Creativity isn’t a puzzle; it’s a process.

You can’t force it, you need to let it happen.

Photo by Alice Dietrich on Unsplash

JK Rowling was sitting on a train one day and Harry Potter just jumped into her head, fully formed.

Born to Run arrived in Bruce Springsteen’s head so fully formed he assumed he must have stolen it from somewhere.

You do not write the songs, the songs write themselves.

When artists are being highly creative, they often feel like they’re not doing much at all, it just comes naturally.

Any artistic endeavour takes three things; creativity, connection and crafting.

Of these three, the most easily understood is crafting. It’s not the most easily executed, because it takes hard work and practice.

Connection is something artists arrive at in different ways. What form should the idea take to connect with the audience? This can be a process of intuition, trial-and-error or observation.

Of these three, creativity is the most puzzling but you shouldn’t look at it like it’s a puzzle. Bruce Springsteen didn’t sit down a say “I’m going write a song that encapsulated the history of rock and roll music in a single stroke” like it was a puzzle. It was his process that allowed him to write Born to…