Some of us have a little voice. (Hi.) You know that voice. (Hi, again.) That little voice will show up at the most inopportune of times. (You’re welcome.) You start a creative endeavour, be it cooking, drawing, writing, dancing, coding, planning, researching, wood carving, and then you hear this little voice gently nudging you regarding how your time might be better spent on other activities. (Face it. You suck.)
An alternative, but equally effective route, does not involve this little voice. (…Fine.) You get down to start whatever it is you are trying to do, and you run into a creative wall, your equivalent of writer’s block. (Wood carver’s block?)
Either way, you’re not progressing fast enough and/or happily enough. This is usually a bummer because we walk into these endeavours thinking that all the creativity lives within us, and we’re just not good enough to let it out.
That’s one way to approach it.
Another way is to think about the creative process not as something that is in us like a personal characteristic, but rather something that visits us, a muse, or the original definition of a genius, which is a spirit; a person is thus not a genius, but rather, a person can have a genius. This means the creative process becomes a co-creative process, where you’d share the successes and failures of your outputs.
Elizabeth Gilbert, author of ‘Eat, Pray, Love’, talks about how the creative process is not rational in her TED Talk ‘Your elusive creative genius‘, such that we might as well think about it this way. We did, once upon a time.
So if the creative process is a two-part system, this means both you and the genius are invited to the party. If the genius is flaky, that’s not your problem. Your job is to show up to the party and create like it’s 1999. It’s kinda like that golfer aphorism, “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” I like what Ms. Gilbert said:
‘Ole!’ to you, just for having the sheer human love and stubbornness to keep showing up.