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>Bilder offers up one last bit of practical advice: Just get your ideas out there—on paper, on canvas, out of your head. This is why a lot of creative keep a "

>Bilder offers up one last bit of practical advice: Just get your ideas out there—on paper, on canvas, out of your head. This is why a lot of creative keep a "brainjuice" file full of half-cooked ideas they can later dip into. When you have some creative energy, its easy to just dump it out and then, later, when you're in a more sober and productive mood, start implementing those ideas in an effective manner. Or as writers say: write drunk, edit sober.

kleer001 12y ago
This is exactly how I make music. There's three distinct steps, sound creation, arrangement, and mastering. Usually I don't spend more than 15-30 minutes on any one track and sometimes as little as 5-10. But I have a huge pile of unfinished work in various stages, some I never get back to, but some I finish happily enough. My key to creative happiness is to be entertained, engaged, and moving forward.
- kendallpark 12y ago
  This is how I write my essays. Out of order. I toy with ideas, play with arguments. Lots of disjointed paragraphs in a single document. Then I step back, look at them, pick out my strongest points and stitch them together into a cohesive paper (dumping quite a lot of work along the way).
  - kleer001 12y ago
    > dumping quite a lot of work along the way As if your work were... say... evolving?
jarcane 12y ago
As a 'creative' of many years (not all of them public), I have folders and folders of dead ideas I never used, many of which I agonized over for weeks and even months to no actual productive end. Kurt Vonnegut famously said that the reason he invented Kilgore Trout and his stories was that he loved coming up with the short little SF parables, but that writing them out was just rubbish and usually not as good as the core moral itself. That said, you can do yourself a lot of harm dwelling on never-finished ideas; at some point you have to learn to buckle down and commit to something. You'll never finish a thing, until you finish your first thing. But once you do, you'll finish another and another, and you'll keep finishing things only as long as you keep finishing them.
- kendallpark 12y ago
  I have the exact same struggle. I have boxes of unfinished art, folders of unfinished writing, and repos of unfinished programming projects. I read a great quote from Steve Jobs years ago and it has definitely impacted the way I work now: We tend to focus much more. People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of many of the things we haven't done as the things we have done. Right now I have one project. It's hard to just have one because I'm constantly bombarded with new ideas I want to pursue. But it's the only way I actually have the chance of finishing something.

kleer001 12y ago

This is exactly how I make music. There's three distinct steps, sound creation, arrangement, and mastering. Usually I don't spend more than 15-30 minutes on any one track and sometimes as little as 5-10. But I have a huge pile of unfinished work in various stages, some I never get back to, but some I finish happily enough. My key to creative happiness is to be entertained, engaged, and moving forward.

kendallpark 12y ago
This is how I write my essays. Out of order. I toy with ideas, play with arguments. Lots of disjointed paragraphs in a single document. Then I step back, look at them, pick out my strongest points and stitch them together into a cohesive paper (dumping quite a lot of work along the way).
- kleer001 12y ago
  > dumping quite a lot of work along the way As if your work were... say... evolving?

jarcane 12y ago

As a 'creative' of many years (not all of them public), I have folders and folders of dead ideas I never used, many of which I agonized over for weeks and even months to no actual productive end. Kurt Vonnegut famously said that the reason he invented Kilgore Trout and his stories was that he loved coming up with the short little SF parables, but that writing them out was just rubbish and usually not as good as the core moral itself. That said, you can do yourself a lot of harm dwelling on never-finished ideas; at some point you have to learn to buckle down and commit to something. You'll never finish a thing, until you finish your first thing. But once you do, you'll finish another and another, and you'll keep finishing things only as long as you keep finishing them.

kendallpark 12y ago
I have the exact same struggle. I have boxes of unfinished art, folders of unfinished writing, and repos of unfinished programming projects. I read a great quote from Steve Jobs years ago and it has definitely impacted the way I work now: We tend to focus much more. People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of many of the things we haven't done as the things we have done. Right now I have one project. It's hard to just have one because I'm constantly bombarded with new ideas I want to pursue. But it's the only way I actually have the chance of finishing something.