Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #264 - Creative Process, Part 1

Episode Date: September 25, 2015

Mark begins with part one-of-two podcasts about the creative process.

I'm pulling my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work. Okay, so today I'm going to talk about a topic that a lot of people ask me about, which is the creative process. So today is all about, I call this the blank page. How do you create something from nothing? So one of the things I've learned is that I get excited by the blank page. I get excited by the idea of there's a world of possibilities. What do I want to do? But what I've learned is most people are scared to death of the blank page. The idea of having nothing to work off of, having no structure of anything that's possible is paralyzing.

And so I want to talk a little bit today, like, what's the technique I use? How do I start with truly a blank page and end up with something? I'm going to teach you my secrets today and talk through the creative process. Sounds like a fun drive to work. Let's get started. Okay, so here's the first secret, is you have to start with something. When I am faced with a blank page, I always say, okay, let's come up with something that intrigues me and interests me. Now, one of the things that's very interesting is you want to make sure that whatever you choose to do, that you, the creative person, are interested in it.

If you pick something you're just inherently not interested in, remember that creation is an emotional thing. That when people create things, you are tapping inside yourself and you're sort of going to your soul, if you will, to your heart, to your soul, whatever you want to call it. You have to pick something that you have some fondness for, that you believe in. It is very, very hard to be creative

in an area that you're just not at all interested in. And so first thing you need to do is find something. So essentially what you want to do when you have a blank page is you want to first pick a starting point. And that has to be something. The reason a blank page is so scary to people is there's no definition to it. It could be anything.

Like one of the things I talk about is I write a column and when I started, when I set up the website, I made it so every other week was a theme week. And people originally said, well, aren't your columns going to be upset at you that every other week you're forcing them to write about a particular topic? And I go, no, no, no, they're going

to thank me because I'm telling them every other week what they have to write about, you know, and that a lot of my favorite articles I got to because I was put in the corner that I said, okay, I'm going to do something. I did a, there's a series of articles I do called Topical Blend. And the idea was I went to the, I went out to my readers and I said, okay, I want you to pick a magic topic and a non-magic topic and I will write about that. a magic topic and a non-magic topic and I will write about that and the first time we did it the the magic topic was your 10 greatest mistakes as a designer and the non-magic topic was girls

so I said okay I'm going to explain the 10 biggest mistakes I made through the lens of my dating foibles and it was maybe the best article I've ever written. It was a really good article. And I never, ever, ever, ever would have gotten there had I not sort of put myself someplace to say, okay, what am I going to do? I mean, like I said, my background is improv. So I definitely am less afraid of getting suggestions and doing that. But the key to any sort of creative thing is

you must pick a starting point. You must pick some germ of something that is interesting to you. And then once you do that, you build around it. For those, for example, talk about how a pearl gets made. Is it a clam? Like a clam gets a little piece of sand or something. And they just keep building around, building around, building around until it creates a pearl. But at the center of the pearl, down deep, it's a little chunk of sand that every creative

idea has to have that little sandy center. That something that goes, okay, I'm going, something about this interests me, I'm going to start on this thing. And that, if I look back to how a lot of magic has happened, like a lot of my magic ideas, it's just, I had some interest in something. It might have been a top-down thing. Like, oh, the horror genre. Let's design around that.

It could have been something like there's a lot of mechanical space in land. Let's do that. It could have been just I want to tell a story. We're going to tell the Weatherlight Saga and I'm going to make a set that can do that. Whatever it is, something inspires me. Something sort of says I'm going to make a set that can do that. Whatever it is, something inspires me.

Something sort of says, I'm going to make a jumping-off point. That's the thing. But that's the key. When you want to start, the way you overcome the blank page, and this is a trick I think they teach in drawing school, is put a mark on your page. Take your brush and just make a random mark. And all of a sudden, that one random mark now tells you something.

