Today I’m going to teach you the creative process. I’m going to teach you how to become creative because there is a system for this. You can train this skill set into your life so you have something better to do than consume all the time. If you’re reading this right now, you’re very likely a creative person. I think you have a lot of ideas, and I think for a long time you’ve struggled to bring those ideas to life because you don’t have a process.
So you go to create something. You start at the very beginning, and then very quickly you realise you’re not at the skill level necessary to make this what you want it to be. So you get discouraged. Maybe you get distracted by another really cool idea. And what happens is you never finish anything.
So you never build confidence that you can finish things, and you keep starting projects, getting pulled in a million directions, and getting overwhelmed until you might even tell yourself things like, “I’m not a creative person; I’m not cut out for this.” These are beliefs. And what you really need is a system or a process that allows you to train over and over again because the more that you train your creativity systematically, the better you’re going to get.
There are four steps to this. I’d recommend you get a piece of paper or something to take notes with. Understand, first of all, that you can do this. You’re capable of this. Everything we’re talking about in the realm of creativity is a skill issue, meaning you can develop it through practice.
Step one: we call this the spark.
You need to stay open to ideas; design a life and create a mental ecosystem that lets new ideas come in. Everyone always wonders where ideas come from, and no one really has a definitive answer.
The best thing you can do, though, is make sure you’re not overstimulated all the time. When your brain is a quiet, calm place, there’s much more room for new, interesting ideas to come about. Okay. I recommend you go for a walk today without music or any other form of stimulation.
Welcome boredom back into your life so ideas can make themselves known to you at the beginning. The idea for your next creative project is not a massive light bulb going off over your head. It’s a gentle whisper or a nudge on your shoulder.
To get good at receiving those things, you’re not going to have divine inspiration. Oh, my gosh! I know what my magnum opus is going to be. I’m going to disappear for six months, write a Great novel and put it out to the world. It’s very likely not going to happen. I would let go of that. What I would do is I would get bored. I would turn off all the noise.
Make your brain a quiet place. Get some motion in the ocean and your body, and then you’re going to have a little spark of curiosity. It’s not inspiration, it’s curiosity. What if I made a song using this instrument? What if there was a story that started with this sentence? Or I see a street sign that evokes something in me?
When you feel that little nudge. You have a spark. So then you’re going to write something down. You’re going to have a notebook and a pen or a voice note or something, and you’re going to capture the initial form of the idea. You’re not starting the project yet. You’re trying to capture the inspiration or the curiosity that came from you.
This idea comes from Rod Sterling. He’s the mind behind The Twilight Zone. Penned a lot of the episodes. Anyway, Capture. Yeah, yeah. Initially, get that initial one-sentence summary of the idea that came to you, and then keep walking. Let it brew. Anytime that you let go of focusing on it, it’s going to keep working in your subconscious. It’s still cooking back there. That’s really cool.
Step 2. Then you’re going to get into the sandbox.
This is the drafting process for people just starting out in the creative process. This is where I think they find the most resistance: taking an idea from beginning to end and letting it be bad, letting it be a rough draft. Because they have this very pristine vision in their heads. They can see what it should be. They can hear what the song should sound like, or see the movie exactly how they want it to look. Oh, it’s going to be like this. It’s going to be like this amazing movie and this.
Mashed together, it’s going to be great. And then when you face the blank page, when you’re looking at a blinking cursor, very quickly, you’re like, oh. Oh, OK, this is going to be difficult, and maybe I can’t do it, and maybe you can’t. But that’s why we’re teaching the process, so that you can make a bunch of really small things over and over again, day over day, week over week, until eventually you produce something bigger and more amazing just because you’ve continued to do it and you can’t help yourself.
The sandbox is where you’re going to intentionally make a mess of it. You’re going to write it out from the beginning to add or, you know, whatever it is for your particular medium. If it’s, you know, wheel-throwing pottery, you’re going to just make a messy first draft. I’m not sure how well this applies to your medium, but for writing it makes perfect sense.
Beginning to end as sloppy as you can. You want to capture the idea as it presents itself. So this is a big thing where you’re not trying to control it. You’re not trying to, you know, manoeuvre it or squeeze it into something it isn’t. Understand that the inspiration, the idea, the creative impulse is coming from something beyond you, and you’re trying to just channel it as best you can.
