How to be creative without really trying
How to be creative without really trying
Creativity should be fun and playful. Here’s how to do it.
Creativity: it feels ecstatic when you do it right and agonizing when you do it poorly.
I should know. I’ve written dozens of songs, essays, and a feature film; built software for Google, startups, and my friends; and I taught a course on design at the Recurse Center.
In these creative cycles, I pay special attention to the initial phase I call cultivation. In cultivation, we turn an insight — an initial, exciting idea — into a creative work — a full expression of the insight, ready for expanding upon.
I argue that in cultivation, insights are perfected or ruined. In this essay, I share my tips for navigating this phase to a) err towards joy rather than misery and b) create a work that’s true to your initial insight.
Let’s begin!
What makes creating hard?
Everybody has good ideas. So why doesn’t everybody create good work?
I have a theory.
People impose form on a work rather than letting the work assume form.
Intuitive & analytical minds
To explain this, I’m going to introduce the concept of the intuitive and analytical minds.1
The intuitive mind is powerful at generating insights, seeing the big picture, and accessing your unconscious. You could say that the intuitive mind sees the forest, not the trees. However, it has two liabilities: it tends to think nonlinearly, and it has difficulty putting its insights into language.
The analytical mind can think linearly and form sentences, so it complements the intuitive mind well. It’s powerful at focusing on detail, processing information linearly, and dealing with abstractions. It definitely sees the trees rather than the forest. But here’s the thing about the analytical mind: it has no sense of meaning, or context, for any of the things it does.
You could say that the intuitive mind knows but doesn’t speak, while the analytical mind speaks but doesn’t know.
How the analytical mind screws things up
I believe that people get stuck creatively when they create from a place of analysis rather than intuition.
Here’s how it usually happens: Your intuitive mind presents you with a brilliant insight. You’re thrilled; you can imagine the finished work clearly. But as you start to execute the work, the analytical mind subtly begins to (mis)shape it. It assigns an inappropriate form or dilutes the initial insight with filler. Eventually you find yourself with a rigid, uninspired work that you’re too frustrated to touch. You throw your hands up and swear off creativity forever.
It doesn’t have to be like this. Here’s my proposed alternative:
The process
Self-knowledge: make the unconscious conscious
Our first practice happens before we’ve even started creating. I call it self-knowledge: the lifelong process of bringing our unconscious into conscious awareness.
Why practice self-knowledge? Since insights arise in the unconscious, in order to generate more insights, we benefit from strengthening our connection to our unconscious.2
There are countless practices for doing this. My personal favorites are:
Meditation: I like open awareness practices (eg. shikantaza) that cultivate receptiveness rather than doing.
Journaling: The messier, the better. I like Julia Cameron’s morning pages exercise.
Deep Conversations: This could be therapy (if your circumstances allow it), but it could also be a walk and talk with a close friend. When you say something that makes you think Hmm, didn’t know that about myself, you’re on the right track.
Voice Memos: This is my personal favorite practice. When doing some other task, like driving or going for a walk, I’ll start a voice memo and just speak extemporaneously. Because I talk faster than I write, I usually go deeper than I could while journaling. Because I know I’m being recorded, my speech is just slightly more polished than my stream of consciousness. Usually I delete the voice memo afterwards — the point is just to talk.
Remember that the point of self-knowledge practices is not to create yet. If you feel critical of something that came up in your self-knowledge practice, your analytical mind might be trying to wrestle control from the intuitive mind. If so, I encourage you to make your self-knowledge practice even messier for a time so you practice abandoning the impulse to impose form.
Record your initial insight in minimal form
Eventually, you’re going to have an insight: an idea that excites you and feels worth expanding upon.
Your job at this stage is to shape the insight into its minimal form: the smallest possible representation of the insight such that 1) every part of the minimal form has weight to you and 2) you can picture the completed work in the minimal form.
For example, minimal form could look like a logline for a movie, a napkin sketch of a painting, a diagram of an app’s homepage, or a voice memo of the chorus of a song.