Oh, that looks like something. And that random mark on your piece of paper all of a sudden takes that scary thing and lets you focus on something. Okay, well now I know that this painting has that mark on it. What does that tell me? And all of a sudden, you start to realize things. So that's the first thing. If you have a creative endeavor,

you have a blank page, pick something. Something that interests you and just start from there. And that, now here's the next important part. Where you start from and where you end up

are not tied to each other. They're not, they don't have to be connected. Well, I mean, they'll be connected, but what I mean is where you start, where your journey starts and what you end up being, there'll be a through line, but that doesn't mean that what you care about in the beginning is what you always care about. Let me explain. So for example, um, cons of Tarkir. So that was

a block I did where I started with this very mechanical quality to it, which was it was going to be a large set, then a small set, then a large set. And I said, I like the idea of having the middle set be a pivot set, that the middle set drafts with the first set, it drafts with the last set. So it was very mechanical. So I had this very mechanical idea. And then I sat down with Ethan and Sean, and we said, what could this be? What could this be?

What kind of story are we telling? What kind of set are we building? What would make this mechanical thing make sense? And then we came back and decided a time travel story. Okay, now I was no longer worrying about the mechanical element. I said, okay, the mechanical element

got me to this new element, which is a time travel story. Now, let me use the time travel story to inspire me. Zendikar is a similar case, where I started from a mechanical place. I was looking for lands as a car type. There's a lot of space in it mechanically. I thought we hadn't explored a lot of it. I said, you know what? I want to just explore it. We explored it. We figured out mechanics that made sense. And then from those mechanics, we went to the creative team, and they came back with the idea of adventure world. Well, then we embraced the idea of adventure world. So, see, if you notice in these cases, I started with an idea, I used that idea to get me someplace, I then used that material to generate something else,

and that, now there's new inspiration. So, your inspiration doesn't have to be constant throughout it's not like you have to go i'm going to do thing x and then for the whole time it's all about thing x thing x might get you to thing y and then it's about thing y for a while maybe it gets you to thing z the key so this is another important part of the creative process is um it's the importance of the journey the reason you start with something something is not because that thing is important. It's because you need to start with something. You need something to guide you. And as you figure things out,

something else might draw your attention. So one of the important things about the creative process is... So a lot of times... One of my ongoing... I talk about this. One of my ongoing sort of themes in my writing and everything is the inner conflict of people

between their emotions and their intellect. And that a lot of people really, really, really want to lean on their intellect. It's just something they understand. The intellect, it's less random in some way. It's more, you can just, okay, it's logical and makes sense. Obviously, if I think thing A, then I'll think thing B. Thing B is a logical extension of thing A.

But the thing is, I believe humans at our core are emotional creatures. Yeah, we use intellect. Intellect's not useless to us or anything. But we are emotional creatures. And I believe the creative process, while there is an intellectual component to it, I believe at its core is more of an emotional thing. And so a lot of what I say to people is, when you're creating, understand what feels right to you. A lot of how creation can work is you're going to do something,

and you're going to see where that creation is going to take you. My example here is a writing example, which is one of the ways to write something is to create amazing characters and then put those characters in interesting situations and see what the characters do. And what that means is you're putting your momentum in something other than your intellect. What you're saying is, okay, I have these characters, I have them fleshed out. Like, for example, one of the things I do, I make my little comics where I use my little Funko figures and I make comics. And one of the things I do is, I'll just make a comic and then if that inspires me to make

a different comic, I'll make the next comic. Like right now, I'm doing a comic, a little series. So Sparks is what I call my little sitcom where I have my little Funko figures and my tails at the bit. And right now I'm doing a story where I did the first day's comic. I had no idea where it was going. I just liked the joke and I did it. And then the second day is like, oh, okay, I got a joke that rips off that joke that's kind of true to the characters.

And the whole week was just me going, oh, okay, I got a joke that rips off that joke that's kind of true to the characters. And the whole week was just me going, oh, okay. If you had asked me when I started where the week's theme was going to be, I would have no idea. I just kind of did something, followed up on it, and then just followed what seemed to feel right. Now, that doesn't mean planning isn't important. That doesn't mean you don't want to get out your index cards and tape them to a wall at one point. That can be important. Structure is important. Being intellectual is a tool that's valuable. But in the heart, when you create, when you design something, you have to make sure that you are following what sort of feels right for what you're doing. Because the essence, and this is a big part of my theme of my talk today, is you want to start with something,

you want to keep evolving, you want to iterate, but the goal is not to be at the place you chose originally. You might start and say, I want thing A, and as you play around with it, thing B becomes more exciting to you.

