The Long and The Short Of It

Episode 405 - Creative Process

Transcript:

Jen: Hello, Peter.

Pete: Hey, Jen.

Jen: I want to talk to you today about an ongoing conversation that is happening in my household. And my household, for the listeners who don't know, is made up of three creative people. And what we have had an ongoing conversation about is the creative process. What is it? How does it work?

Pete: Oof. To be a fly on the wall to this conversation, I guess this is the next best thing. This is The Long and The Short of It. I feel like, sidebar, that you are not giving the three of you enough credit. Three creative people? I mean, come on. We're talking about like three creative geniuses.

Jen: Well, the listeners know me, but for context, I will say that my husband, I mean, he really is a creative genius. He is very, very talented. He is a playwright, a director, an artistic director, and many other things. And my daughter, who I mention often, is a writer as well. A songwriter and a writer of poetry and a writer of short stories and personal narratives. She's just...she's an incredible writer. And then there's me.

Pete: And then there's you. I mean, the listeners don't need me to tell them. The most creative genius. So this is a wild group of people to all have in one room. Like I said, to be a fly on the wall to this conversation would be a true gift. So I'm excited to hear what three creative geniuses came up with when they talked about the creative process.

Jen: Well, the impetus for this conversation to start was my daughter has been working on a piece of writing and has been building on it and building on it for quite a long time. So we've gotten into conversations about how writers go back to previous works and build on them and how we can take an idea and sort of plant it in our minds and then years later figure out how to connect the dots between that idea and this moment. And sometimes you make these grand leaps forward with your work and you're like, wow, it just comes pouring out of you. I mean, this happened the other night. My daughter was supposed to be studying for her final exams and I hear the guitar going and I go in the room like ready to, you know, be like, "You're not supposed to be playing guitar."

Pete: Study. You're meant to study.

Jen: And I opened the door and she's like, "I just wrote a song." And I was like, "Okay, keep going. Keep going. Keep going. Keep going. Don't mind me. Don't mind me." So anyway, it's just...it's gotten me thinking about the creative process and how it shows up in so many different ways. And, you know, in our culture of reality TV and Instagram and TikTok, we often see end results, but we aren't aware of people's process. So I don't know. It's something I just wanted to bounce around with you today.

Pete: I mean, I feel like I have nothing to contribute to this conversation other than questions.

Jen: No, that's not true because you're very creative.

Pete: Well, I appreciate that. I'll not try and dismiss that compliment because one of the things you've taught me, which I believe, is that everyone has the capability and the ability to be creative.

Jen: Well, you write your own keynotes, you create frameworks, you come up with...I don't know why I'm wanting to call them thought bubbles. You come up with these thought bubbles that, like, you give people a way to think about something in such a succinct way. But it takes you a creative process to be able to boil something down to a sentence or, in some cases, a word.

Pete: That's interesting. Are you saying I have a creative process?

Jen: Well, that's kind of what I wanted to know is, like, what is your creative process?

Pete: Well, I was wondering the same about you and about Kate and about Mark. Like, what is the creative process? But maybe the better question is, what is your creative process? Because I don't know. But I would assume, I would assert that it's different for each individual.

Jen: Yeah, I would think so. And actually, I have a friend who is an author, and he has told me that he has a totally different process for every single book. He's never written a book the same way twice.

Pete: That's wild. I love that. Like, "I don't have one proven system that is my process or system. I have to come up with a new one every single time."

Jen: Yeah.

Pete: So, how do we think about this to start with? What are we talking about? We're talking about creative process. Like, I feel like people think about the stereotype that I come up with is like, I don't know, some lone genius in a room thinking and writing and, I don't know, noodling and doing stuff. And then all of a sudden, aha, they've got this idea. I know that's very, very, very generic and not what we're talking about. So, what are we talking about? Some version of that?

Jen: Well, I'm sure that that does happen for some people. You know, during COVID, I would teach these classes every single week that I called Homeroom, and I would pick some sort of personal development topic that felt relevant to the moment and craft a sixty-minute workshop. And the way I would do that is I would turn on my voice memo, and I'd go for a fifteen-minute walk, and I gave myself fifteen minutes to do it. And every time at the end of the fifteen minutes, I had the class written. It's wild. Every single time. That was my process for that particular thing that I was doing. But there are other things that I've been working on, like my reboot program, which is the summer coaching program I do. I've been reiterating on it for eleven years, and I don't think it's ever going to be done. I'm going to deliver it in its newest form every year. I'm going to make it better and better and better. I'm going to keep what works. I'm going to add new things. But I feel like I could be reiterating that until my dying day.

Pete: Yeah, so there's many different processes that you even have.

Jen: Yeah. And the conditions for it are often very different.

Pete: I agree with it. So when I used to write a weekly blog, which I have threatened to get back into the habit of and still have not done, calling myself out, just acknowledging that, I used to give myself thirty minutes, sometimes sixty minutes on a Sunday afternoon. The best part of doing it was reminding yourself that you can go from, "I have absolutely nothing to say," to, "Oh, I just put a thought into the world."

