Creativity is a phenomenon whereby something new and somehow valuable is formed. The created item may be intangible or a physical object. I suspect that the process and outcome is different for every individual. That conclusion seems obvious to me, since everyone produces something unique when they create, kinda like snowflakes or signatures or fingerprints or turds.
It seems to me that creation is our reason to be, since this is pretty much all that we do … create. Whether it is on the job, in school, in the home, or on the toilet, we are all pretty much creating 24×7. But hey, we’re not talkin’ bout the outcome, we’re talking bout the process, so let us begin. Since my only frame of reference is my narcissistic self, that is where we must begin.
Usually, I start with the simple thought of “What am I thinking about right now?”. That may seem strange to you, since what I am thinking about is “What am I thinking about?”. Let us not go down that hall of mirrors. What I really mean is “What has been lately on my mind?”.
Sometimes it happens when I wake up and I can’t get a certain chain of circular thinking out of my head. Other times it occurs during a booze addled state in which my brain seems to go in some orthogonal direction to where it normally goes. In either case, I start with that thought and then start riffing on the idea (like I am doing right now). It’s kinda like a two year old with a crayon that starts coloring between the lines and off the pages and onto the walls. It ain’t pretty, lemme tell ya.
After the whole mess is done, I go back and look at it a little while later, editing and changing my creation to correct mistakes or to add additional colors or erase other colors. The strange thing is, that I find myself in this pattern whether it is working on some engineering project, writing music, adding shit to this silly blog, or working on the house.
Seems like a pretty stupid way to be creative now that I look at it on paper. I am pretty sure that neither Picasso nor Albert Einstein worked this way.
