Creative Wisdom

Or: How to Make Things Without Going Crazy

I spend hours at the drawing table each week, putting pen to paper and stylus to screen. I am constantly creating new comics, new books, and new scraps of paper for the wastebasket. With so much time spent crafting ideas, it’s impossible not to wonder: could I be doing this better?

The first part of the process is often the hardest—getting to work. There are so many other things I could be doing instead of drawing tiny pictures in boxes. Maybe I need to load the dishwasher. What about that bill I have to pay? I could really use a snack. Maybe all the windows in the house need cleaning??? Time for another snack…

When I finally sit down (half and hour or so later), I’m faced with the ominous, mythical blank page. How do I overcome the anxiety of putting messy lines on a pristine sheet of paper? I open my notebook.

I have notebooks going back more than a decade. They are filled with assorted fragments of my imagination and observation: quick doodles, random thoughts, collected quotes, sketches of people and nature, and more. When I open an old sketchbook, I’m brought back to a previous mental state.

Sometimes I barely recognize the person who made the doodle. Did I think that? Other times I’m filled with nostalgia for a past version of myself. But the best part is when a half-formed idea from my sketchbook combines with my current state of mind and grows into something new. Something bigger and more complete. A fully-formed idea.

Maybe there’s some mathematical formula to explain it:

(1/2 idea + experience) x time = 1 fully-formed idea!

Now I have a starting point. It’s time to get to work. Unfortunately, silence is a key part of my creative process. I used to work in the early morning, setting my alarm for 5:30 AM, brewing a pot of coffee, and tackling my day’s creative work before leaving for my day job as an orthodontist. Morning is a time of clarity. No one’s sending emails. The kids are (hopefully) still asleep. The sounds of mowers, chainsaws, and jackhammers have not yet filled my suburban neighborhood. Even the sun hasn’t made its appearance.

My morning creative hours served me well for years. This monastic routine did limit my evening social life (which was pretty much nonexistent anyway), and it made me slightly more grumpy come evening. But it was worth it for the incredible amount of work I got done on only one uninterrupted hour of creativity a few days a week, repeated nearly every week of the year.

Now that I’ve stepped back to only two days a week at my day job, I don’t maintain this rigorous schedule. But I could shift back to it if I ever need to squeeze more creative juice from the day.

Silence remains essential to my current creative life. When I sit down with a new idea, I close and lock the door to my room. I try not to turn on music. I don’t listen to podcasts. I strive to keep my phone or laptop on a different floor of the house. I know I’m not strong enough to resist the temptation to check email or scroll Instagram.

It’s uncomfortable to be alone in a quiet room with my thoughts. But if I keep my pen moving and my butt in the chair, something happens. My distracted mind falls away and before I know it, I am working.

Most days I can stay in this flow state for long enough to create a page or two of new comics. Perhaps you’ve heard about flow in every possible book or podcast on the psychology of creativity? It’s a complex topic. But I’ve simplified it in this handy “Flow Chart”:

Keep Working. That’s as good a creative motto as any. After an hour, or two, or four, I’ve made something new. Sometimes it’s good. Sometimes it needs revision. Sometimes I look at it and feel I’ve wasted my life. Very, very, rarely, I’ll marvel that regular old ME could make something so great. This feeling usually fades quickly. Why?

The monster of self-doubt enters the picture. No matter how many pages of comics I’ve drawn (I think it’s well into the thousands), no matter how many books I’ve published (it’s now in double digits), every time I create something new, I encounter self-doubt.

Gradually I’ve befriended the monster. Because without self-doubt, there would be no self-criticism. It keeps me accountable to revise and improve each thing I make. It keeps me open to trying new things despite the knowledge they might fail. It helps me grow as a writer and artist.

Creativity, for me, is like flying a homemade airplane held together by tape and glue. I keep launching new ideas, knowing they may fail. But it’s a magical feeling when one finally takes flight.

For more insights on the creative process, check out my book THE SHAPE OF IDEAS: AN ILLUSTRATED EXPLORATION OF CREATIVITY. It’s been translated into over a dozen languages and is available in new, larger format from Abrams Books.