Tutorial 43: how to do creative work

I was struck by a Mastodon post where classic game developer Ron Gilbert quoted film critic Roger Ebert as follows:

The Muse visits during the act of creation, not before. Don’t wait for her.

And Gilbert commented:

I am constantly forgetting this as I procrastinate writing only to discover her again once I start.

In a reply, Gretchen Anderson said her favourite version of this is:

When the muse comes to visit, she better find you working.

I couldn’t find the original source for this, but as I was trying to track it down I ran into this, attributed to Pablo Picasso:

Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.

When I mentioned these observations to Matt, he sent me a longer-form exposition of the same phenomenon, from painter and visual artist Chuck Close. If the four pithy versions above strike you as a bit facile, the kind of thing you might find on a motivational poster, this may be more actionable:

All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.

All of this points back, of course, to the very snappiest version of this observation, attributed to William Wordworth and appearing in the previous tutorial:

To begin, begin.

Why should this be true? I don’t know why, but I know that it is. My best guess is that it’s the same principle by which you can only steer a moving boat. Without some kind of resistance to push against, your rudder can’t exert a useful force; without some raw material for it to work on, your creativity can’t get a toehold. You can’t be creative about nothing. You need something to be creative about.

So the substance of this tutorial is this: whatever project you’re procrastinating on — the novel that you can’t quite figure out the ending of, the paper on a subject that you’ve not read enough background information on, the song that you can’t bring yourself to write because it won’t be as good as a Paul Simon song[*] — just make a start. The worst-case scenario is that you’ll better understand where the real blockages are. A better case is that you’ll find there aren’t any. And the best case is that the very process of getting your hands dirty leads you to fresh new ideas.

I leave you with this brief reminiscence from Greg Gunther, who ran a mailing-list I used to be on for aspiring writers:

I was on an [email] list with Tom Clancy once. Mr. Clancy’s contribution to the list was, “Write the damn book”.

(I am pleased to see that we’ve quoted this at least twice before in SV-POW! tutorials: in my own Tutorial 10: how to become a palaeontologist; and in Matt’s Tutorial 12: How to find problems to work on. It remains by some distance the very best advice I’ve ever heard on writing.)

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[*] This last one is very much aimed at myself.