That doesn't mean you have to stick with thing A because thing A is the thing you started with. Thing A is a means to advance you along, and if that advancing you have to stick with thing A because thing A is the thing you started with. Thing A is a means to advance you along. And if that advancing you along gets you to thing B and thing B takes you in a new direction, that is okay. Okay, so you have an idea, you brought the idea out, you start to get inspired by the idea, and you start creating things. Okay, so the first thing I say is there is one of the valuable parts. Once you have an idea,

once you have a general direction of where you want to go, just a general direction, okay, I'm going to try such. The next thing which is important to the creative process is there comes a point where you just need to spit a lot of things out

where you make something and then what you want to do is think, okay, I'm looking for thing A, B, whatever direction you're pointing in. There comes a point then where what you want to do is think, okay, I just want to, you can use brainstorming, you can use whatever idea generation you like, but there comes a point where the next part is, okay, I'm just going to generate a lot of material. I'm just going to, because when you first start out, you don't know what you want.

You start by having a direction, that's important, and then just spit out as many things as you can think in that direction. So an important part of the creative process is, first you have to figure out where you're headed. If you don't have a bullseye, if you don't have a direction, you will just waste lots of energy, And it's why it's so frustrating. It's why the blank page is so frustrating. You just don't know where to put your energy.

Okay, pick something. Something that matters to you. Something emotional to you. Something that you're excited to work on. Okay, now you have a direction. You know, you now have a little speck on your paper. You have something to focus on. Okay, the next big part of the creative process is just

generating things. Generate a lot of stuff. You know, do something. Make it happen. You know, if you're writing, start coming up with scenes you want to write. If you're, you know, doing car design, make mechanics, make cars, just make things, you know. The next part about it is make a lot of things. Make things. And what will happen is most of what you make, you will not use. That this next part is not about making things necessarily that will end up. It's about you figuring out where things lie. So I've talked about this a lot. The creative process is an iterative process. Okay?

What that means is you will generate, you will evaluate. You will generate, you will evaluate. Okay? That is how iteration works in the creative process. You make something, you then take a little bit of emotional distance and try to evaluate what you've made, and you figure out the things that work, and then you generate again.

So this first big burst is just lots of generation. I have no idea where I'm going. Let me just make lots of things. In magic terms, I talked about Zendikar earlier. So Zendikar was, I started by saying, I know, we haven't done a lot mechanically with lands. Lands seem like an interesting design space. done a lot mechanically with lands. Lands seem like an interesting design space. So what I said to my team is,

okay guys, we're just going to design every single mechanic we can come up with that has to do with land. Go to town. And we spent a month doing nothing. We're just coming up with mechanics and cars and just neat things we could do with land. And the idea was there were no parameters. Early on, that's

important. The only parameter was I have a goal. I want to move toward my goal, but whatever I want. No rules. Now, one of the things that's interesting about the creative process is, sometimes you need to be critical, and sometimes you don't. when you're being creative is... So Roger VanEck wrote my favorite book called A Whack on the Side of the Head. He wrote a second book called The Kick in the Seat of the Pants. Both are good books. The Kick in the Seat of the Pants

talks about the role, the creative role, and that the idea that, you know, you're artist, you're judge, you're warrior, you're... what's the fourth one? It talks about sort of when you're making something at each stage at some point

you have to be free to make whatever you want and at some point you have to sort of be able to judge what you've done and at some point you have to go sell

the thing that you've made you know and there's different points for how you function as a creative person early on when you're in creating mode when you're in mode

where you're like I'm just generating things that's not the time that's when you're in creating mode, when you're in mode where you're like, I'm just generating things, that's not the time. That's when you want to be open to anything. So one of the things to remember is you don't necessarily know where things will take you. One of the ideas is when you are generating, there should be nothing off limits because you are just trying to come up with ideas. And even if you do something impractical, the impractical thing might lead you to a place that you wouldn't have got to without it. It's kind of what I call the stepping stones, is that you want to, part of getting to where

