8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions ䷀

Category: [25] Duty & Demand

Doing the work of creativity and why consistency beats inspiration.

Chapter List

  • Desire Paths

    There is a principle in urban design called “desire paths” wherein smart planners pave the shortcuts.

    You’d recognize this if you ever saw it. The example that comes to mind for me is the Quad in my alma mater. A big grassy field between classroom buildings existed as a place where students hung out, studied, napped, snacked, and of course, travelled between lectures. The sidewalk infrastructure was in place, but it didn’t represent the paths that students actually walked. The shortcuts wore into the grass as bare-earth trails trampled by a million footsteps. So, when the space was renovated, those exact paths were paved with proper sidewalks, voted on by countless students just existing.

    Noticing where shortcuts emerge and making those paths formal and proper, then, is something of a smart move. It is an act of recognition that the subconscious of many (or even just one) can tell us something we didn’t overtly consider.

    Recognizing your own shortcuts to creative expression is a similar act of finding the desire paths leading you towards creative fulfillment. Understanding that no matter what you do, your subconscious may be looking for the shortcuts between idea and product, between notion and outcome. 

    Forcing formality on your creative process or trying to follow a path that you “designed” based on your conscious consideration, may neither be the best way to get there, or the shortest, cleanest route.

    Instead, noticing the habits, being aware of the hacks, and catching those tricks you’ve stumbled on to get words on the page, ink on paper, or notes into the universe are the shortcuts that you should mix up some mental concrete and pave them straight through to your destination.

  • Write Always

    Don’t stop.

    You want to be better at anything? Keep plugging away and don’t ever stop practicing, and that goes doubly so for writing. Why? It just does—filled as it is with nuance and expectation and alive right there in the heart of everything we do, say, hear, and make.

    Writers write.

    They just do. And you are almost certainly only a writer when you are writing: actively penning words onto the page, typing characters into a keyboard or brewing the thoughts in your brain for your next opportunity to do more writing. 

    Writing can be messy. It can be scattered. It can be long or short, formal or stylistically chaotic. Writing can be words strung together in a notepad app, or traced with a lusciously thick felt-tipped marker on a wall. Writing can be private scribbles in a journal or annoying daily posts in a public website launched into the universe with no clear destination or audience.

    Whatever it ultimately becomes, the writing itself is an action. To write is a verb. 

    Writing is the act of filling the gaps between words. Writing is temporary and temporal. 

    And you need to write always. Why?  If you need to ask then you are not one of us.

    Because writers write.

  • Keyboard Less

    Creation is rarely ideal.

    It’s messy and short on time and squeezed into the cracks of life.

    Don’t believe me? I found a cup of hot tea and an unoccupied table at one of North America’s biggest shopping malls on a busy Friday evening while my family is off browsing through shoe stores and spending money on who knows what.

    I didn’t bring a keyboard. 

    I am resorting to typing this on my phone. 

    But it was either sit down and write something, or wander around tripping over ten thousand shoppers and their giant bags of momentary indulgences.

    I choose to write, ideal situation or not.

    Not everyone’s first choice, sure, but as frequently as I can I like to do something that viscerally reminds my creative self that writers bring their stories to the page, the page doesn’t come and wait for our stories.

    I’ve been haunting this particular shopping mall since I was a kid. West Edmonton Mall has an indoor theme park (which I just wandered thru), skating rink (which was occupied by a few dozen skaters this evening), a water park (which had closed for the evening shortly before I strolled by) and a life size pirate ship parked on an indoor lake (which was by the bookstore that briefly caught my attention before I decided to park here.) My Kid works here. We drive over every month or so and try to not be overwhelmed. 

    This place is full of stories, and I can reach into my own personal history dating back decades and sometimes even make sense of them.

    Why not spend a few minutes spilling out some creativity here, too, ideal conditions be darned. Keyboard less… or opportunity more.

  • Idea Bank

    Case in point: I had been watching videos about creative note-booking strategies on YouTube, too many to make it worth linking to them, and thinking about my own process for tracking ideas, brainstorming and creative ideation, and I sat down to write this post.  In my notes, months ago, I had already written “an idea bank by carrying a notebook even a digital one is a foundational tool for creative” on a bulleted list at the top of a digital topic page somewhere.

    I keep an idea bank.

    It’s not complex.

    And that’s the whole point. 

    It’s simple. It’s low effort. It’s low friction, as the business gurus might put it.

    I use the notes app on my phone, keep a date-stamped note near the top of the list, and just add new post ideas to the top of the list when said ideas cross my mind. No bullet lists. No categorized planning. No grids or charts or bubble flows. Just note on list.

    Later, when I’m sitting in a cafe sipping on a tea I’ll go through them and copy-paste them into a giant living document that I have going where I write my posts. Personally, and this isn’t so much an endorsement as it is a I happen to use note, I use Scrivener on a Mac. It is billed as writing software and is the closest I’ve come to a big multi-document, cloud-synced, writers organizational platform as anything.  Results may vary, so do your own research for what works for you.

    Which is to say: keep it simple.

    I’ve gone simple and it works for me.

    If I had to put a point on this it would be merely to tell you that creativity happens anywhere at any time—you know that—and the best tool to capture that is not one that involves tapping some of that creativity to engage with it. The best tool to capture it is one that takes the absolute minimum space: a sheet of paper with a pen, a notebook you carry around with you, a voice memo, or the simplest text app on your phone.

    Bank on it.

  • Routine Back

    Nothing reminds me so much of the value of my everyday get-up-and-do-stuff routine as when I step out of it for a few days.

    Every few months I take on a weird side project (for pay) that becomes all-consuming. A contract here, a part-time gig there, and always an interesting side-quest from the main project of my semi-retired creative life. The week before I wrote these words I was at it again, up north having a little adventure in the rural Canadian prairies. 

    And while the details change, the post mortem is almost always the same: I have been decoupled from my routine and then I need to spend a week or two trying to find the routine back.

    Routine is, after all, a cognitive shortcut for feeling productive. Whether or not productivity is your end goal, or if the effort it is meant for something less clinical and more spiritual, routine is often way more important than we give it credit for being.

    Routine is habit. Routine is a temporal obligation to be somewhere doing something on a clockwork regularity that, bluntly, gets stuff done.

    For me, routine is sitting in a cafe for an hour in the morning sipping a hot drink and typing something, writing, making, creating with a regularity and scheduled purpose. Without the routine I may get it done, but more than likely I would not. Deciding with a planned regularity that this is where I need to be and when I need to be doing something means I don’t need to find the motivation or overcome the paralysis of deciding: it is just due.