You’re never going to have it all figured out. There is no magic formula. You’re trying to define something that, in its essence, is indefinable.
You figure it out while you’re doing it.
You don’t figure it out and then do it. If you approach creativity that way, you’ll never do it. (The thing you really want to do.)
So, actually, those were five things to know about the creative process.
But they all come back to the same premise: You figure things out while being in the mess, fear, beauty, and weirdness of it all.
Do you figure out love first and then decide to go out on a date? Do you try to figure out compassion before you give a homeless man money on the street?
Constantly trying to figure things out from your head would immobilize you from taking any kind of action and experiencing the thrill of what true creativity is.
Life is in process. So is one’s creative exploration.
But actors get so impatient about…well…everything. Impatience is the enemy of process; robbing us of our joy.
When did we lose the fun in process? In figuring things out? I was talking to a female actor yesterday who’s newly in love. She seems petrified. Well, that’s good. Love is a scary thing. So is creating, putting yourself out there, being willing to risk-all of that can be unnerving at times.
But you can’t just get stuck in the inevitable unknowable-ness of it all. Love is unknown. Love is scary. But it’s also fun to jump in, to live in the excitement, to discover another person.
Acting is scary. But it’s also fun to explore parts of ourselves we never knew existed, to be willing to experience things we’ve never before experienced. But that comes from being in process.
We often declare something “stupid,” or “over,” or “not going anywhere” long before it’s really played itself out. We’re so impatient for results-instantaneous answers for things-that we think we can outsmart life.
We can’t. As clever as we think we are with our “smart” phones getting everything we want in 30 seconds or less, life still finds a way to make us work through our s**t without getting to the end until we work our way through.
Process.
And thank Gawd for that. With no process and only immediate gratification, we would become completely juvenile, ill-behaved, narcissistic brats, and the art of creativity would be lost. There would be none.
Creativity exists in the act of getting lost and finding one’s way through the process.
So go out into the world without your Google Maps one day and see what happens if you just get a little lost but still find your way home.
Go out into the world without having everything controlled and planned and perfect. (And try that with your acting!)
Go out into the world and be open to the mysteries that want to reveal themselves to us but we keep missing them because we think we have it all figured out.
We don’t. And thank Gawd for that.