You are the translator of the idea. When you think about it this way, it removes a lot of the pressure because it’s not about you trying. Be as brilliant as possible. It’s like, no, I am just a medium that this idea is moving through, OK. And it’s just about being as honest as I can to that initial piece of DNA that made itself known to you when you first captured the idea.
You remember that initial tap on the shoulder, that vague curiosity that made itself known. All you’re doing is you’re just going from beginning to end, writing the whole thing out, staying true to that idea. OK, it should be fun. So, very practically, what this looks like is you’re chasing the excitement. OK, you’re not trying to make something amazing. You should be doing this very quickly.
I highly recommend doing this drafting process, or the sandbox process, in one sitting if possible. This can take an hour, 3 hours or 4 hours. Understand that you’re going to do a lot of work on this once you’ve generated the raw material. That’s it. That’s it.
You want this to be fun. And anytime you hear your little critic within your brain say, oh, this is bad, this isn’t good, you’re just going to say, hey, I’m going to change it later. I don’t. You’re not in the room right now. This isn’t your job. Ray Bradbury is one of the most prolific short story writers of all time and huge inspiration of mine kept a sign at his typewriter every day of his life that he went to write and said don’t think.
This is not a time for thinking. This is a time for feeling. This is a time for just getting the idea out like a kid. Remember when you were a kid, and you were just yapping, hopefully, to friends and family about all the cool stuff? Things in your brain. Hopefully, you grew up somewhere you were allowed to do that, because that’s the kind of energy we want right now.
So that’s what you’re going to do in this rough draft anyway. I think you get the idea. No pressure. Just go for as long as you can. Once you start to fill, your reserves deplete. Once you get tired, you don’t really want to do it anymore. Stop. Just take a break. Breathe. Don’t distract yourself. Don’t go on your phone. Don’t. Do something else. Let your brain relax. Just actually rest. OK? This is a big thing: passive consumption of media, distraction chasing, is not actually rest; it’s more stimulation.
And so when you do that as a means of getting away from the work, you’re not refilling your reservoir or your resources. You’re continuing to deplete yourself such that it’ll become harder to return to the work when you’re ready or when you want to. So rest, sit in silence, go for another walk, talk to someone or read a book.
The beautiful thing about having a completed sandbox is that now you have captured all the DNA of the idea. You have this initial form, and that’s precious. You don’t want it to be perfect. You want the most honest, messy, sloppy thing that you can possibly create. Because that was the idea moving through you, and now you know what it wants to be. OK, this isn’t about you. This isn’t about you looking brilliant.
This isn’t about you making a song that’s going to make people compare you to Dua Lipa, whoever it is, right? Like the idea showed up and wanted to move through you. And I know this is getting a little spiritual, but I promise you, when you start to look at the work this way, your ego anxiety and worries about becoming good, liked and successful start to go away. Because then your attention shifts to, OK, what is my job? How can I best be? Service to this idea. How can I serve the process? What is? How can I be present in this experience?
And that’s where the good work comes from. Ego anxiety creates more ego anxiety. That is not what you need when you want to develop your creative process. OK, so once you have that rough draft, great, now you have material to play with. That takes us to Step 3
Step 3, The sculpting, is where you start to refine the work.
It’s where you start to read through what you’ve just produced very slowly and without any judgment, and you just try. Start making it what it needs to be again, not making it good, great, amazing. The best thing that human beings ever made. None of that making it what it needs to be. If you’ve done your job in the drafting process, you know what the idea wants to be.
Now you just serve the idea by trimming the fat and adding some extra muscle tissue, writing new paragraphs. Introducing more clarity, right? Removing things that you don’t need. Now, I can’t just tell you exactly how to do that. That’s a qualitative evolution that you’ll make in your own process. You’ll get better at this over time by consuming media and art you really enjoy and that inspires you, then continuing to run this process.
OK, to start the sculpting process, I just clean up the sandbox. So I go through and add periods to sentences that are missing them, fix typos and hit enter a few times between paragraphs so I can see the material. I’m not making any qualitative adjustments. I’m not changing sentences; I’m not adding material. I’m not making any hard creative decisions yet. I’m just kind of working way in through the edges.
