The Value of Settling Down on My Creative Process

One wonderful aspect of aging is acquiring some modicum of stability which, at least in the current season I’m in, has really helped with my creative process.  There is certainly a time for exploring and if you are a young person, I especially highly encourage it!  Get out, travel the world, meet tons of people, goto Meetups, explore!  Go!

In my twenties, I harbored an itinerant fantasy of being “a traveling creative.”  I’d spend my weekends wandering around New Jersey with my notebook and laptop in my backpack, working out of different cafes, in random parks, and on the NJ Transit.  I’d visit Rutgers and Princeton and enjoy strolling around their campuses (thinking I might bump into Professor Nash on campus or something; I never did).  Sometimes I’d take the PATH train into Manhattan and wander the city for a day.  Attend a Margaret Atwood lecture at the 92Y.  Visit a Lev Grossman talk at BAM.  Use my company pass to wander the Morgan and check out the exhibit on Jane Austen’s letters.  It was a heady time and I wrote a ton in my notebooks.  But none of it was cohesive.  I didn’t know about Morning Pages yet, but it was essentially several years of weekends of Morning Pages.  I thought I was doing something creative.  And maybe I was.  But I definitely wasn’t producing any kind of finished artifact.

Anyway, the reason I wrote this this morning is because I was actually inspired by Charlie’s post on Keats’s Negative Space and Yancey’s comment about Andreessen’s “Zero Introspection”.  My entire life, I’ve been a navel super-gazer and have spent a ton of time in a “life of interiority”.  In middle age now, I’ve been (haha) reflecting on that.  I don’t know if I could ever achieve Andreessen’s “Zero Interiority” (a genuinely extraordinary ability, if he can actually do it!) but I feel like I understand the spirit of the desire. To not spin compute on rumination. To be only able to hone in on "critical path". This year as I’ve buckled down on this damn novel I’ve been trying to push out the door for over a decade now, I’ve come to really appreciate the idea of “just doing the next thing that needs to be done”.  Not getting nerd-sniped by a dozen different distractions and writing various dissertations on things that have nothing to do with anything.  But literally just locking down, writing one coherent scene at a time, having a sensible/interesting plot and characters, and a sequence of events that cogently happen one after the other.  One mental framing that’s really helped me is thinking of myself like an LLM: I am simply only concerned with “next token prediction” and to not dilly dally on all the other stuff.  All ”the other stuff” may be what it means to be human, but for the purposes of creating an artifact, “all the other stuff” does not a novel make!

#creative-practices (originally I was thinking about posting this in the #creative-practices channel of the acorp space but then realized I don't have posting privileges there. So posting here! In general, I'd love to know about other people's creative practices though, if people are keen to share!)