Stages of Creativity
Where new ideas really come from
For me, the two most important parts of doing creative work are experimentation and fermentation.
Two years ago, Paul McCartney and Rick Rubin released a short documentary miniseries called McCartney 3, 2, 1 that delved into how Paul and the other Beatles worked. In the fourth episode, Paul talked about how they learned how to engineer and produce records. After the success of their first two records, the lads decided they wanted to learn more about how their sound was recorded and what the machines could do. They would sit down at the engineer’s board and turn knobs and twist dials to see what happened, almost like little kids.
Sometimes an engineer would tell one of them this knob shouldn’t be turned past this point, and of course, the Beatles would nod and then turn the knob past that point.
Paul described it as being professors in the laboratory. Most of the experiments didn’t work, but that’s the process they used to find all the innovative things that changed the way rock music was recorded by everyone.
This process is similar to how I make my poetry collage comics. I sit down and ask, what would happen if I did this with my pen or brush? I spend hours, fiddling with sliders and on the computer and scribbling different shapes with different…
