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snowflake_challenge, and this challenge wants us to introspect about how we turn things out.
The problem with talking about my process is that saying "Well, I think about things, and when an idea pops into my had, I write it as far as it's able to go, and when i hit a block, I go back to thinking and gathering input again." is pretty boring. Doing some of the art exercises isn't any better: "Stare at the source art, try to think of it in terms of lines and shapes, then try to match those lines and shapes on the thing I'm drawing on."
I'm pretty much a poster child for the idea that a lot of output is not so much about being repeatedly hit with inspiration, as much as it is doing a little bit of work over a long period of time, and being satisfied when something complete pops out. And using constraints and guardrails to drop the available space from infinity to something that can be comprehended and worked with.
So much of the creative process for me is internal, so it's not like I have entire documents written of drafts, of discards, of stuff that shows the process at work. And a fair amount of it happens while in distracted by other things, so you'd need something like an fMRI or other brain scanner to watch things happen, and to interpret what you see properly as the lightbulb moments that happen, before there's conscious awareness of it happening.
[Excuse me for a moment while I put down the solution to something that had been blocking me in a project.]
Where was I? Right, lightning strikes. They do happen, but often as the result of a synthesis that clicks into place at the right time. Sometimes drawing in a lot of input is the thing that helps, because having a brain that likes to make connections between things, even very disparate things, can mean traversing all kinds of pathways, including the fun ones where you waltz your way through six different genres and ten stories to make a connection that allows you go to forward on some other thing that has nothing to do with any of that, except for one tangential bit that turns out to be exceedingly important for the situation in front of you.
And sometimes, the correct option is to set this down and pick up something else, which helps the variable attention stimulus brain be happy, choosing to go after something else that seems like there's a pathway forward over, rather than trying to keep hammering on the same thing over and over again, and letting the brain do more of those background connections and worthwhile work.
[And now, some more time spent on a different project, where an idea has just appeared and will be quite workable, thank you.]
It's not necessarily anything special, and I suspect most of the people who do writing for a living, especially writing that is in the novel-length department, don't spend days waiting for the inspiration to hit, they have work processes where they go after the words that are coming, and then, when the words they really want arrive, they switch back to that project and provide all the words they can on that. Even if a project is destined for the drawer, it's still sometimes useful to spend the time on it to bring it all the way to fruition, or at least to a strong outline and some other parts in it where you can get all that you wanted to get out of it, and maybe come back to it later when you want to do something different with it, or feel like you can rework it into something that will go.
So, yeah, the creative process. Doesn't always involve a lot of outlining, or multiple draftings, or other such things. Some of that is the experience I have helping me get close to the thing I want on the first try, and some of it is tricking myself into believing that the thing itself is not sufficiently important to have a complete nervous energy about. With the help of betas and editors, I like to think that I can turn out good things on the regular.
snowflake_challenge, and this challenge wants us to introspect about how we turn things out.Challenge #8
Talk about your creative process.
The problem with talking about my process is that saying "Well, I think about things, and when an idea pops into my had, I write it as far as it's able to go, and when i hit a block, I go back to thinking and gathering input again." is pretty boring. Doing some of the art exercises isn't any better: "Stare at the source art, try to think of it in terms of lines and shapes, then try to match those lines and shapes on the thing I'm drawing on."
I'm pretty much a poster child for the idea that a lot of output is not so much about being repeatedly hit with inspiration, as much as it is doing a little bit of work over a long period of time, and being satisfied when something complete pops out. And using constraints and guardrails to drop the available space from infinity to something that can be comprehended and worked with.
So much of the creative process for me is internal, so it's not like I have entire documents written of drafts, of discards, of stuff that shows the process at work. And a fair amount of it happens while in distracted by other things, so you'd need something like an fMRI or other brain scanner to watch things happen, and to interpret what you see properly as the lightbulb moments that happen, before there's conscious awareness of it happening.
[Excuse me for a moment while I put down the solution to something that had been blocking me in a project.]
Where was I? Right, lightning strikes. They do happen, but often as the result of a synthesis that clicks into place at the right time. Sometimes drawing in a lot of input is the thing that helps, because having a brain that likes to make connections between things, even very disparate things, can mean traversing all kinds of pathways, including the fun ones where you waltz your way through six different genres and ten stories to make a connection that allows you go to forward on some other thing that has nothing to do with any of that, except for one tangential bit that turns out to be exceedingly important for the situation in front of you.
And sometimes, the correct option is to set this down and pick up something else, which helps the variable attention stimulus brain be happy, choosing to go after something else that seems like there's a pathway forward over, rather than trying to keep hammering on the same thing over and over again, and letting the brain do more of those background connections and worthwhile work.
[And now, some more time spent on a different project, where an idea has just appeared and will be quite workable, thank you.]
It's not necessarily anything special, and I suspect most of the people who do writing for a living, especially writing that is in the novel-length department, don't spend days waiting for the inspiration to hit, they have work processes where they go after the words that are coming, and then, when the words they really want arrive, they switch back to that project and provide all the words they can on that. Even if a project is destined for the drawer, it's still sometimes useful to spend the time on it to bring it all the way to fruition, or at least to a strong outline and some other parts in it where you can get all that you wanted to get out of it, and maybe come back to it later when you want to do something different with it, or feel like you can rework it into something that will go.
So, yeah, the creative process. Doesn't always involve a lot of outlining, or multiple draftings, or other such things. Some of that is the experience I have helping me get close to the thing I want on the first try, and some of it is tricking myself into believing that the thing itself is not sufficiently important to have a complete nervous energy about. With the help of betas and editors, I like to think that I can turn out good things on the regular.
no subject
Date: 2026-01-16 11:41 am (UTC)"tricking myself into believing that the thing itself is not sufficiently important to have a complete nervous energy about."
Yes, this is me on the daily!