One of my all-time favorite reflections on the creative process comes from an interview between musicians Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno.
Lanois is attempting to make “a film that’s beautiful in itself, about beauty” and he asks for a reflection.
“What would be really interesting for people to see,” Eno says, “is how beautiful things grow out of shit.”
Unmet expectations
Often when I work with patients who are “stuck” or “blocked” creatively we find that there’s an unmet expectation.
And that often centers around the profound and magisterial art they should be creating. It’s similar in this regard to the art they see others creating.
But there’s a chasm. That art (theirs or others’) is often a distant reality for them, growing all the more so with each act of self-protection via procrastination.
Two essentials of creativity
For creativity to flourish, two essentials must occur.
First, one must simply begin. If this is writing one must glue ass to chair and make words. If it’s music one must pick up the instrument and make notes. And so forth.
Second, during this process, one must develop a tolerance for the feelings we work hard to avoid, that invariably come up during the creative process: incompetence and inferiority, worthlessness and uncertainty and even self-loathing.
There are myriad “positive” feelings too—some of the finest we can hope to know—but one never gets to truly feel those if the others are avoided.
Work with a trained professional via therapy is a wonderful place to process all this, of course.
But the real work begins once one merely begins, and then begins again.