The Creative Process

I have a love-hate relationship with the creative process. Some days, I wake up feeling super inspired and motivated to work on all my projects; other days, I wake up and can barely find the motivation to get out of bed. It’s hard to explain, let alone, understand why creativity comes to me at such inconsistent and unpredictable times. I guess it feels like I never really know what I'm doing until I've done it; which can be extremely frustrating, confusing, scattered, unreliable, etc. at times. Over the years, I've learned to just embrace it though.

As an example, this article was actually supposed to be about a completely different topic, but I've been staring at my computer screen for the past week not knowing where or how to even start on what I originally wanted to write about. So here I am now, writing about the creative process. I’m just trying to embrace the fact that I can't really force creativity to happen exactly when I expect it or need it to. The number of times I've sat down at my desk, with a coffee, ready to work on one of my videos or projects, then never ended up actually being productive/doing anything, is unreal. It’s the random times when I'm least expecting to feel inspired, I actually make the things I'm most proud of. I guess when there isn't any pressure to create, it's easier to let ideas/inspiration happen naturally.

Another example would be a series I produced called “800 MILES”. It's genuinely hard for me to fathom the fact that there was little to no planning going into the whole project. I literally didn't even know what the series was going to be called until about a week before I published it. Most of the planning took place after everything was filmed as I was editing all the footage together. In the moments of filming, I remember being really concerned that I wasn't going to be able to create anything out of the footage I filmed. To be fair, most of the footage was a complete mess and in the moments of filming everything, it was hard to see it from an outside perspective.

However, once I was actually able to rewatch the footage after filming, I could see everything from a different standpoint; It was easier to see how I was going to piece things together and tell the story. Looking back, not planning the filming really made the series flow more naturally and it challenged me to work with what I had. Now that I can see the finalized version of "800 MILES", it's hard to believe there was even a time I didn't know what I was doing with anything. This seems to be a recurring pattern when creating a lot of my videos; once the actual video is finalized, I’ll have a hard time understanding why it was so unclear how I wanted everything to be put together in the first place.

I think not knowing how anything is going to turn out can be overwhelming but I've been trying to get better at letting things happen naturally. After all, that's kinda the way life works too; everything is just happening the way it does no matter how much we try to control it. All we can really do is go with the flow and create what we can with what we have. So yeah, there really isn't a creative “process”.

There is no step by step instruction guide to making something. No matter how much planning goes into something, you’ll never 100% know exactly how it's going to turn out until it's finished.