The Creative Process

Something my wife said started me thinking about creativity. I was thinking about the process of creativity and about why people can be very creative in one area and yet not another. For example, I think that my writing and my armoring (Red Dragon Armoury) show that I have creativity but yet I cannot seem to express that creativity in visual arts, like drawing and painting.

Back in college, my second try at college (it took three tries to get a degree), I was a commercial art major. It started off as a sleeping stone to architecture, which is what I had decided on in High School. I was very excited by what I saw produced by illustrators and that is what I wanted to be able to do, book covers, movie posters and especially album covers. This is lack in the days when vinyl was still king and I especially loved the glorious album cowers of Roger Dean.

Unfortunately, I just wasn’t very good at it. I couldn’t translate what I saw or what I imagined onto the canvas. And more than just being unable, I was extremely frustrated by my lack of ability and therefore by the whole process of creating my art. Eventually, I gave it up.

My point about creativity is that it is a process, and a love of the finished product is not enough. You must love the process that leads to that product or you will never truly be successful in that creative endeavor.

I never really enjoyed the process of producing a painting or drawing enough to power through my lack of skill. I enjoy the process that ends in a finished piece of armor. I never really enjoyed the process that produced a piece of flat art. I never tried sculpture when I was at school and what I do now is partially metal sculpture.

Finally, I come to another of my creative endeavors, an endeavor that has been causing me some frustration of late, my writing. I enjoy writing but for a long time I struggled with trying to become a professional writer. When I look back at those days, more than 30 years ago, I think that I wanted to be a writer more than I wanted to write. I wanted the product more than process.

The only writing that I have done with any consistency is the journal that I have kept for more 35 years. It has been a constant companion and yet it has sat unused for long periods.

I don’t know if I will ever sell anything, but I have finally learned to love the process of writing…as long as I don’t push too hard. When I try to force myself to write I generally find that things go badly.

Writing About Boredom

Fundamentally, I am bored.

Now, this is not much in the way of a revelation, at least to me, but once again I was struck by the fact that this may be the base motivation for much of what I do.

I play Mass Effect 2 for the third and a half time because I’m bored.

I watch videos because I’m bored.

I don’t want to mow the yard, or wash dishes, or clean my room, or do any of a hundred other necessary things because they are boring and I am already fundamentally bored.

I don’t write because I’m bored.

This is the one that is bothering me at the moment. I enjoy writing and I think that I have a certain amount of skill at it, but lately I have found it hard to get myself to sit down and just write. Then, to top it all off, the last time I tried to force myself to sit and write was a disaster. I may have squeezed out a few paragraphs I but they were pretty awful.

It could be a problem with the story I was working on, but I think it might have to do with how I write fiction. I find that I have to see the scene in my head before I can write it. One story I wrote for an online game forum seemed to take forever, because some of the scenes wouldn’t quite come to me.

But, I think the real problem is that I am so fundamentally bored that I find it hard to let my mind wander in the way that helps me imagine the stories.

I am so fundamentally bored that I work at distracting myself and I end up distracting myself from writing as well as almost anything else useful.

Unless of course you consider it useful to catch up on the unwatched videos that you have been meaning to watch.