The two invisible steps before you make something
Hallå my pals!
Jonas here with another issue of Indie Notebook to get some ideas out of my noggin, and to inspire you to do the same.
I promised that I would have a longer piece written for this week. And here it is!
I totally forgot that I meant to publish this on Wednesday though, so I still spent my Sunday writing this. I’m sighing and putting my face into my palm’s. I’ve been extremely forgetful recently. I got locked out of my bank account and forgot all the pin codes to my cards.
The reason I forgot that I meant to publish this on Wednesday was that I was too excited to get this piece finished. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for quite a while.
NEXT WEEK I will publish on Wednesday for sure though.
The two invisible steps before you make something
When I made comic strips in the past I would often jump straight into drawing the first panel. I’d just wing it and then improvise each following panel. Sometimes it worked out.
But often it just turned into nonsensical crap.
I often started drawing a strip and gave up cause I didn’t know what to do.
I thought I was supposed to be able to fart out great comics with ease. But I squeezed and squeezed. I was too eager. Without being aware of it, I tried to do 3 steps all at once. To continue this (f)art metaphor - before anything comes out of you, you’ve gotta 1. find something you want to eat, 2. digest it, 3. let it come out. The problem was that I hadn’t eaten or digested anything.
To put it in a more dignified way.
The first step is to search,
the second is to make sense of,
the third is to make it.
I used to skip the first two steps, I wanted to get straight into making shit. But that often turned into nonsensical crap, or I would run into a wall and give up.
The third step (to make it) is the most obvious one. Despite it being the most obvious step, I got completely stuck on it because I hadn’t gone through the first two.
If you are reading this, it’s likely you already know how to make something. I think these first two steps are identical no matter what medium you are creating in. So I will take the liberty of not going into detail about how to make something.
Instead of trying to think of products first, what any creative person should try to do is think, search and wonder. Think about real things, notice what makes you feel stuff - what is close to your heart if everything else is stripped away? Ideally projects will emerge from the collection of the thoughts you have collected, or at least be designed/conceived in a way that can package your thoughts as nicely as possible.
Search
There’s nothing quite as uninspiring as a blank canvas. 85% of the time a blank canvas only makes me feel dread or boredom. If you come up with a great idea while looking at a canvas it’s not because you looked at a canvas, it’s despite looking at it. Whatever great ideas I have managed to conjure while looking at that white rectangle has always come from something else - an inspiring movie scene, something from my day, a lingering thought, or a line from a song.
Now I’ve abandoned blank canvases, I never start from one. Neither when I write or draw.
Instead, I live in search of noteworthy thoughts. Regardless of whether you know what a thought will be useful for, jot them down somewhere.
To search is just to live life with a keen eye, ear and heart and to make sure you don’t forget.
When I stare at a blank canvas The Search becomes stressful and I want to avoid it. But in reality, if I admit that The Search is part of the process, it becomes the most peaceful and interesting step of them all. It’s just living with a secret mission - to be human and to find out what’s special about that to you.
And of course you need to make sure you don’t forget those thoughts for the next step.
Make sense of
Now that you’ve been out in the world and discovered stuff, it’s time to sit down somewhere, sift through and examine your haul. You might be overwhelmed by how much is in there. You’ll never be able to use everything. So you just gotta use your intuition. See what stands out, group things, talk with someone - do ANYTHING you want with it until you find what’s hiding there.
Your notes are a collection of countless puzzles. Some puzzles are hundreds of pieces big, others are just one or three. Some pieces fit into more than one puzzle. You don’t know. Often you’ll have to find a few pieces in your head to complete a puzzle, while other pieces might still be hidden out there in the world.
The way to make sense of a puzzle is to try to put it together, or to be literal; try to explain it as clearly as you can. Ask yourself, “how can I prove to someone else that this is true?” And ideally not just make them understand it, but also feel it. That’s the puzzle you gotta solve.
Let me give you an example.
I found myself frustrated that we live life too much through screens and I want to make a Space Deer comic strip. That’s the idea I want to make sense of and the filter that I will examine my idea through.
