The pursuit of creativity
All my life I have dreamed of being creative, of being an ideas person. I have always wanted to be the person who’s given an empty room, 100 yards of fabric, a sewing machine, a bag of goose down and ribbon, and who manages to transform the room into something wonderful.
However, the creative process is continually stalled by one of my biggest sins: overthinking. And this tendency towards overthinking is related to my affliction of procrastination. While taking the time to think things through might seem like a good quality, when it leads to the halting of all possible and potential creative processes, it is not a good thing.
I was given some good advice about combatting this problem: Just do it! Cut up that sheet of paper to make that thing you want to make. If it turns out badly, a) now you know that the idea doesn’t work so well and b) you can start again. It seems so simple, so basic but I can read and dream up the coolest things but until I actually make a step towards turning it into reality, it’s pretty useless to the world (and to this blog). So I will try to do that more often. For example, last night, I took the following with the intention of making a “Happy Housewarming” card:
And almost two hours later, I hadn’t gotten any further. I spent an hour moving pieces around, thinking of the different things I could do. Why didn’t I just stick something down, decide I hate it and start over? I don’t know. But what I do know is that I will do that now. And tomorrow, I’ll report back on how the process went. To those of you who ever feel like this, I challenge you to go for it, do something, even it becomes a mess. Chances are it’ll give you some insight into your finished product!
January 16th, 2008 at 2:31 am
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