The Best Technique for Creating, Drawing, or Writing

I had a great idea for a humor piece this week and wrote it to perfection in four days. It was one of the fastest pieces I’ve written in years. I was able to use the best technique I ever learned on harnessing our creativity, and I’ll introduce you to the technique today. I hope you like it, because it continues to amaze me.

Had I mastered this technique 30 years ago, my writing would be light years ahead of where I’m at now. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The Humor Piece wasn’t the “best” because it’s the funniest thing ever, but because it was right in my sweet spot for a current topic (artificial intelligence) that makes me angry (A.I. threatens to steal human creativity) and had a perfect comical template to use (the Terms of Service Agreement big tech uses to do sneaky stuff). The way it came together brought me joy. Even if no one publishes it (come on, McSweeney’s: put me in the game!) I’m very satisfied with the work.

And the work is the only thing I control.

Without this "best" technique, I may not have pulled it together. The writing probably would have dragged on for weeks, maybe months, and the opportunity would have been lost.

The technique is to use a sculptor’s metaphor for creating things, whether it’s drawing, making, or writing. But it’s not the sculptor's metaphor you may have heard.

The common metaphor—the one you may have heard—refers back to one of the masters of the Renaissance, probably Michelangelo, who said something like, “The sculpture is there within the block of marble. The artist’s job is to reveal it by chipping away the unnecessary stone.”

That’s pretty good, but my creativity was often stymied because I didn’t know how to get the block of marble. Especially with writing, because we face a blank page. There’s nothing there to chip away.

The block of marble metaphor works for writers once you have a big, messy draft of a story. You go at it by cutting and shaping what’s there. Unlike sculptors, though, you can add stuff, move things around; mostly, the metaphor helps.

The metaphor that works better is to think of the sculptor who works in clay.

The clay sculptor starts their work by gathering clay. They have an idea of what to create (a bust, or an abstract, or what have you) and an idea of how much clay they’ll need. They drop it on a lump on their workspace and begin.

The sculptor shapes the clay by moving it, cutting things away, or slapping on more clay in this area or that. Assuming they are making a bust, they try to make something that looks like a head with a neck, a chin, and a face of some kind. At this point, it’s a lump of clay that resembles a head.

Once satisfied with the overall proportions, they begin to sculpt, forming eyes, nose, and mouth. Cutting and smoothing the jaw line. Making ears and hair. Sculpting continues until the former lump of clay somewhat resembles the person they are making.

The features are polished and fine-tuned. Of course, you don’t “polish” wet clay; you are going from a pretty-good resemblance to exact, spitting image of your original, artistic vision.

Any artist worth their salt will repeat the cycle of shaping, sculpting, and polishing until they’re satisfied (or until they abandon the effort).

What you need to embrace is the overall cycle of gathering, shaping, sculpting, and polishing. How does this four-step cycle help you with your creativity?

I’ll explain the advantage by describing how my writing went this week.

I wrote without constraint and judgment—known as “free writing”—on the idea, generating ideas and riffing on whatever I wrote. In this case, it was in the form of a Terms of Service document, and about artificial intelligence. I have a lot of thoughts on how A.I. is turning creativity into a dull commodity, so it wasn’t hard at all to generate a bunch of words.

I’m familiar with Terms of Service documents because I use software and online services often. After an hour, I had 500 words on the topic.

The 500 words had jokes going in a couple of directions. Some jokes were about corporate greed, others about how stupid it is to have a machine do the creative stuff. One of the jokes was about how we are all sleep-walking into this A.I. dominated future.

It’s kind of like being hypnotized and told to ignore something obviously bad. I liked that direction because it added another metaphorical relationship in that the big tech company is a hypnotist and we are all it’s victims; that made the Terms of Service document the hypnotic tool.

I rewrote the piece, adding in phrases a hypnotist might use. It seemed to be working, so I kept at it, revising each paragraph to fit the new metaphor.

I’ve been self-editing for years and have taken several classes on writing humor, so this is deceptively easy for me. A lot of people struggle with self-editing, and need a bit of distance. If that’s you, You can try taking a break from the work.

Taking a break allows you to cool to the excitement of writing, and bring a more critical eye to what has been written. The three basic ways to do that are:

• Sleep on it

• Work on something else for a couple of days

• Set it aside for a week

When you return, you should have a fresh reaction, and won’t cling to your darlings.

This four-cycle technique is a way to bring four different points of view to your creativity. If the metaphor of a clay sculptor makes sense to you, then lean into it with your next project.

If you’re not quite convinced, think of the spirit of the four cycles. When gathering, you’re exploring possibilities across a specific set of requirements. You can be loose, but you can’t be wild. Relax and create so that you have something more to work with.

When shaping, you’re looking at what you’ve got so far from different angles to see if there’s enough there to work with. If not, go gather more material.

Sculpting is about making what you created appear to your audience. You know a particular lump is the chin, but will everyone know it's a chin? You look to make sure everything you tried has the best chance of being seen.

Polishing is about making the best possible version of every element in the creative work.

If you’d like to learn more, let me know and I’ll pull together my notes, and track down the other teachers and their notes.

At some point, I’ll create my own resources for this four-cycle technique. I may even come up with a better name than that.

Thanks for reading!

All the best,

Mickey