I emphasize minimal because I want your analytical mind to resist the urge to dilute your initial insight with less weighty ideas. Have you ever had a friend tell you about a story idea they’ve had, and it goes something like “There’s this detective, and his name is Roger, and he has a pet beagle, and it’s also sci-fi…?” Clearly some parts of this insight have weight for my friend, but he doesn’t know which. Perhaps his minimal form looks like “I’m excited about the idea of telling a hard-boiled detective story in outer space.”
When you record your initial insight, I recommend recording your intention: why this insight feels like a meaningful investment of your time and attention. In the trenches of the creative process, you can return to this intention to revive your faith in the work.
Add insights to the work
After you’ve created the work’s minimal form, your analytical mind will want to hastily expand it using brute force. Resist that urge.
Instead, your role at this stage is to collect insights. Insights occur over time, nonlinearly, and unpredictably, especially when you’re doing something embodied like walking, washing dishes, or taking a shower. This step is like reconstructing a song played on a loop on a static-filled radio. The work will reveal itself in full, but over time and out of order.
When you have an insight, reduce it to its minimal form and add it to the work where it feels appropriate. For example, if adding an insight to a story, put it in chronological order. In most other cases, I like to sort insights from most to least weighty.
Reshape the work to fit the new insight
After you’ve added your new insight to the work, take a step back. This is where we let the work assume form. What is it trying to become?
In reshaping, you might:
Merge related insights. If you keep having variants of the same insight, that’s a good sign. Merge them into one weighty insight.
Reorder insights. Keep sorting by descending weight if that feels appropriate.
Remove insights, if they no longer have any weight.
Rethink the work’s medium. Maybe you planned to write a book, but your thesis fits into a song’s chorus. Go with it.
My favorite tools for easily reshaping works are:
FigJam (for visual work) to quickly create and rearrange ideas.
Notion (for textual work) because I can easily rearrange content on pages and access lists of insights.
Pen & paper | index cards | sticky notes (for any work) because I can express myself most easily there. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
If you’re creatively blocked…
If you take away nothing else from this piece, remember this.
If you’re blocked, you probably imposed too much form on the work.
To get unblocked, revert some or all of the work’s form.
Remember when I said it’s easier to contribute to something messy than something neat? I want you to mess the work up. De-indent the nested bullet points. Move the prototype from FigJam to a sticky note. Re-record the song as a demo. Throw everything in a big pile. Trust that by making a temporary mess, you're going to end up with a cleaner finished work.
Add and reshape until the work feels complete
Repeat, repeat, repeat. The cycle should be one of expansion (adding insights) and contraction (reshaping the work). If you’re just expanding, try to contract more. If you’re just contracting, try to expand more.
Expand the work
Eventually, the work will feel complete. The story has a clear arc, the song has three verses and a chorus, the app’s prototype has a clear flow from start to finish. You’ll know the work is complete when 1) the rate of new insights slows and 2) you reshape the work less and less with each new insight.
Now, you use your analytical mind to expand the work. This is where domain-specific skills come into play: the screenwriter writes the dialog; the pianist practices the piece; the programmer builds the app.
Some people think that reshaping the work during the expansion process is inevitable. (Think of the over-budget, reshoot-heavy film or the delayed software launch.) I disagree with these people. Over time, I’ve gotten better at measuring twice (reshaping early and often) and cutting once (executing painlessly). I believe you can too.
In summary…
That’s the process!
To recap:
Practice self-knowledge
Record the initial insight in minimal form
Add insights
Reshape the work
Repeat 3 & 4 until the work feels complete
Expand on the work.
Personally, this process has been a revelation for me. I enjoy creating more than I ever did, and each work feels more important and honest to me. I’m curious to know how it works for you! Feel free to email me at reymbarcelo@gmail.com to let me know what you’re working on, where you’ve been stuck, or any questions you have.
Have fun creating!
Rey ☀️
I’m indebted to Ian McGilchrist and his book The Master and His Emissary for my “two minds” framework. The intuitive mind corresponds to the brain’s right hemisphere and the analytical mind corresponds to the brain’s left hemisphere, but for simplicity I chose to avoid referring to hemispheres in the article.
Julia Cameron’s The Artist's Way (especially her twin practices of morning pages and artist date) helped inform my thinking on this step of the process. It’s a good read, but — speaking from personal experience here — don’t let reading about the creative process sidetrack you from creating. (The same applies to reading this article 😉)