Getting Creative Work Done
Oct. 19th, 2006 02:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nemorathwaldCreative work is still work. When writing, design, or another use of the imagination is a task one has committed to do, one cannot wait for inspiration to strike. The creative professional has to learn how to corral inspiration.
Recoiling at the passionless utility, I used to consider this an excellent reason to keep my creative output mostly partitioned from my income except for the occasional freelance job. Anything that I do because I have to, I can no longer even tell whether I sincerely still want to. There may or may not be a market for things I like, so it would probably involve making things I don't like, too much of which would kill my desire to work in that medium at all. I'm careful to stay in love with the rewarding part of my life and have fun with it. If I can find the sweet spot in which people will pay me to do it, so much the better; if not, too bad.
I must be careful that the luxury of being an amateur does not result in slacking off on creative output. My most successful times have come when I treat creative challenges as puzzles to be solved, and then apply myself to finding the answers to those questions as if I were a detective. I have to have something in my hands and say "no no, this is all wrong," and roll up my sleeves to open its guts. I either tinker with trial and error, or I apply the insights I've gleaned from experience about what makes me like something. Either way I fix the machine until it works for me.
The main reason that I didn't do more creative work used to be that I didn't know what to draw, what to animate, what to write a webcomic about, etc. One of the reasons fanfic is so successful might be that many of us don't know how to determine the goal state, so we have to get it from someone else and improve on how they did it. Having a nifty idea is said to be easier than sitting down and doing the work, but it's an equally insurmountable step for those who don't know the trick of it. Yes, there is a trick to "where do you get your ideas?" and yes-- difficult as it may be for authors to believe-- some of us needed to be taught it. Neil Gaiman, who never needed to be taught it, wrote an excellent article about this process after he had been asked "where do you get your ideas" umpteen million times. He identified several idea-seed questions. "What if..." "If only..." "I wonder..." "If this goes on..." "Wouldn't it be interesting if..." That's the trick to which one devotes quiet time and gets to work on making the imagination do something. After and between the reveries in which the goal state is realized and revised, one locks one's self in the workshop carrying out the mechanics to put it in a consumable form outside one's head.
My current creative challenge is to write a humorous skit of a game show between the Klingon Language Institute and The Logical Language Group for the annual Lojban Festival at Philcon. It's difficult to create drama not based on conflict. I have been instructed to make sure that Klingon and Lojban come out looking like apples and oranges for whom the idea of inferiority is inapplicable, while illustrating their non-overlapping goals and features, and have the contestants collaborate to destroy the competition itself. "Warrior Language And Logical Language Join Forces For The First Time!" How's that for a story hook? Philcon is November 17 through 19, so it must be finished within a month.
Recoiling at the passionless utility, I used to consider this an excellent reason to keep my creative output mostly partitioned from my income except for the occasional freelance job. Anything that I do because I have to, I can no longer even tell whether I sincerely still want to. There may or may not be a market for things I like, so it would probably involve making things I don't like, too much of which would kill my desire to work in that medium at all. I'm careful to stay in love with the rewarding part of my life and have fun with it. If I can find the sweet spot in which people will pay me to do it, so much the better; if not, too bad.
I must be careful that the luxury of being an amateur does not result in slacking off on creative output. My most successful times have come when I treat creative challenges as puzzles to be solved, and then apply myself to finding the answers to those questions as if I were a detective. I have to have something in my hands and say "no no, this is all wrong," and roll up my sleeves to open its guts. I either tinker with trial and error, or I apply the insights I've gleaned from experience about what makes me like something. Either way I fix the machine until it works for me.
The main reason that I didn't do more creative work used to be that I didn't know what to draw, what to animate, what to write a webcomic about, etc. One of the reasons fanfic is so successful might be that many of us don't know how to determine the goal state, so we have to get it from someone else and improve on how they did it. Having a nifty idea is said to be easier than sitting down and doing the work, but it's an equally insurmountable step for those who don't know the trick of it. Yes, there is a trick to "where do you get your ideas?" and yes-- difficult as it may be for authors to believe-- some of us needed to be taught it. Neil Gaiman, who never needed to be taught it, wrote an excellent article about this process after he had been asked "where do you get your ideas" umpteen million times. He identified several idea-seed questions. "What if..." "If only..." "I wonder..." "If this goes on..." "Wouldn't it be interesting if..." That's the trick to which one devotes quiet time and gets to work on making the imagination do something. After and between the reveries in which the goal state is realized and revised, one locks one's self in the workshop carrying out the mechanics to put it in a consumable form outside one's head.
My current creative challenge is to write a humorous skit of a game show between the Klingon Language Institute and The Logical Language Group for the annual Lojban Festival at Philcon. It's difficult to create drama not based on conflict. I have been instructed to make sure that Klingon and Lojban come out looking like apples and oranges for whom the idea of inferiority is inapplicable, while illustrating their non-overlapping goals and features, and have the contestants collaborate to destroy the competition itself. "Warrior Language And Logical Language Join Forces For The First Time!" How's that for a story hook? Philcon is November 17 through 19, so it must be finished within a month.
