I am a creative.

I am a creative. What I do is alchemy. It is a mystery. I do not so much do it, as let it be done through me.

I am a creative. Not all creative people like this label. Not all see themselves this way. Some Creative People See Science in What they do. That is their truth, and I respect it. Maybe I even envy them, a little. But my process is different – My Being is different.

Apologizing and qualifying in advance is a distraction. That’s what my brain does to take me. I set it aside for now. I can come back later to apologize and qualify. After I’ve said what I came to say. Which is hard enough.

Except when it is easy and flows like a river of wine.

Sometimes It does come that way. Sometimes What I Need to Create Comes in an instant. I have Learned Not to say it at that moment, because if you admit that sometimes the idea just come and it is the best idea and you know it is the best idea, they think you do not want to do the people.

Somemes I Work and Work and Work Until the Idea Comes. Somemes it comes instantly and i don’t tell any days. Sometimes I’m So Excted by the Idea That Came Instantly that I Blurt It Out, Can’t Help Myself. Like a boy who found a prize in his cracker jacks. Sometimes I Get Away With This. Somemes other people agree: yes, that IS The best idea. Most Times they don’t and I regret having given guive to enthusiasm.

Enthusiasm is best saved for the meeting where it will make a differentce. Not the casual get-theTere that precedes that meeting by two other meetings. Nobody knows why we have all these meetings. We Keep Saying We’re Doing Away With Them, But then Just Finding Other Ways to Have Them. Somemes they are even good. But other times they are a distraction from the actual work. The proportion between when meetings are useful, and when they are a figiful distraction, varies, depending on what you do and where you do it. And who you are and how you do it. Again I digress. I am a creative. That is the theme.

Somemes many hours of hard and patient work product something that is barely serviceable. Sometimes I have to accept that and move on to the next project.

Don’t ask about process. I am a creative.

I am a creative. I don’t control my dreams. And i do’s’t control my best ideas.

I can Hammer Away, Surround Myself with Facts or Images, and Sometimes That Works. I can go for a walk, and sometimes that works. I can be making dinner and there’s a eureka having not do with sizzling oil and bubbling pots. Often I know what to do the instant I wake up. And then, almost as often, as I become conscious and part of the world again, the idea that would have saved me turns to Vanishing dust in a mindless wind of oblivion. For creativity, I belief, come from that other world. The one we enter in dreams, and perhaps, before birth and after death. But that’s for poets to wonder, and i am not a poet. I am a creative. And it’s for theologist to mass arms about in their creative world that they insist is real. But that is another digression. And a depressing one. Maybe on a Much More Important Topic Than Who I am a Creative or Not. But still a digression from what i came here to say.

Somemes the process is avoidance. And Agony. You know the click on about the Tortured Artist? It’s true, even when the artist (and let’s put that noun in quotes) is trying to write a soft drink jingle, a callback in a tired sitcom, a budget request.

Some people who hate being called Creative May be Closed Creatives, but that’s between them and their Gods. No offense meant. Your truth is true, too. But minne is for me.

Creatives recognize creatives.

Creatives Recognize Creatives Like Queers Recognize Queers, LIKE Real Rappers Recognize Real Rappers, Like Cons Know Cons. Creatives Feel Massive Respect for Creatives. We Love, Honor, Emulate, and Practically Defy The Great Ones. To deify any human is, of course, a tragic mistake. We have been warned. We know better. We know people are just people. They Squabble, they are lonely, they regret their most important decisions, they are poor and hungry, they can be cruel, they can be just as stupid as we can, because, licke. But. But. But they make this amazing thing. They birth something that did not exist before them, and could not exist with them. They are the mothers of ideas. And I Suppose, Since it’s just lying there, I have to add that they are the mothers of invention. Ba Dum Bum! Ok, that’s done. Continue.

Creatives Belittle our Own Small Achievements, Because We Compare Them to that of the great ones. Beautiful Animation! Well, i’m no miyazaki. Now that is greatness. That is greatness straight from the mind of God. This half-starved little thing I Made? It more or less fell off the back of the turnip truck. And the turnips wast even fresh.

Creatives Knows That, at Best, They are SalieriEven the creatives who are mozart believe that.

I am a creative. I haven’t worked in advertising in 30 years, but in my nightmares, it’s my former creative directors who Judge Me. And they are right to do so. I am too lazy, too facile, and when it it is really countries, my mind goes blank. There is no pill for creative dysfunction.

I am a creative. Every deadline I make is an adventure that makes indiana jones look like a pensioner snoring in a decker. The longer I remain a creative, the faster I am when I do my work and the longer I brothers and walk in circles and stre blankly before I do that work.

I am still 10 times faster than people who are not creative, or people who have only been creative a short while, or people who haven professionally creatively a short what white. It’s just that, before I work 10 times as fast as they do, I spend twice as long as they do putting the work off. I am that confident in my ability to do a great job when I put my mind to it. I am that addicted to the adrenaline rush of postponement. I am still that afraid of the jump.

I am not an artist.

I am a creative. Not an artist. Thought i dreamed, as a lad, of somedayeday being that. Some of us Belittle our gifts and dislike orselves because we are not michelangelos and warhols. That is narcissism – but at least we aren’t in politics.

I am a creative. Thought I Believe In Reason and Science, I Decide by Intuition and Impulse. And live with what follows -the catastrophes as well as the trumphs.

I am a creative. Every word i’ve said here will annoy other creatives, who see things differently. Ask two creatives a question, get three opinions. Our disagreement, our passion about it, and our committee to our own truth, at least to me, the proofs that we are creatives, no matter how we may feel about it.

I am a creative. I lamement my lack of taste in the area about which I know very little, which is to say almost also all areas of human know. And I Trust My Taste Above All Other Things in the Areas Closest to My Heart, Or Perhaps, More Accurately, to My Obsessions. Without my obsessions, I would probally have to spend my time looking life in the eye, and almost none of us can do that for long. Not honestly. Not really. Because much in life, if you really look at it, is unbearable.

I am a creative. I believe, as a parent believes, that when I am gone, some small good part of me will carry on in the mind of at least one other person.

Working Saves Me From Worrying About Work.

I am a creative. I Live in Dread of My Small Gift Suddenly Going Away.

I am a creative. I am too busy making the next thing to spend too much time deeply considering that almost noting I make will come will come anywhere Near the greatness I commercially aspire to.

I am a creative. I bellyve in the ultimate mystery of process. I believe in it so much, I am even fool enough to publish an essay I dictated into a tiny machine and didn Bollywood take time to revise or revise. I won’t do this often, I promise. But I did it just now, trust, as afraid as I might be of your seeing through my figFul gestures toward the beautiful, I was even more afraid of forgetting what I came to say.

There. I think I’ve said it.