How do you create?

[tehta]

I don't think that approach works for me, empirically speaking. As pat of my job, I write technical documents, presentations, complex emails etc daily... and they don't trigger inspiration. If anything, they use it up: I was more creative when I was on leave.

[Turnstylus]

I'm just now discovering this thread – a great topic to discuss, moredhel!

And so many great contributions from others. We have much in common in the creative process.

The American author Stephen King has said a few things about creating, and one of my favorites is basically that the “Muse” is more of a partner than a fairy godmother. The Muse needs to know where you're going to be, and that you'll be working when he gets there, so that the environment is right for him to open up the “bag of magic”. Perhaps Stephen chose to characterize the Muse as a grouchy man because it reflected his experiences with inspiration! 

The people who see great spectacles in the sky have already made the habit of watching the stars. And so they are present for the meteor showers, eclipses, etc. This was a truer statement when we did not have modern weather services, but you get my point! If we can build the discipline to devote a certain amount of time, and a certain amount of attention to our craft every day, then whenever the Muse descends, we'll be ready.

For me the discipline is not always daily, but I've been doing it long enough that in my mind there is no question that I will make art, good or bad. And I don't feel ready more often then I do, but I begin anyway, feeling like an unqualified amateur almost every time, even though I've been drawing for decades!

There is strength in looking past your feelings of being an imposter and instead thinking, "If I spend this present moment making art, then I am an art-maker, in fact," and now it's a matter of historical record! No one can dispute it, not even myself!

And I believe most (if not all) of us are capable of training our minds to do this - it takes time and persistence, but it can be done.

[Lenny]

I've been frustrated lately with finding info on more advanced art critique, and specifically project management. Part of my mostly fruitless search went into tools for project management, and I found some resources that might be useful to others.

My focus for tools was on: Desktop software. Offline software. Works out of the box with no setup. Free and if possible open source. Simple to use. Nice to look at. (I have a ton of experience by now with project planning/management in software, and there's a lot of that out there, but it's a little harder to find things that are designed for the individual instead of a team and that don't require a sign-up of some kind or a lot of setup.)

sleek, a ToDo app. Free, open source, has a nicely designed UI, can add dates to tasks, can group tasks by project.

Xmind, a mindmapping app. Free version has everything you need. Facilitates braindumping like nothing else. Has loads of different kinds of maps you can switch things to, currently using this for project mapping and plot mapping, meaning to use it for top level script planning, too. Really smooth UI and preset themes.

My method for the two, and why I chose them, is to use the mindmap tool for large project structure and mapping out global things, which can then be broken down into small tasks into the todo tool. Can combine with a calendar if you so choose (for me I'd much rather work with time blocks and a current todo list that I can just pick whatever from or ignore, so I don't feel locked in to anything - it's much more of a tracking system than anything else).

I usually work pretty freeform since yeah, stuff always has structure, but that structure just needs to be in your head. Howeverrrrr, that only works for projects that are extremely freeform (doesn't matter what the end result is etc.), or extremely small (one piece) with techniques you know how to do or are comfortable freestyling.

With larger projects, or if you need to fit in projects with working full-time and other things in your life, freeform method ends up as unfinished projects half the time at least, in my experience. So yeah. Project management.

...overall I kind of suspect I'm falling in-between the professional artist and hobby artist cracks in regards to what information I need. And usually with professional artist resources (and to some extent hobby artist, too!) you'll have contacts or groups or facilities of some kind. What with the unintended 8 years of survival strats all of that's just... gone for me (people moved on, websites taken down, moved to gated communities), so I'll have to start up from scratch.