Constructing Creative

  • hammer meet nail

    Creativity is sometimes, to borrow a turn of phrase, a hammer looking for a nail.

    Inside every creative soul there can be this latent urge to make something, anything, and despite the tools sitting on shelves or the technology idling on the desk, all of it patiently waiting for inspiration to strike, the creative hammer can sometimes be lacking a nail to strike.

    Motivation without a project to constuct.

    That’s not to say there isn’t always something worth pounding away at, a loose fence board or a wobbly bench that needs a few good thwacks, but constucting something brand new, whole cloth, fresh and crisp and exciting—therein life can sometimes leave the creative soul wanting for such inspiration.

    Thus leaves the poor sap with a perfectly good hammer in his hand to walk from place to place, examining every nook and cranny of his own backyard for a bit of mending to be done or maintenance upon which to direct his energy. He may even fall into the trap of picking through a pile of scrap wood and with a bag of nails in hand feel as though there is something worth constructing from the leftover bits of other projects.

    And sure, interesting artifacts may tumble out of such efforts. It is more soothing for the creative soul, however, to have a blueprint, even if it exists only in his mind, with a fresh purpose and a meaningful objective, to build something out of purposely acquired supply and to create with intent.

  • coder thoughts

    Coding is an iterative space in which I live.

    I build something that some would call a minimum viable product. It is little more than a toy that does something simple and basic and imperfect, yet it is functional. Once that utility reaches a certain point it is not unheard of for me to abandon such projects out of boredom or lack of direction, but on occasion the iterative mind steps in.

    I will think of this minimum viable product that with a few more hours of work it can perhaps do more things that would build off the simplicity and basic functionality. So I write more code and launch more tweaks. 

    This goes on and on in waves, sometimes for years, and after a long while composed of stints of development, revising, improving, removing, and refining I find myself with something that is no longer a minimum viable product, but rather something much more complex and interesting.

    This iterative thought about a wouldn’t-it-be-neat-if project has manifested by stepwise effort into a small but effective little code base that moves data around and renders web pages and sends emails and validates users and whatever other clever little algorithmic functionality that I have been poking away at making work.

    Sure, I could have sat down and mapped out a project in its entirety and worked tirelessly to make it all at once, but there is something organic and curious about my method, curious about this space in which I choose to call myself a coder.

  • negative stimuli

    As much as we like to think of ourselves as reflective and thoughtful creatures, the hard truth is that our brains are highly reactive. They are, perhaps literally, hard-wired to respond to stimuli from our senses.

    It may even be true that much of this reaction occurs outside of our conscious perception of it: visual cues give us thought, sounds that make us spin our head to look, slight variations in the terrain below our feet as we walk shift our gaits, scents wafting in the air trigger memories—or any of a hundred thousand million combinations of things we see, hear, taste, smell, or feel cause a reaction outside of our awareness of it.

    Each of these cause a cascade of neural energy through our nervous system and into some part of our brain that has been evolutionarily adapted for self preservation and to react in a way that will keep us alert and alive. 

    We probably don’t think about it enough, but I’m almost certain that the same reactivity holds true for the words and images that we watch and read. These things enter our brains and as much as we are able to logically think about them and be rational, thoughtful human computation engines about big ideas and moral philosophies, and social insights, it is also likely that these same stimuli pass through our unconscious selves and drive reactivity that we can neither sense nor control. 

    They say you are what you eat, and you probably only feel as good as the media you consume, too.