you need to go is understanding what it is exactly you want and what you enjoy. So what you need to do in the creative process is there comes a point where you just have to express, you have to generate, you have to do. And at that point, nothing is off limits because you're just trying to come up with ideas. And sometimes doing something that seems crazy, the reason that's empowering is it just gets you to let go of restrictions that you've imposed on yourself. One of the most common things you will find is you will think you know what your restrictions

are, impose them on yourself, and then later upon re-evaluation, you'll realize that maybe you set a guideline that doesn't need to be a guideline. That a lot of times I'll look back and I go, oh, I thought the restriction was A, but it turns out, really, it's a subset of that. I care about B. So, like, there's a classic Star Trek episode where there's something that's taking control of Spock, and they're trying to figure out what to do, and they think it has something to do with light, and so they shine this great light, and they end up to figure out what to do and they think it has something to do with light and so they shine this great light

and they end up blinding Spock and it turns out that it was a component of light but not the light itself that they needed. And they blinded him for no reason. And the idea is that sometimes what you think you need is not all of what you need. Say you said my little Star Trek. How many podcasts do you have Star Trek analogies for you?

Sometimes what you need is buried within what you think. So, I mean, you're correct that you need that larger thing, but it's a smaller subset of what you need. But anyway,

we'll get to that in a second. We're on the generating part. We'll get to that part. Okay, so what you want to do is spit out a lot of stuff. Make a lot of stuff. If you have a team, assign that to the team.

You know, when I'm working on a design team, the first thing I do is I say to my team, here's what we're trying to do. Here's our goal. Here's our first objective. Let's do that. And a lot of how I lead teams is the idea of keep letting the team know where the new bullseye is, where the new, what you're trying to do. Every time you ask for an assignment, you want to let them know what you're trying to do. Now, and this is the fun part.

So, okay. So you generate a lot of stuff. And like I said, pull the stops out. No restrictions. Do whatever you want to do. Do crazy things. That's fine. Your goal is to generate a lot of different things in a lot of different

directions. I guess the next point I should stress. Don't keep doing the same thing again and again and again. Try different things. Part of the first sort of generation is you want to sort of map out and figure out possibilities. So what you want to do is just make a lot of different things. In magic card design, we make a lot of cards and make a magic card design, we make a lot of cards. We make a lot of mechanics. We try a lot of things. If we're talking about something like writing, you know, a lot of times what I'll do is I'll just write scenes with my characters.

Do those scenes end up? Not necessarily. I'm just trying to find some sense of who the characters are, or I'm trying to find a plot element. I'm just writing to get a sense of things. But that's early on. You just want to explore and generate as a means to vent out ideas deep inside you, to explore what there is to explore. Okay, so the next stage after that, like I said, in an iterative process, you generate,

then you evaluate. So now comes the evaluation. So what that means is, whatever it is you've done, whatever format you're doing it in, you have to put it away for a little bit of time. And the reason you do that is you need a little bit of distance. And one of the things that's very hard is when you create something, it's super emotional. You're very tied to it. That's not a bad thing. You want to be emotional. If you don't care about the thing you're creating, if it doesn't down to your soul matter to you,

you will not be good at creating it. The reason that creation... Creation wants to be personal because by being personal, you are reaching a level of yourself that's just giving extra value. For example, that when you are... When something means something to you, has value to you, you, just as human beings, we treat it more seriously.

You know what I'm saying? I'm not saying that when you watch other kids that you, you don't try your hardest and you don't really care about that kid and you're doing what you can. But when it's your kid, it's your kid. It is your kid. Like, the emotional bonding there is so strong that just, you go the extra effort. I mean, because you just can't help it. Because you care. You know what I'm saying?

And that your ideas are your babies. That you want to be emotionally connected. So you want to go deep and you want to care. But when you get to the evaluative process, you need to pull back a little bit. When you're generating, go full tilt. Just embrace everything that you want to embrace. Okay, put it aside for a little bit. Now you get to the first, once again, this is an iterative process, meaning you'll do it again and again.

