Twenty first proof of my existence: On Creativity

So a few moments ago, I decided that I was going to write this.  I sat simply, my legs careening over the edge of my bed; my mind blank. That is to say, my decision was made, but I had absolutely no idea what to discuss. This got me thinking, brainstorming what exactly I should write about- and I started to realize that I do similar things (in so far as the act of brainstorming goes) whenever I'm trying to create something.

It's not a clear process by any means- decidedly not, even. It's vague and nebulous and requires this sense of being lost, like the first time a child becomes separated from their parent in a bustling, emotionally vacant mall. When I'm creating something, I grope around the back of my mind for a thread, just the skeleton of an idea. With this thread, I find my outline, and from there, I break it into the parts that create it- be they ink, sounds, or just future plans- and then I see if I can figure out how to improve them.

In many ways, I think that this is another form of bad faith in my life, because I often do not finish drawing the outline. I think my best examples are with music and drawing- I've got something like 30 separate little snippets of songs, and I'm still not fleshing them out and then I've got 3 or 4 drawings that I've started, but never worked on a second time. It's not that I don't think about it, but I... I get bored of it, and I move on to something else, and the boredom of completion becomes an unseen vision, the sense of future-past without clarity of dejà vu. So I'll look to them, but can't remember what I wanted them to be.

On rare days, I'll be in the middle of a task, but I'll be zoning out, lost in a labyrinth of thoughts- when inspiration strikes. I've noticed that it's frequently when I'm thinking about anything that I'm either extremely emotional about or quite apathetic about, rather than just random thoughts. Regardless, I am struck unaware with a burst of thought in the middle of of the textile's creation, and it is of better quality than most of my other ideas. There's form to these ideas, and it's these that I'm more adept at finishing. It's different, though, than my ordinary process, because I usually cannot just "work" on them in the sense that I just improve the separate parts of the idea, and I'm constantly waiting for another strike of inspiration.

I think my point is that with some discipline, I can start bringing the first realm of ideas, the threads, into the realm that the inspired ideas are in- I just need to finish the outlines, and continue fleshing them out. But... it needs to be when I start. Either that, or I need to learn how to work on my old projects.