It’s 86 degrees on October 13th, and I’m out on my lunchtime walk. This weekend is supposed to get down to 42, and I’m so excited I may go stand in the yard without a shirt on just to get cold. It’s been a long time since I’ve been properly cold.
Poor life choices aside, I want to talk about whether creativity strikes like lightning, or whether it’s a muscle you build and flex when you need it.
I used to wait for the muse
A lot of people want to believe their most creative times come by divine inspiration. That they just have to wait for the muse, or the lightning, or whatever it is that strikes them, before they can come up with something creative and profound.
I used to be in that camp. I would put myself in the right situation: a coffee shop, sitting down, focused on writing. I just knew that if I put myself in the spot and sat there until it hit, something great would come.
And when I sat down in those places, it did come.
I thought that validated my way of thinking. It actually validated the exact opposite. If I had gone to those coffee shops over and over and nothing happened, and then on the 23rd visit it finally struck at random, my theory might have had some credence. But it seemed that every time I sat down and started working on an idea, creativity just came. Which suggests creativity is something you can develop. Something you can exercise. More muscle than magic.
The painter Chuck Close said it better: “Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work.”
How I set myself up now
I went to the coffee shop because I needed to sit down and type. But my natural thinking is verbal, and voice-to-text lets me do it on my feet. So now I just go out for a walk.
I know that if I come out here and start running my mouth about topics I’m interested in, I’ll start to see how the pieces of information sit together, and how I can iterate on them into a point of view, a book, a song. It all starts with reserving the time, just like I’m doing for this post, to walk, talk through my ideas, and see what sticks.
Some days all I get out of it is exercise. Other days I come back with almost a full set of lyrics in hand, because I’ve been able to fully describe the scene and the emotion I’m trying to get out of the song. Or a fully baked thesis for a paper. Or a character arc for one of my stories.
On a walk a few weeks ago, I started talking through a conversation I’d had after church with a man whose meetings keep wandering. By the time I got back to my desk, I had the bones of a post about decision logs and data governance. I’d had no plan to write about either when I left.
Chaos into order
Creativity, to me, is taking the randomness in my head and putting it in order as it comes out of my mouth. A lot of people glorify it into something it isn’t.
I’d much rather practice inside a time block than wait for something to land fully formed in my hands. That happens to a few artists, maybe once or twice in a lifetime. The rest of us show up.
This post is today’s walk. Eighty-six degrees, a phone in my hand, and no idea when I left the building what I’d come back with.