The first evaluation. So what you want to do is look at what you've done. Hopefully you've generated a lot of stuff. And I can't stress enough. One thing's not enough. Two things, you need to generate a lot of things because you need contrast. You need, the part of evaluation is what you want to do is look at all the things you've made and then evaluate them against one another.

And why? Why against one another. And why? Why against one another? Because you're trying to understand what matters to you. And to do that, so one of the things that's very interesting is if you ask somebody, do they like thing A? Do you like blah? They'll think about it. If they know they like it, maybe they can answer quickly.

But if you get in an area where it's, you know, it's in the middle, they're like, hmm, do I like this? I'm not sure, you know. It's hard. But if you say to somebody, here are two things, which do you like better? Bam! Usually they can tell you pretty quick.

I mean, if they're really close, maybe they have to think about it a little bit. But it's a lot easier to judge something in comparison to something else. And so what you're trying to do when you create things is you want to generate lots of things so that you can evaluate contextually between them. And that is very important because do I like this thing in isolation? I don't know. I kind of like it. Maybe I like it. Do I like this thing better than that thing? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I do. And that's what's important. That's why you want to generate a lot of things is so that you can look at things and have contextual context between them. Because

that context will help you figure out what matters. Because the first, once you evaluate, what you're going to do is, we're going to put things in three boxes. Box number one is, I'm excited. This excites me. Box number two is, I am not excited. Box number three is, I don't know yet. Okay, put everything in their boxes. Take box number two, the I don't know box.

I'm sorry, the I don't like it box. Chuck it. Gone. Hasta la vista, baby, gone. Okay, now look into the first box, the box you're excited by, and pick one thing that you're most excited by. Pick the thing that you go, what is most inspiring me right now? And then take that element and do the next series of generation. Okay? So what you do is you do generation,

make a whole bunch of stuff, take it, evaluate it between itself, stick it in three boxes, I like it, I don't like it, I don't know yet. Toss the I don't know, take the I like it, pick something from that to inspire you for your next series of generations. Okay, then do the next series of generations.

You want to do this little process a couple times because the first thing you're trying to do is you're just trying to get a feel from a larger sense of direction of where you want to go. What is the thing, like a lot of times when you want to go in a direction, you don't know what about it excites you.

And usually the reason you don't know is you've never explored it. You don't know. So this first part is you're using the loop, the iterative loop, the generation evaluation loop, to get your center, to figure out what about this project excites me. And how many times you iterate at this point is dependent upon what it takes to learn what you really like.

Sometimes it's one time, and bam, bam, bam, you're going to make a new box. The absolutely, positively, I'm so amazed at the thing, I love it box. Then you know what you're doing. Hopefully you don't have tons of things in that box. But then you have a sense. Sometimes it takes a while. Sometimes it's like, well, I like a couple different things, but nothing's standing out yet. And so the key is you want to iterate by taking something, you know, have that as a new inspiration,

make lots of things, and spend a little time. So at some point, what you'll do is as you do this, you'll start to get a grain of what it is you care about, what it is that's driving you forward. Okay? Once you do that, once you've iterated a bunch of times, you have a general sense of what you like. What seems to be working for you. And that's another point and thing, by the way. It's not always, I mean, what you like is important.

But you also have to ask yourself, what is working? Now, I think these things are connected, obviously. But here, I'll give you an assignment for your emotions and an assignment for your head. Heart and head each get their own assignment. Your heart has to say, what speaks to me? What am I excited by? What makes me smile when I see it? Your head has to say, what does it give me things I can build off of?

One of the things that your head wants to work, because your head is part of this process, is when you look at things, your heart's just saying what it likes. But your head is saying, what can I work with? You know, this idea, does it generate other ideas? Do it create hooks that we can work with? You know, your intellectual side is trying to evaluate. And pretty much, when you're creating, you're going to be led by your heart. You can let your intellect guide you some, but more led by your heart. When you're evaluating, you want to listen to your heart, but you've got to make sure your head is definitely paying attention

because you need to evaluate with a critical eye, understanding what it is you need. You know, that said, if something really, really speaks to you, even if your head goes, I don't understand it, that doesn't mean you get rid of it. It means you want to iterate a little more to get your brain wrapped around it, get your head wrapped around it. Okay, so eventually you do that. You do a little iterative process enough that you start to go, oh, okay, I see what my thing's about. I see what I care about. Okay. Now your head gets involved. Once you do that, the next part is you get to the planning stage where you're like, okay, assuming I want to do this, assuming that's the thing I want, what do I need to do to deliver on that?

