Creative Thinking

THIS time I know what I'm doing.

Creative people have big ideas, impossible aspirations, boundless imaginations—and mountains of self-doubt.

Here’s the monologue that goes through my head when I sit down to make something new.

Maybe everything worth making has already been made.

But it’s up to you to make it again.

To tell a familiar story in your own words. To play the same chords on an unfamiliar instrument. To write yet another poem about the moon, but to compare it to something wholly unexpected.

To take old ideas and make them new.

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With a bigger book advance comes bigger expectations for book sales.

With a viral social media post comes the wish to hit the digital lottery again (paid out in useless virtual currency, of course).

With a perfect painting, play, or poem comes the self-imposed expectation to live up to your own creative achievement.

Do you deserve it? Of course you do. You’ve worked your whole life for this big break.

And you also deserve the mental fortitude not to get caught up in the nonsense that surrounds it.

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I recently installed the Opal focus app on my phone to block out pesky social media apps (thanks to Beth Spencer on the The Illustration Department podcast for the tip!).

It’s worked wonders for my screen time—but I’ve made up for it by scrolling Instagram on my laptop instead.

My best focus trick is this:

I find a local university library where I don’t know the wifi password.

There I can sketch for hours uninterrupted by digital pings or email blasts—as long as I leave my phone in my car. And my laptop conveniently becomes an old-fashioned word processor.

I get so much writing done.

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Oh, wait! A good idea!

I like myself again.

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Think you have a great book title? Better search Amazon to see if someone’s beat you to it.

Think you’ve invented a brilliant, witty aphorism? No, Oscar Wilde said that centuries ago.

Think the cute animal sketch in your sketchbook is the next Olivia or Corduroy? Looks an awful lot like a Mo Willems character…

Sometimes I doubt even the lines I draw are original. Isn’t my art a pastiche of cartoonists Roz Chast, Tom Gauld, and Jean-Jacques Sempé? I can’t escape the anxiety of my early influences.

I’ll often sketch a clever joke in my notebook, only to find I made the exact same sketch in a different notebook, years prior.

I’m not even original in my own thoughts.

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I’ve drawn a weekly comic strip since 2009. My first book project was published a decade ago. I have more unpublished poetry comics pages than many artists publish in a lifetime.

I still don’t know what I’m doing.

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I will have another good idea.

My ideas are original—enough.

I deserve my work’s success, but I’m not going to tie my self-worth to it.

I don’t know what I’m doing. And that’s what makes creativity thrilling.

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This comic appears in my book THE SHAPE OF IDEAS: AN ILLUSTRATED EXPLORATION OF CREATIVITY, published by Abrams ComicArts and available worldwide.

Collect the entire Incidental Comics series for colorful comics on overthinking, mindfulness, and the love of reading. Signed, personalized copies are at my local bookshop, Watermark Books & Cafe.