Blog Post 4

 Twyla Tharp talks about what it’s like to walk into an empty room and create in Chapter 1 of The Creative Habit. Elizabeth Gilbert talks about her creative process, and all the ups and downs, in her TED talk.

How does your personal creative process work? A few questions to consider, and please don’t let these constrain your writing: how does the blank page with blinking cursor make you feel before you start a paper? where do you look to for “scratching” your creativity (see Ch. 6 of The Creative Habit)? when/where are you most creative?

In Chapter 6 of The Creative Habit, Twyla Tharp talks a little bit about what it feels like when you start a blank canvas in the face. The way Twyla describes the creative process is very intimate and real for me. It's the feeling of emptiness, and fear with no end in sight. This is a familiar feeling for me. The blank page with the blinking cursor when I start a paper makes me feel like an infinite amount of work left. Often times I spend more time thinking through the simple step of getting started, as if it was asking myself to climb Mount Everest.

Twyla Tharp described a few examples of what some people can do to scratch their creativity. One that stood out to me everyday conversation. This is the most common form of scratching that I look to within my papers or bodies of work. When I think about the past conversations I have, it's not only in person but also virtually that I can lean into. Due to COVID-19 the majority of my social interactions over the past two years have all happened virtually, across some form of social media platform such as Instagram, Facebook or Twitter. I don't think this takes away from the creative process, and in some cases I think it can benefit it. For example, if a friend sends me a new creative dance that they saw on Instagram we may have a conversation about it. This then both allows me to benefit from the conversation and the creative perspective in itself. 

Circling back to the blank page with the blinking cursor, the immediate question that I raise to myself is how can I get started. What I have found recently, is that rather than thinking of the creative process in its entirety, it is more beneficial to break the creative process down into bite-sized chunks. This allows me to break out the creative process into a manageable work flow. Rather than staring at the peak of mountain and creating a negative assumption on the work to be done, this allows to tackle the mountain of the creative process in waves. On example would be focusing on building the sources for a paper, rather than building out the intro and body paragraphs all at once. Another example is attempting to build out the conclusion of a paper, which allows me to ideate on how to best build out the introduction and body paragraphs.