And there's a part of the creative process where you get to the structural part where it's like, okay, now that I understand the heart of what I'm doing, I need to understand the structure of what I'm doing. I need to sort of say, okay, given I'm doing this thing that emotionally is fulfilling me creatively, I now have to get my head involved and go, okay. In order for that to be true, so the next experimentation you're doing is an intellectual experimentation. You're saying, okay, I have found in my heart that I know what I want to follow.

I know the thing that intrigues me. I know the thing that's exciting me. Now I've got to get my head involved and say, okay, if I want that to be true, what do I need to do for that to be true? So, for example, I'll just take Kant and Tark here. I started with an idea that I thought was cool. We sort of, we spit out all these ideas of what this large, small, large thing could be. We're pivoting in the middle.

What can that mean? And that, I had a lot of different ideas come out. One of the ideas spoke passionately to me. A time travel story. I love time travel. It really sort of fit what we were doing. Okay, now the next step is I say, okay, I'm going to tell a time travel story. What does that mean? What do I got to do? How do I make a set, a block that's a time travel story? What does it

mechanically mean? What does it creatively mean? What do I have to do to be able to realize that? mean, what do I have to do to be able to realize that? And part of it was going and talking to the creative team and understanding, okay, what parameters do I have? It was thinking mechanically of what would one expect if you do this to the audience? You know, okay, if I'm telling a time travel story, I'm in the present, then the past, and the alternate present. What does that mean? Okay, well, there's some connective tissue I have to do. If I'm going to say, this is the past, what does that mean? How do I dictate the past? How do you know it's the past? What mechanically says it's the past? If this is the alternate present, what does that mean? How can I do that? So you then have to get your brain involved

and say, okay, now that I emotionally know what I want to do, I need to figure out structurally, now that I emotionally know what I want to do, I need to figure out structurally, how do I make that thing happen? And what you'll find is once you have a goal, an emotional goal, now that you set your brain, your brain's like, okay, now here's another important thing. This comes from writing. One of the things they teach you when you write the fantastic write things that aren't real is you're allowed to have one premise what that means is Superman comes from another world

and he has super strength and he's a super powered alien okay I got it I'll buy that now he's going to change in a phone booth a phone booth? how is he changing in a phone booth? and all of a sudden they'll buy that Superman can, you know, fly faster than speeding bullets and, you know,

has super strength and whatever. That's all fine. But a phone booth? Why would he change in a phone booth? Like, people take one premise. So the same is true of a creative thing is you get one emotional premise, one thing you care about,

one thing that's pushing you. Everything else is conditional. Like, you have to have one priority. So this is important. In any one moment in time, you have to have one priority. You can't have multiple priorities. Or if you have multiple priorities,

what it means is that your priorities are prioritized, which meaning you have one priority that supersedes all other priority, which means when push comes to shove, that's the priority you follow. And so whenever you're doing, whenever you're structuring this, your emotional side gets to pick one thing, and your intellectual side goes, okay, that's your one thing, but after that one thing, you get nothing. Your intellect is allowed to do whatever it needs to do to make that one thing work. And the key is picking the thing you most care about. Now, sometimes what you will find is you will pick something,

and as your intellect starts structuring things, you might go, ah, something's wrong. And sometimes what that means is you didn't properly identify what it is you really cared about. And so one of the things for the emotions to be on the lookout for, if things seem to drift or seem wrong, you've got to circle back and go, okay, let me re-evaluate what I said I wanted and figure out if either it's a subset of what you wanted or maybe you made an assumption that you assumed something that's not true.

But your emotion should be there as a constant check on your intellect to make sure that it's not drifting from what you want. Because sometimes you misunderstand what you think you want. That happens quite a bit. Oh, I thought I wanted this, but now that I've seen it, really what I wanted was a subset of that, and I've added things that aren't necessary. I've blinded Spock. Don't blind Spock.

