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Photo by Gaelle Marcel on Unsplash |
You get the appropriate ingredients (ideas), clean and prep them (jotting down the idea), cut them up and throw away the skins (get rid of irrelevant stuff), filter out scums in the boiling water (get rid of even more irrelevant stuff), season it with aromatic (add flairs and metaphors) and top it up with garnish, and you’d probably end up with something more or less edible.
If it tastes good, that’s a bonus point for you. And for a brief moment you thought you had it in you to become a professional cook.
Just like cooking, writing is never instant. Even if you just want to make something simple, cup noodles still take four minutes to get ready.
Just like the dry noodles needing time to seep all that boiling water, you also need inspiration to seep into your brain and turn them into a short passage according to your vision.
Or not. That might be ridiculous. This is just a thought that pops up as I am currently rewriting yet another draft of my long(ish)-form essay about the evolution of the music genre that doesn’t seem to be done from two weeks ago.
“The only kind of writing is rewriting” As the great sailor-author Ernest Hemingway once said.
Now, I’ve always been scared of calling myself a “writer” or even an aspiring one, because in this age of instant gratification and abundance of content, taking a long time to create one blog post that’s not exactly catering to the masses seems like a waste of energy.
In a sense, that’s actually unfair both for me and for all the content creators out there, because things do take time.
Unfair for myself because I’m beating myself over the fact that it takes more than one week to finish a mini-essay about music streaming, when I know darn well I’m progressing. Unfair for everyone in the creative industry for undermining their process and somehow thinking that their creation happened instantly.
Even YouTube “video essays” that are seemingly just “rants” probably needed at least a month for idea generating, conceptualizing, and implementation (scripting, script editing, recording, re-recording, video editing and god knows what else). Well… at least the ones I watch and find value in.
And I get that it’s hard to quantify creative processes. How long is too long of a process? How much does a decent design actually worth? How much does an extraordinary painting worth? What defines a good creation? If an alleged “masterpiece” doesn’t have people appreciating it, is it still a masterpiece? If my writing, which I poured out my heart and soul to, doesn’t gain any traction, should I say it’s a flop and I should stop writing?
Even so, the nice thing about creative processes is that it always ultimately stems from the depth of our human need for self-expression. I write because I have an (abundance of) idea to communicate and pour into words. I didn’t initially seek approval or audience, although recently I find myself longing for a community in order to hopefully discuss the idea further and inspire me to keep writing.
And maybe build myself a portfolio as a “writer” of some sort, because apparently I can’t just expect people to believe that I’m smart and a great verbal communicator.
I know that’s rich coming from me, and I realize how late I might just be. With the uprising abundance of generative AI tools that easily, almost instantly, lets people create soulless contents for the mere sake of capitalizing on it. “Ways to make money from ChatGPT”, they would claim.
We should be celebrating more often the journey of our creative process. Because it’s fun. Because it serves as proof of our existence, the synthesis of our accumulated subjective experiences. It’s who we are as humans.
Creating is a lot like cooking, and just as necessary.
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