Practicing Creativity

These are my draft notes on creativity—as a skill, a practice, and a mystery. It's a bit of a knotted labyrinth. Please leave breadcrumbs to follow if you get lost.

Everything you find here is in a perpetual draft state and much of it may not make sense. I hope these notes become clearer over time as I continue updating them, although I hope they might be useful even in disarray.

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Talking about creativity

Creativity is arcane and mundane

• Creativity is a mystery
  • Creativity is obscured by misconceptions
  • Encountering the chaos monkey
• Creativity is a paradox
  • Integrate classic mode and romantic mode
    • Classic mode / Romantic mode
  • Creativity is a superpower
  • Creativity is a stable stance
• Creativity is organic
  • Practice morphogenetic creative processes
  • Creative projects have developmental cycles of maturity - the pendulum
  • Dynamic emergence generates new static forms - Ratcheting up of form
  • Patterns and forms have a lifespan
  • Repair and refactoring processes are creative
  • Gardening games and exploration games
• Creativity is textured
  • Creativity is brackish
• Creativity is a skill
  • Creativity is a habit

Creative habits and practice

• Wonder
  • Creativity starts with raw material
    • Combinatorial creativity
      • Assemble, adapt, and arrange fragments
    • Perceptual creativity
      • Perceiving is a creative act in itself
      • Originality and universality emerge from deeply individual experience
    • Creativity of the present moment
  • Record sketches, rough observations, and ideas in inboxes
  • Cultivate presence and attention - fill the well
    • Practice awareness of the whole
    • Don't think
    • Be bored
    • Turn toward
    • Make of yourself a sensitive recording plate
    • Embody the senses
    • Become interested in reality
    • Consider the old, try out the new
  • Enjoy unknowing
• Curiosity, humor, play & enjoyment
  • Let ideas and projects emerge organically
  • Follow intuitive curiosity
  • Find community in sages and scenes
    • Work with the garage door open
    • Give and receive notes
  • Get stuck
  • Dive in
  • Commit to learning
  • Balance boredom and anxiety
  • Dive deep into disorientation
  • Move at an enjoyable pace
    • Move right along the way life does
    • Things of quality have no fear of time
    • Leisure is a stance between work and holiday
• Creation
  • Plan patient, executable strategies
    • Reduce batch size and increase frequency
    • Finish small cycles
    • Leave the campsite cleaner than you found it
  • Separate creative tasks
    • Embody roles
      • Classic mode / roles
      • Romantic mode / roles
    • Balance care and spontaneity
      • Go slow, be careful
        • Care and quality
      • Go fast, be spontaneous
        • Loosen your grip
        • You got an eraser
    • Shift stances to refresh yourself
  • Start where you are, use what you have, do what you can
    • Hold a quality of standard
    • Wholeness includes roughness
  • Go brrr / Flow
    • Limit work in progress / Have more than one thing going
    • Identify constraints / What can you waste?
    • Take small leaps
    • Wreck it
  • Stop
  • Rest
  • Maintain wholeness
    • Sketch the whole first
    • Set boundaries
    • Establish an outpost
    • Develop the whole together
      • Cycle within, then around, then outside at multiple scales
      • Keep the level of detail in proportion
      • Generate and stabilize - structure preserving transformations
  • Stay at the human scale
    • Match each action to the scale of the tool
  • Sign it

Living wholeness - The Quality Without a Name

• There is a living relationship between the maker, the object, the subject, and the people who live with the object
  • Making an object or place means imbuing it with its own spirit
  • Art just happens
• Check in with the degree of life, the feeling of quality
  • The mirror of self
  • The fundamental process

Creativity anti-patterns reference

• Development hell - isolation from the conversation
• Too much flow
• Broken boundaries, unclear separation
  • The inner critic
  • Checking the egoic emu
• Resistance trap / Gumption trap
  • Hurrying and delaying
    • Startup friction
  • Seriousness
  • Specialness
  • Perfectionism
  • Impatience
  • The cult of productivity
  • Starting from a blank page
  • The way it's always been
  • The shock of the new