Don't have additive things that aren't necessary. Okay. Almost to work. So, now, once you've done the structuring, you've set up the next level, which is, okay, I now create a structure. Intellect then needs to break up the tasks

and say, okay, in order to make this work, here are the things you need, and then it gives you sort of, you start breaking down your iterative process by tasks. Now, as a general rule of thumb, what you don't want to do is do too many tasks in one

iteration. And let me explain why. If you have too many, you can only have one master if you will, remember? You can only have one,, if you will. Remember, you can only have one at any one moment in time, only one thing can matter the most. So every iterative process, you only get one thing that matters the most.

That doesn't mean you can't have other elements in there, but if you change too much at once, the problem is you might lose track of what you like. Let's say, for example, I make 20 changes and I really love it. Now, all those 20 changes weren't the 20 changes. Now, I have a lot of work ahead of me to figure out what exactly I changed that I liked. But if you make one major change, you really like it.

Okay, that major change is the thing. Now, I will admit, the more you do the creative process, the more you do it, the more you shorthand things. I will make a lot more changes now than when I was less experienced because I have a better ability to recognize what I'm enjoying. But that just comes from 20 years of experience. So like when you're starting out, it's very important that you want to focus your changes so you understand what it is. In any one iterative process or any one generating process there's one priority make sure you understand your priority and you're designing to your priority then when you get to the evaluative part make sure you understand what that priority was now that doesn't mean the priority can't change and part of the iterative process i'm sorry part of the evaluative process

is figuring out whether the thing you want is in fact working for what you need. But when you're in the generating stage, where your emotions are in charge, you pick something, you run with it, you don't question that, you just generate. Then in the evaluative process, when your brain's a little more involved, that's the part where you can say, okay, let me reevaluate. I understand what was driving me. Let me, as I evaluate, let me figure out whether that's the thing I liked or not.

And what you will find is the creative process is exactly what I'm saying. You'll get to the structural part. So note, by the way, that today's topic is not about making the creative process from the beginning of the creative process all the way to the end of the creative process. Today was about starting with a blank page

and getting to the point where you no longer have a blank page. That's mostly what I did today. I'm enjoying this conversation, so I will probably do other podcasts, but like I say, today's podcast is about starting from the blank page and getting to the point where you know what you're doing. I will do other podcasts talking about other aspects. But okay, so let me recap today.

Here's what you do. You start with a blank page. You figure out something. You make your spec on a piece of paper. Pick something to care about. That thing you care about doesn't mean the thing you'll always care about. It's something to start.

You generate off that idea, make a lot of things, no rules, do whatever you want, just generate. Make a lot of things in a lot of different ways. Don't keep doing the same thing. Try experiment, do lots of different things. Then use that experimentation to move to a period where you're evaluating. From that, figure out, make your boxes, figure out what you really like, what you don't like, and we don't care

about. Toss the stuff you don't like. Choose from the stuff you like to pick a new thing. Always focus on one thing. Generate again. Do that iterative process enough times until you figure out what you're very focused on. Then you move into the structuring part where you allow your intellect to start figuring out what you need

to accomplish the thing you decide you care about most. Okay, guys? So that is from blank page to structure, to begin your structural process. This is a very elaborate process. The creative process, and it's not I'm trying to explain in very broad terms what you're doing.

Be aware it's personal. How you generate ideas, how you evaluate ideas, that is all very personal. I'm just trying to explain the larger sense so when you think of how the creative process works, you can sort of stand back a little bit and go, okay. And I'm hoping, I'm just giving you some general guidelines, that if you try my general guidelines,

I think what you'll find is it'll make it a little easier. A lot of the problems people run to in the creative thing is they don't know what to prioritize when. And a lot of it, a lot of just getting better at understanding the creative process is knowing where in the process what you're supposed to prioritize at that point. Anyway, thank you guys

very much for listening to me. I had a lot of fun talking. I love talking about the creative process. But, I'm in my parking space. We all know what that means. It means this is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic and the creative process, it's time for me to be making magic and the creative process. So I'll talk to you guys next time.

Bye-bye.