8 Clicks from Nowhere ䷀

Dispatches ⌂

Category: Part 6 – Clicking Deeper

And in the end, some will tell you that the only thing that matters is building a self identity and a methodical life around creative expression, putting in the hours, and learning from the effort, that this the true heart of creating stuff. They may have a point.

Chapter List

  • Canada Day-ish

    Being Canadian means our annual celebration of national pride falls on the exact-ish half way point of the year. Where New Years Day is the first day of the year, Canada Day, July 1st, is on the first day of the second half of the year.

    This year also happens to be the day when I mark the exact six month anniversary of this writing project. It’s been half a year of daily-ish posts.

    What that means for the site is that after six months of working on this project, I have accumulated one hundred and twenty-seven (plus this one) posts on some meandering thoughts on creativity and pursuing a creative-ish life.

    Routine can lead to profoundly interesting things. Iteration of effort, keeping at something through incremental addition and improvements can break through the overwhelming perception of size and complexity and spark a kind of driving force that can make anyone successful-ish.

    Readers may have already noted that I am an evangelist-ish for the the incrementalism of things.  Doing a little bit each day can simply get the work done.

    And on a day like this, when I’ve crossed yet another milestone and keep going, posting the next post and the next and knowing that there are likely a few more in the queue even as you are reading these words, is the best I can do to show by example of what twenty minutes of writing per day can accomplish-ish.

  • Morning Person

    It’s nearly 8pm as I write this and I’m stumped.

    I do almost all my writing for this project in the mornings. I get a hot mug of tea, I set up in a quiet-ish place, I open up my word processing software, and I just start writing.

    It’s nearly 8pm as I write this and my family is out for the evening leaving me alone with a quiet house, no obligations, and drizzling bit of cozy weather outside. One would think I’d be up to my elbows in motivation, huh?

    Instead, I’m stumped.

    I’m writing about writing and how I can’t find the focus to write, which is exactly what writers do when they can’t find the motivation or inspiration to write what they are supposed to be writing. Ugh! Writers.

    Lucky for me I have a whole writing project and website about this sort of thing.

    One set of advice will tell you (and I strongly agree) to treat creativity as a job. Sit down. Make the conditions. Get it done. Excuses are people who don’t finish their projects.

    But then—well—there is also a realistic part of me that acknowledges that productivity and progress on a project is also about knowing the conditions when you work best, having a routine, and being in the right frame of mind.

    I’m a morning person.

    I work best in the morning.

    I’m productive in the morning.

    I wrote this in the evening proving that I’m not rigidly locked to that schedule, but given the choice—well, you get the point.

  • Advice Less

    You may have found this blog project and be thinking that I’ve made a terrible mistake.

    There’s not really much advice here, you might be thinking.

    You’re not wrong, but you’re not right.

    This was never intended to be a manual about being a creative person. No. Not at all. It was meant to be a collection of thoughts on the accidental nature of creativity. I have no solid advice. I have no lists of skills to check off on your way towards success.  I have no morals or lessons or cautionary tales with polished insights at the end.

    This is a fumbling, imperfect exercise in abstraction. It is an daily exercise in being lost on a path that is as much about the journey as it is about a destination. Imperfection is the goal.

    You want a lesson?

    Fail more. Because it means you tried something and maybe learned.

    Embrace different. Because it might be the only way to stand out in a crowd.

    Close your eyes and ignore all the other advice. Because copying is what machines do and the humanity of creativity is something that might not be teachable so much as felt, gleaned, experienced, caught, or whatever.

    You’re not wrong. There isn’t much advice here, just a few notes from the last guy to wander this path and never really find his way out.

  • Pinch Poster

    This is not the post I had intended to drop here today.

    I’ve been keeping about a week and a half ahead of my schedule these days, writing posts, getting them queued up on the back end of the blog, giving myself both breathing room and time to go back over and revise stuff I’ve written before it goes live.

    And about two weeks ago I started a whole new series. It was going to be about a bunch of big projects I was going to tackle, and write big multi-part articles about.

    I wrote an introduction post that was supposed to go out instead of this post.

    It fumbled and flopped before it even launched. I was struggling getting the actual project done in the middle of writing all about how great it was going. [Slowly pulls back curtain and…]

    In this case, I realized that committing to the time to do the project itself was just out of the realm of reasonability as summer arrives and things get busier around our house. 

    I accept failure as a natural part of working on big ideas. Not everything is going to take and sometimes—like this past week—you’re going to find that you’ve bit off a bit more than you can chew on. Take the L and move on.

  • 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.