Jen: Yep.

Pete: And the constraint, for whatever reason, enabled that. It didn't detract from that, which I feel like is often the misconception of constraints. Similarly, our podcast, I mean, we literally start every one of our conversations before we hit record with, "I don't think this is an episode, Jen, but here's an idea."

Jen: Yep.

Pete: Or, "Let's just try this. I don't think this is going to work." And yet, after twenty minutes, we usually have an episode in the can.

Jen: We usually do.

Pete: So I guess this is a creative process. So that's one way of looking at it is these time-bound, constrained processes. Then I love this idea that, like, one of the things I wrote down is ongoing, question mark. It's just...does it ever end in the...you know, is there a capital C creative process that is just like life, you know?

Jen: Yeah. Are you familiar with the ship of Theseus?

Pete: No. Please, enlighten me.

Jen: Okay. So, the ship of Theseus.

Pete: This sounds like a Trojan horse type situation. Is that right?

Jen: Well, the ship of Theseus is a concept. I don't actually know why it's called Theseus. It probably has something to do with the Greeks. Somebody can look it up. But the basic idea is you have a ship. It's the ship of Theseus. You need to replace some of the planks on the ship. So you replace the planks. Is it still the ship of Theseus?

Pete: Oh my god. I'm so obsessed with this. I already know where you're going with this. Keep going.

Jen: You have to replace the sails. Is it still the ship of Theseus? You have to replace the masts. You have to replace the rudders. And over time, piece by piece, you replace every single thing that was on the original ship. Is it still the ship of Theseus?

Pete: Oh my god. Is it? What's the answer?

Jen: That is the whole thought experiment of it.

Pete: Which plank of wood tips it over from the ship of Theseus to the ship of something else?

Jen: Right.

Pete: And so that would suggest that improving, iterating, refurbishing, rehashing, repainting our old ideas or our old literal buildings or ships in this case is part of the creative process that doesn't always create something new but improve upon existing things.

Jen: Yes. This is why I love the ship of Theseus image because it's like, well, the ship of Theseus, after you replace everything, is the new ship.

Pete: Right.

Jen: But it's still the original ship.

Pete: Yeah. That's...oh, god, my head hurts. I love it.

Jen: I know. So the reason I wanted to bring this up is because one of my husband's unbelievable talents is taking something he's written and turning it into something brand new. But it's still the thing that he wrote.

Pete: Still the same thing.

Jen: So a couple examples. My husband wrote an adaptation of A Christmas Carol for a cast of, I don't know, it was like twenty, twenty-five, something like that. Then he wrote another adaptation of A Christmas Carol, starting with that one, but for a cast of six. Then he wrote another adaptation of A Christmas Carol, but set it in Nantucket. So same structure, new ideas. Then he took A Christmas Carol and mashed it with a Sherlock Holmes story and wrote a new script called A Sherlock Carol.

Pete: Nice.

Jen: So all of these things, they're all completely unique to themselves, but they have some of the planks of wood from the previous iteration of the ship. They are all his work. They're all completely original and distinct, but he's a master of iteration.

Pete: So good.

Jen: And then sometimes he'll write something that is just...it's this one thing and that's it. And he walks away from it. It's so fascinating.

Pete: I love this example because I feel like it gives us and listeners permission to repurpose existing things.

Jen: Yes.

Pete: One of the traps I would say that I've bumped up against myself, whether it's through our podcast or through writing or through running, doing a keynote or doing a workshop or coaching a leader, is this thought. I don't even know where it comes from that you need to have a unique idea, a unique take every single time. That just because you said that thing in episode 32, that means you can't say that thing again now because you already shipped that idea. It's already in the world. You can't say it again and you'd be repeating yourself and your ideas would start to become redundant. And I know intellectually that's not true because I listen to other authors and podcasters and people I admire that say a version of the same thing, but build on it like your husband all the time. And I love when they do that.

Jen: Yes.

Pete: So, the question I wrote down just for my own sanity for that is, "How might I make this thing better within these new conditions?" So, I'm like, "I'm in these new conditions. I've got this new opportunity. The cast is now six instead of twenty." How do I take what I had and make it better based on these new conditions, these new boundaries, these new constraints?

Jen: One of the things I love about doing this podcast with you, Pete, is you come up with such good questions. Like these very succinct questions you can ask in order to get to the heart of something. That is one of your superpowers. In case you didn't know.

Pete: I appreciate it. I do. I mean, I do love questions.

Jen: Yeah, me too.

Pete: It's essentially me trying to make this codified so that I could use it myself, essentially, is what I'm trying to do. It's like, "What's the question I need to ask myself to remind myself of what you just said?" Mark's genius. I love it. I guess that's a creative process.

