TheDisciplineOfTediousWork
One aspect of creativity that is, I think, underrated is the willingness, the self-discipline, to do tedious work in pursuit of one's artistic goal. Three kinds of tedious work come to mind: rote learning, brute force search, and repetitive actions.- Rote learning is valuable because it compiles information and actions that would otherwise have to be handled interpretively. Rote learning is an investment in one's creative future. Data and subroutines buried in subconscious microcode free your limited conscious mind to focus on other matters while creating. If you have a large vocabulary, if you are a good speller, if you know your Greek and Roman mythology, if you've memorized a number of great poems already, if you know the first twenty or so powers of two, if you have the ASCII collating sequence memorized, you spend less time consulting reference works and have fewer interruptions to the flow of creative thinking.
- Brute force search is sometimes the most effective way to get the job done. It feels a lot nicer to sit under a tree and have wonderful words pop into your head (and rote learning can make this possible); but there's nothing wrong with getting out your thesaurus and plowing through 500 suggested words to find the right one. Moreover, brute force search often opens the door to serendipity. It is, however, important to learn the art of estimating beforehand how much effort will likely be required.
- Repetitive actions are sometimes needed to turn an idea into reality. I think of the pointillist painters, or Jackson Pollock spending hours making swirl after swirl, or quilters cutting out thousands of squares and then sewing them together by hand, stitch after tiny stitch. A relatively modern idea is to make a machine to carry out necessary repetitive actions, and the design of such a machine is in itself a creative act. But it is often more effective to just go ahead and do the repetitive work yourself. Sometimes the creative act of supreme brilliance is simply choosing a new kind of trivial action that, endlessly repeated, can express an artistic idea in a surprising way
surprising because everyone before has been scared off by the prospective tedium of the approach.
A creative person needs not to be afraid of activities that in themselves don't feel terribly creative. Is your goal to feel creative, or to be creative?
GuySteele