Is Your Creative Process Holding You Back?

Hello Creative Souls, and welcome back to the Creative Spotlight. Today I'm going to invite you to do a little bit of a self-evaluation to bring awareness and intention to your creative process.

If you don't already know, I am a theater maker: playwright, producer, actress, dancer, and my husband and I have an immersive theater in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. I feel really lucky in terms of creative process because my art form, my medium is literally called production. We produce a production. It's all about process. It’s really natural and joyful to me because I like to be organized - have timelines, know where things are going, and have an efficiency to the process. We produce shows from concept to curtain, from an idea to a script being written to casting to rehearsals and scheduling… then costuming, props, sound design, lighting design, all the while layering on marketing, promoting, collaborations, all these things. It's a lot and it's not as simple as one, two, three. The layers of the process frequently overlap. Some of them need to be done at the same time, and some of them can't be done until another one's done. There is a level of complexity to it that all has to be tightly organized. I love that so much.

Now, you might not be a theater maker. You might be an author or a musician, or painter or a sculptor, or a jewelry maker or a metal worker, or a glass blower. I'm not sure what your creative flow is, my darling, but I'm sure there's a process to it. Every art form has somewhat of a natural process, yet there's still a lot of room for variation because we are talking about art here. I think it's great that we have the creative freedom inside of the creative process, but also if it's too mushed and disorganized, we can kind of suffer from that. We can waste time or energy reinventing the wheel every time, or by being inefficient with the limited resources we might have. Not everyone has all day long to stand in front of a canvas. Maybe you do. Good for you if you do! Nonetheless, you still might find a richer experience if it has some clarity of process.

I'm really excited. Right now I am working on something. Over the years of creating show after show, I now have what I call my production guide, and it's got all the steps and all the pieces and all the departments organized. As we go into creating each unique show, I now know the order that things essentially need to occur, what overlaps and what has to be done before the next thing can start. It's complex, but it's now very organized. I love it so much, to have this process that can kind of be zoomed out on and then I can just plug in a unique new creative idea. In our case, a unique new show.

What I'm working on right now is taking our theater production guide and sort of reformatting it so that all creatives of any medium could use it and plug their own creative work into it. It will include aspects of monetization because that increases the complexity - it's not just, oh, I want to paint something. I have a canvas. I have paints. I have an idea. Go. Right? I don't mean to minimize what all goes into a painting, by the way, so don't read it that way. The point is when we add monetization, that’s an additional layer to the creative process, and we have to think about those extra aspects: not just the creative work, but the selling and promoting of the creative work.

I am working on that production guide and I would love if you would drop a heart or a hey in the comments and let me know if that's something you'd be interested in getting your hands on, because that will motivate me even more to get it done so that you can improve your own creative process.

In the meantime, while I'm working on that, here's something for you to work on to start improving your creative workflow right now. There are a few questions I'd like you to ask yourself

1. How many steps are there in your creative process?

Now, you probably don't know the exact number right off the top of your head. That question alone will sort of encourage you to sit down and think about how many steps there actually are. What are you kind of doing on automatic because you just know it so well? And what do you maybe love to skip? Especially if you're doing monetization. Sometimes we wait until the thing is done to start promoting it. That should go way back at the beginning.

2. What order do those steps need to occur in for your process to be ideal both creatively and efficiently?

What order do those steps need to occur in for your process to be ideal? You've laid out all the steps. Now you're thinking about putting them in some kind of order and catching yourself if you do some of them in an order that's not self-serving.

3. Does your process include aspects of monetization like marketing, selling, promoting, sharing, etc.?

If not, that's okay. If you're not in the monetization world, no big deal. You don't need to worry about that one.

4. How do you think you would benefit from streamlining your creative workflow?

I've benefited a lot after the creation of lots of shows, organically building out my production guide so that I don't have to think about which pieces I'm missing. I used to always wait until the show was done to promote and then I'm like, "Oh crap, opening night we forgot to promote." It's a little bit exaggerated, but I've benefited a lot by really streamlining and creating a consistent, organized template that I can use for every show. Even though every show is unique and special, the template and the structure remains the same. I can use it every time. It speeds me up and it's allows us to go from producing one show every other year to producing two, three, four shows in a year and not feeling burnt out because I have a structure where things don't need to be creative. The structure doesn't have to be the creative part. The structure is the system that the creativity exists within. Don't think that creating a structure, streamline. or workflow hinders your creativity at all, because it doesn't. It will actually allow you to expend less energy on things that could be structured and streamlined and easy, and spend more of your energy on improving the quality of the actual creative work that exists within that structure.

So those are the questions for you. I hope that they open up some observation and some awareness to your own creative process. And like I said, I am building out a production creative process for you guys. I'm really excited about it. Put a comment, a heart, a hi in the comments if you're interested in getting your hands on that.

As always, it would mean the world to me if you felt inspired to share this blog another creative. If you'd like to dive deeper into the creative pool with me, then sign up below to receive my weekly newsletter. I love writing it for you and I would love for you to read it.

That's a wrap, darling. Now go do your creative work.