends on writing/design projects because they would just talk and talk and talk and then nobody would ever DO anything about their ideas. I like seeing ideas take some sort of rough shape, then pulling back and evaluating. I like just throwing caution to the wind, rolling the dice, throwing whatever against the wall, seeing what sticks, and then thinking about it after I have something to look at.

As far as actual inspiration, I like looking in random, unexpected places. Watch movie genres I haven't watched before, go on walks to strange places, roam the shelves at the library, draw random cards from a tarot deck, literally roll dice, something, anything that breaks me out of my comfort zone.

I have quite a few actually. I write science fiction, so for me a good movie or tv show can get the juices flowing. The Stargate properties, Star Trek, are generally good if I already have a bit of a thing going, but if I need to get out of a slump where I haven't been writing, I go for something more involved. The X-Universe games from Egosoft were at least partially responsible for stoking the fire in the first place, so I go back to those regularly.

Outside of that, I walk a lot. Every morning I do 4 k and let myself get a little bored on the way. It works wonders.