No Hacks, Tricks, or Tips Will Do It
There’s a quote from a Robert Frost poem that I really like — but it’s not the one you may be thinking of:
You can hack, disrupt, and innovate all you like, but at some point, those approaches cease to further the cause of creating stuff. In many cases, though, the following holds true:
It is simply a matter of work.
You can take this as a simple platitude that merely passes along the conventional wisdom of the Protestant work ethic, but you do so at your own peril. Unravel it a bit, and you can find a more useful prescription for helping push along your creative endeavors.
The Art of Craft
Brian Eno, one of the two mad geniuses behind the Oblique Strategies once said:
“Craft is what enables you to be successful when you’re not inspired.”
The key word here is craft. It conjures up the image of that unsexy work — the drab and sometimes monotonous tasks that you just get through, the work that tends to be uniform and codified in your workflow. It’s not the spontaneous, exciting work we often associate with creativity and inspiration. But, it is the foundation of creative work. The actual ideation — the creative portion of creative work, where one literally makes something up, is exhilarating, exciting, it pulls you along on a journey. But as most of us know, it comes in fits and starts — it’s not consistent.
The point is this: your creative process will not always be an exhilarating downhill glide of inspiration. Sometimes it will be drudgery, and sometimes drudgery is what is needed. You have to get used to, and fully accept impermanence. Just like you have experienced bursts of mad genius and easy creative momentum before — and they have passed — so will this lull. But it only passes if you keep moving. Craft — so-called drudgery — is what keeps you moving, keeps you focused on your thing (whatever that may be), so that you keep making progress. But make no mistake, it is work, and it is difficult — both difficult to do, and difficult to motivate yourself to do.
A Way to Keep Moving: The Idealanche
So in order to motivate yourself to keep working and boost your creativity, here is a modest proposal:
I call it the idealanche (please, hold your applause).
Here’s how it works. Please wear the proper safety equipment. For your next available working hour, focus only one one fresh, new document, and just churn out ideas. Feel free to cross off bad ones as you churn out more. Also feel free to elaborate a bit in a note under each bullet point, but don’t begin actual work on any of the ideas. The point of this exercise is to build momentum, and to create a log of ideas, to prove to yourself that you’ve still got it (whatever it is that allows to complete things). And guess what? This is as true an example as you’ll find of the craft of creative thinking!
But there’s a catch about the idealanche: it must be on a blank page, a new document, a new note, etc. It can’t be part of a notebook, or a new portion of an existing document or outline. You need to clear your mind of any other ideas or preconceived notions — you need as clear a mental space as is possible.
Don’t treat this prescription as relying too much on tools, or an example of productivity porn (getting obsessed with tools and methods, rather than just getting things done). Recognize this as a serious treatment of a simple condition: we humans are fragile when it comes to thinking creatively. So much affects us, and we have to take steps to combat those effects that just don’t serve our mission.
Guard the Horizon
We so often get blocked because we as humans are sensitive to the influencing power of other ideas and objects. It doesn’t mean we become controlled by them, it just means that they crowd themselves into our mental horizon, such that we have to look around them just to see what we’re trying to focus on.
No one is exempt from this; it will always be the case, so long as humans have minds that resemble the kind we know homo sapiens sapiens to have.
The real power that we ought to seek is the power to notice when something crowds into our mental horizon and be able to clear it out as quickly as possible.
Some things — thoughts, ideas, inclinations — will always be there, and most of us will never notice many of them, but they are there. They affect us. They are the reason that we get creative blocks, get confused, feel oddly anxious, fail to fall asleep, and numerous other psychological pains. This is what the buddhists refer to as dukkha, and it is the very basis for their particular worldview.
So, like the buddhists, we need to acknowledge the root of the problem, and work to ensure that we effectively work against it. This, then, becomes your craft, your work. You get up, and ensure that the mental horizon is as clear as you can get it. Obviously, the best tool for this is meditation, and not (unfortunately) coffee and your Facebook feed. I sense that if you’re reading this, you already have an inkling that this is true.
For me, the writing of this post began with something like the idealanche, on a plane to Boston. I felt completely un-creative, sitting in a cramped airplane seat, the gentleman next to me snoring and twitching, and my back hurting from my odd position. But, the craft portion of my creative workflow pulled me through. I just started listing ideas and stayed on the page, working through until I had a list that was good enough to start. This piece of writing is not going to be my best — not by a long shot. In retrospect, it may not even be good. But I actually did the work. The momentum is preserved, and I became just a bit better at clearing out the mental horizon, which will serve me well as long as I live. Here’s hoping that you discover the same thing.
Godspeed.
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An earlier draft of this post lives at my legacy blog: Your Fool Laureate.
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