First I will ask myself, “ok, why is that idea true?”- I think life needs balance, you shouldn’t stare too much of it away through a pixelated representation of it. Then I ask myself, “how should we live then?”- We should go outside and get our boots in the mud more, what we will really remember is probably gonna happen out there. And then I try to think of a situation where I can show as clearly as possible that this is right. I’m afraid this message might be tired or preachy, especially if I would aim the message directly at someone like us (you know, someone who’s currently looking at a screen). Luckily the imagery of my comic gives me other symbols to play with.
So I thought of how I could show that in four comic panels and wrote down this.
Space Deer walks on a desolate planet. They encounter a mars rover. They scream “get out here and live!!” NASA people see Space Deer through their screens.
It’s simple, but it gets the idea across. Normally I would like to make it clear that Space Deer is really out there and living freely, to show what these researches are missing out on. But in the comic we will see Space Deer explore and go on all kinds of adventures, so that’s something I didn’t feel like I needed to put more emphasis on. I trust the reader to make that connection themself.
Sometimes making sense of an idea can be much harder, in this example the idea was an entire puzzle on its own, or maybe I had the remaining pieces in my head already. Sometimes all you need is just one piece in front of you to know where to look for the rest.
Make it
And then of course the last step is to just make it. (Step 4 is to share it. Step 5 is to repeat it.)
I have made decent comic strips despite jumping straight into drawing, or so I’ve thought. Thinking back on it, I just managed to search and make sense of an idea as I was drawing. I didn’t magically skip two steps, that’s impossible. I was just not aware of what I was doing.
Now that I know the steps, I’m much better at understanding why I tend to get stuck in different parts of the process.
In reality these steps are not always as clear cut. They will blend into each other, you might do some back and forth, making sense of and making something is a fuzzy line. This is not so much a step-by-step process as it is a journey you have to go through. It has definitely helped me to be more methodical and intentional about it though. I’ve set myself up in a way where it’s fun for me to get each step done. I might go into that in the future.
If you only take one thing with you from this - I hope it’s that you will be aware of and feel more at peace with the first two steps.
Mini Notes
📝 Article - The Spark File
If you only do one type of note taking, I think this is the way you should do it.
⚡️ Arc Easel - My Computer Build
I’m gonna try to build my first PC this year and I’ve started to look around for parts. I’m continuously updating this Arc Easel to figure out which parts to pick. It’s easier to think straight when all the options and thinking is laid out like this, as opposed to having 10 open tabs.
I’m open to part-suggestions btw!
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Take care and have a creative week.
Fun :) I'd love to experience space deer yelling at my face in first person. They're so intense, yet cute.
It's cool reading about your personal process. Everyone diverges and their work is unique for it, and that is something I like about the world.
It's my tendency to extrapolate worldviews into an endless spectrum to avoid being mentally locked; perhaps "two steps before you make something" could be one of many possible processes. What if there were a third step, or just one step, or you combine steps (you hinted at that by saying it can be messy), or they were completely different? Then there is now an idea of "there can be steps before the main labor of a project" and those steps can be variable per project to make effects.
And what about extending that to having steps or not having steps, and getting different effects out of the choice of steps or no steps?
And what about throwing away "steps" and going orthogonal to that idea, such as having non-discrete continuous task-switching?
It's fun to cast a wide net of ideas. It's almost like I get bored of having an answer, so I try to find a rare new one that works just as well or potentially better ;)
This is very possibly my favorite issue of Indie Notebook.
Not only do you nail a lot of things - I think - but you also do it in a whole-hearted and genuine way.
Also, personally, I am a sucker for anything to do with (the) creative process.
I've had similar revelations to do with my creative process. Steps that didn't seem like steps before it suddenly hit me that they were.
A way of putting it could also perhaps be that in order to be an artist, it actually isn't enough to just make art. Perhaps, in order to be an artist, one needs to BE an actual artist; tie one's shoes artistically, take a breath artistically and even be practical and realistic in an artistic way.
The part about the blank page really resonated with me, btw. The amount of terrible poems I've written about a blank piece of paper is considerable!