Jen: I'm also thinking right now of one specific instance, but I know there have been so many of these, maybe hundreds, maybe thousands, of this book called Who Am I Really? by Brian Little. And he delivered a TED Talk on this question of who am I really? And then from the TED Talk, he wrote the book. So it started as this, you know, fifteen-minute talk. And then it turned into a book. That had to go through some sort of a creative process to go from, you know, scratches on a page to a spoken talk to something you could go into a bookstore and purchase. And I actually don't know if he's turned that into other things, but I'm thinking now of some books that I love that started as a TED Talk, became a book, then became tools, then became courses.

Pete: And became a business, yeah.

Jen: So maybe what I'm actually talking to you about today is creative iteration more than the creative process.

Pete: Yeah. Well, I guess both and.

Jen: Both and, yeah.

Pete: Because the original TED Talk was probably created through...would have been created through some sort of creative process in the first place. And the iteration is still a process. It's like, it's its own creative process. Iterating is a creative process.

Jen: Yeah. I mean, how could you create anything without iterating? I mean, it almost seems like nothing would exist if we didn't iterate.

Pete: Exactly. Go back to one of our favorite...well, one of my favorite books of all time and probably most quoted is Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon.

Jen: Mm-hmm.

Pete: And the premise is, I mean, this book is so brilliant. You can read it in forty-five minutes. It's so short. It's so punchy. And the premise is that there's no new ideas, just iterations on existing ideas. And so, Steal Like an Artist, borrow these ideas and then iterate on them and improve them and put your own spin on them.

Jen: Which I think, to your point about, oh, if I said it in episode 34, I can never say it again, maybe another version of this is Steal From Yourself Like an Artist.

Pete: Oh, yeah. That's good. That's good. I like that. Steal From Yourself Like an Artist. The other thing, this might be a whole separate episode, I just am like noodling on for my own benefit, is I'm trying to work out, for myself, what are the conditions that enable my best creative processes?

Jen: Right.

Pete: And I think it probably varies depending on what we're trying to do. Like we've said, sometimes it's time-bound, sometimes it's not. But I was thinking about, I mean, speaking of old episodes that we could reuse, was it like episode two or three where we mentioned how we come up with our best ideas in the shower?

Jen: Yeah. Shower thoughts.

Pete: And I was thinking about this idea that like there is some universality in my own experience to not having distractions or inputs and that lending itself to my brain having the ability to be more creative or come up with new ideas or connect dots. And this has been happening so much lately because when I put my son to bed, who is a toddler, he's almost three. I read some stories, pop him in his bed, and he likes me to just lie there for a little bit while he like gets himself tired and comfortable and then he drifts off to sleep. And so I get this, you know, sometimes ten, sometimes thirty-minute window where I'm just lying in the pitch black with no other inputs other than I can hear my son breathing, sometimes talking to himself about what happened that day, which by the way is hilarious. And I'll just start coming up with these ideas or connecting these dots. The other day, I literally was like, oh my god, that person that I met today is the same person that a client of mine from four years ago referenced who she wants to introduce me to. And I only just figured that out right now lying in the dark. Where did that even come from? I have no idea. But because I didn't have inputs, my brain was able to connect these kind of dots.

Jen: Yeah, so putting yourself in a condition where nothing can distract you from the nothingness.

Pete: Exactly. So instead of shower thoughts now, I'm all about cot thoughts.

Jen: Cot thoughts. I love that. I love that so much. And for me, it's my...I'm about to enter this era of the year. It's my morning walks. Get up with the sun. Get outside. Go for a walk. Touch grass. Look at the ocean. That's where all of my creativity starts really popping off.

Pete: Yeah, I love it.

Jen: And then sometimes the creative process is bouncing ideas off of other people. I do feel like the ongoing conversation in my house right now about what is creativity, what is the creative process, is actually its own creative process.

Pete: Oh, for sure. For sure. And you will come up with new ideas and interesting thoughts because of the conversation.

Jen: Yeah, and actually several times we've been talking and trying to sort of quantify what is creativity. And one of us will say something and I'll go, "Oh, Kate, write that down. That sounds like a good song lyric." So, it's very possible she's writing an album. Who knows?

Pete: Oh my god. So, you are...you're doing it in the moment. She's going to iterate on that idea and that will be its own process. I love it. My goodness, my goodness. I have so many other thoughts and questions. You're sparking a lot of creativity as you tend to. So, I mean, Jen Waldman, you are one of the most creative and smart people that I've ever had the pleasure of meeting. I feel so lucky to be able to bounce these conversations off you.

Jen: Oh, thanks.

Pete: You always inspire new thoughts. You're like a human bubble of creativity. And every time I talk to you, something new comes out of it. So, thank you for these ideas. I literally have two pages of scribbles on my notepad.

Jen: Oh, I love it. Maybe you can go turn them into something like, I don't know, a blog post.

Pete: How dare you. And that is The Long and The Short of It.