The Muse & The Work

I write for a liv­ing, I take pho­tographs as a hobby, I stud­ied design in school and even worked as a 3D artist. And I think I’ve done some decent work in these areas, if I may say so myself.

At the same time, if any­one were to ask me about what makes a per­son cre­ative, my truth­ful answer would make them think I’m nuts.

Cre­ativ­ity in 2 Parts

I believe that cre­ativ­ity lies in 2 parts: the muse and the work. The muse is the source of inspi­ra­tion for all cre­ative work, and the work is the getting-your-hands-dirty act of mak­ing things.

Mak­ing any­thing good requires both inspi­ra­tion and work. Inspi­ra­tion with­out work is day­dream­ing, work with­out inspi­ra­tion is dreary. The tricky part is when peo­ple use the lack of either as an excuse not to do anything.

But Where Does Inspi­ra­tion Come From?

I have no idea.

I work my ass off and sud­denly a divine idea springs into my head from out of nowhere, just beg­ging for me to help bring it to life. And when it’s done, all I can do is look at it and go “I did that?”

In her TED talk, Eliz­a­beth Gilbert describes this as a ‘genius’, an age-old idea that cre­ative genius doesn’t lie inside the per­son, but from an exter­nal, divine source. Sounds kinda kooky, but I think every cre­ative per­son will tell you how much it rings true. In any great cre­ative work, there are strange moments where you hap­pen upon an idea that doesn’t feel so much thought up, but given to you from some­where.

That’s all well and good, but prac­ti­cally speak­ing then, is there a way to get more inspiration?

More Work Gets You More Inspiration

Here’s my the­ory: more work begets more inspi­ra­tion, which is the oppo­site of what most peo­ple believe about the cre­ative process. Most peo­ple think that crazy cre­ative peo­ple get reg­u­lar bolts of inspi­ra­tion from the divine and then do the work.

But what really hap­pens is that some nor­mal per­son tries very hard to do some­thing well, and while sweat­ing it a freak­ish jolt of inspi­ra­tion comes to add an extra dash of spe­cial­ness to the work.

Why was Mozart so Creative?

Here’s a sec­ond the­ory: the bet­ter you are at your work, the bet­ter the qual­ity of inspi­ra­tion that will flow through you.

This is where most peo­ple think the oppo­site too; that some peo­ple are touched by God more reg­u­larly than oth­ers and that’s why they’re more cre­ative. But if you look at these peo­ple, you’ll notice that besides hav­ing great ideas, they also have the abil­ity to exe­cute those ideas really well.

I have a feel­ing that these invis­i­ble cre­ativ­ity muses don’t hand off their pre­cious ideas to peo­ple whom they know don’t have the abil­ity to han­dle it. There’s no way any self-respecting muse would give a begin­ner a Mozart-level sonata, he wouldn’t have any idea what to do with it and the idea would die a silent death.

Instead, the muse searches for the per­son who has a cor­re­spond­ing level of abil­ity to the level of cre­ative idea. (To make it inter­est­ing, muses seem to like find­ing peo­ple who have lev­els of abil­ity slightly lower than the level of idea, just to stretch them and see them in tor­ment for a while. Nobody said giv­ing birth was easy.)

This trans­lates into a really sim­ple prin­ci­ple: if you want to have bet­ter ideas, get bet­ter at using the tools of your cre­ative work, whether it’s a cam­era, a pen­cil or your own body.

Related Posts

1. The Only Way to Do Great Work
2. The Per­son Who Would Go
3. Are You a Word Document?