By Chris McGinty
I did a blog post a little while back where I was going through somebody else’s video on the five stages of the creative process. It was meant to be a series of blogs in which I would kind of go through each of the stages and who knows maybe I’ll get to at some point this year. The reason why I might get to it is because I decided at the beginning of the year that I would attempt to do a blog post and a short story or flash fiction daily. I did make the decision from the get-go that I can decide to give up on it at any point that I don’t want to do it anymore. So far, I’m still deciding to keep up with it because I think that if I stopped that I just won’t get back to it at all.
The thing that has definitely happened while I’m doing this experiment is that it’s become very clear in what ways I do the five stages of the creative process. The problem that I’ve run into is that because I’m doing something daily and haven’t had a chance to get out ahead of myself I’m not really getting to do as much real research as I would like. There’s that joke about I’m not watching TV I’m doing research and if you go completely holistically with the creative process there may be a legitimacy of sorts because even the most passive entertainment will teach you something and maybe on a subconscious level make a connection. I’ve got a lot of that level of research done and I’ve gotten a lot of ideas from it.
The part I’m struggling with is I need time to do some real research and to write some of the bigger ideas and I’m just not really getting that. I went out and delivered Uber Eats last night. From a monetary standpoint I don’t regret it, but at the point that I realized oh I really need to start working on my next blog post that’s about the time that I regretted it.
So similar to last night’s blog post this one is going to end with me resolving out loud, because I’m doing this on the dictation app, to actually spend some time working on things tomorrow. All it will really take is for me to get out ahead by a few days and I won’t feel so much like I have to do throw away bits just to get something in on time.
So I have a lot to say on the subject of being busy at work and actually doing double duty by being creative. Infact I wrote a 4 part blog about it. You can read it here:
https://accordingtowhim.com/2011/02/28/living-my-life-at-work-and-other-junk-2/
It’s how I utilize my jobs to be creative. The gist of the story is: the more demanding the work is, the more it motivates me to get some creative work done. The more free time, the less I got done.