Pablo Picasso has a famous quote that goes, "Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working." There are few things in my working life that have proven to be more true for me than this.
I consider myself to be a fairly creative person. Between music writing and recording, graphic design, photography, and writing for this blog, there's normally at least one or two creative tasks that seek their way into every day of mine. That being said, whether I'm trying to redesign a slide deck live in front of coworkers or cowrite a song with a friend, I get extremely nervous whenever I have to try and creatively perform on the spot. I'm not confident in my ability to be given the creator's spotlight and instantly improvise magic. That's not what I'm good at.
What I am good at is getting a creative task and then sitting with it for a bit. And sitting with it a bit more. And then trying a few things, and then hating those things. And then trying a few more things, and then hating those things even more than the first batch. And then three hours later finally stumbling onto something by complete accident and all of a sudden feeling a spark and finishing the project up in 20 minutes.
This is exactly what happened a few days ago when I was trying to design a new webpage artwork for this blog. I sat down, opened my computer, booted up my graphic design app, drew some colored lines, decided I didn't like them, opened a few more tabs to draw different colored lines, and repeated this process for three hours until I got so brain drained from looking at a blank canvas with a few colored lines on it that I grumpily decided to give it up for the night. But as I was closing my tabs, one of the line designs with a cool spray paint feel to it caught my eye and I thought, "Hey, this could actually be the starting point for something." Within maybe 10 minutes, I was adding a notebook page background to the graphic, digitally tracing cloud designs onto the notebook pages, drawing these psychedelic cartoon people playing on top of the clouds, and figuring out the perfect font for the Speaking of Which title that would tie it all together. The end result was this.
And it was exactly what I was looking for. Nothing fancy, but something with character. And sure it took me at least three hours of brainstorming to get anywhere close to making progress on it, but once I was on the scent, it all came together extremely quickly. This sort of work always seems to follow the Pareto Principle: 80% of your time is spent getting the first 20% of work done, and then the remaining 20% of your time is spent whizzing through whatever 80% of work the first 20% inspired.
I'm convinced most creative people aren't pulling from a never-ending well of brilliant ideas. They are pulling from a never-ending well of mostly crap ideas, and they just have the stubbornness to keep pulling buckets until the right idea comes along. If you're trying to create something, it's important to have desk time. It's important to have studio time. It's important to have time accounted for where you're just trying things out and not liking them and feeling like you've hit a dead end. That way, when all the crap ideas flow through and the great ones begin pouring out, you're ready to take that spark and make a fire.
Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.
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