How am I possibly going to make this good? And the truth is, you just kind of slowly tiptoe your way in if you can spend 5 to 10 minutes editing some of the surface. Mistakes. Suddenly you’ve made 12 keystrokes, or you’ve made a couple of changes, and then it’s like, you know what? This sentence is kind of funky. I’m going to change this one word, or this sentence is a little bit too long.
Whatever, address this to whatever your medium is. Maybe it’s music, whatever, but you just work your way in through the edges. That’s it. Then you slowly start to get into it, make more changes and build momentum. That’s kind of how it goes. Then you get into the refinement process, and this can take a long time for me. I keep it pretty short. My creative philosophy right now is to make as many things as possible as fast as possible, while still making them as good as possible. I think that spending a month on something isn’t going to make it that much better than if I were to spend a week on something, and I’m better off just making a lot of things.
You might feel differently, and that’s OK. The sculpting process, that refinement process, the editing process is going to take some time. At a certain point, you stop; you start to chase, or at least I start to chase, the relief of being done with the piece, right.
So it’s like, oh, I would rather be done with this and move on to the next thing. So I’m not going to try to make it perfect. And when you’re starting off building this process, trying to run this system as many times as you can, I recommend letting go of perfection and actually chasing imperfection, learning to let it in, saying, you know what, I’m going to make an imperfect piece so that I can finish it so that I can start the next one.
The big theme here is repetition. We’re training a system into our lives. We’re building out this, programming these skills into ourselves so that we can repeat them. Because if we repeat this 100, 200, 1000 times, we’re going to be much better creatives than if we were to try to, you know, spend a year working on a novel without ever having done something before. Does that make sense?
OK. That’s why I love short stories. They let me finish something, move on to the next, and get better over time. Do that 13 – 20 times. That’s a book. So that’s how I approach it. Stay true to the spirit of the idea. Let the idea come out as it wants to. Make sure it’s honest. Make it as good as you can, then release it.
That brings us to the final step of the process: sharing.
And this can look like a lot of different things. Maybe you want to share the work on the Internet or in some other public setting. Maybe it’s something you just want to share with a friend, or maybe it’s something you want to put on your shelf and keep for yourself, whatever it is. Ever the final end place of the pieces. That’s fine. But what you’re going to do is you’re going to let it go.
You’re going to let it go. You’re going to finish it. You’re going to understand that, yeah, you probably could’ve spent more time on it and made it better, but you’re just going to let it go. You’re gonna put it away so that you can start the next one.
Let’s review what we’ve covered so far.
You’ve created a mental ecosystem. You’ve quieted your brain so that you can receive ideas. Ideas like sparks. OK, the seed of an idea is going to be a gentle tap on the shoulder, not a massive lightbulb moment. OK, once you receive a seed, you’re going to write something down. And write down the spirit of the idea. Just one sentence, a story that goes like this or a song that sounds like this, or a, you know, a piece of pottery that looks like this, a drawing that OK, you’re going to just write that initial thing down.
And you’re going to get into the practice of listening for ideas. You’re going to pay attention to your life so that ideas make themselves known to you. The more you do this, the more ideas come to you.
I promise you, this is a, this is a flywheel, right? This is a snowball of momentum. Once it’s going and you feed it, it keeps speeding up. And that’s what takes the place of your consumption habits because you slowly become quietly addicted to creativity and to ideas.
That’s a much better way to live your life. World, then chronic consumption. OK, so you write down the initial idea, then you get in the sandbox. You make a messy long. Very human first draft. I read everything by hand. I recommend you do the same thing. Just get the idea out, then transcribe it over whatever. Start editing it. OK, start refining it. Work your way around the edges. Just slowly find your way in.
Face that initial resistance of it’s not good, it’s not good, it’s not good. Stay calm, regulate yourself and take deep breaths.
Edit the surface-level things, then slowly add material, take stuff out, rework the piece and finally share it. Give it away, give it away. It doesn’t belong to you anymore; it belongs to the world. Let it go, move on to the next one you’re living in. The modern world: this is what the process looks like.
Creativity is a skill set. You can train it, and I believe you need to, to replace consumption and have something better to live for than chronic distraction. Run the process, see what you’re capable of, see what needs to come out of you. Release it to the world. And then move on to the next one.
