Drawing for the Day and Jonah Lehrer

“Every creative journey begins with a problem. It starts with a feeling of frustration, the dull ache of not being able to find the answer. We have worked hard, but we’ve hit the wall. We have no idea what to do next.

When we tell one another stories about creativity, we tend to leave out this phase of the creative process. We neglect to mention those days when we wanted to quit, when we believed that our problems were impossible to solve. Because such failures contradict the romantic version of events- there is nothing triumphant about a false start- we forget all about them. (The failures also remind us how close to having no stories to tell.) Instead, we skip straight to the breakthroughs. We tell the happy ending first.

The danger of telling this narrative is that the feeling of frustration- the act of being stumped- is an essential part of the creative process. Before we can find the answer- before we probably even know the question- we must be immersed in appointment, convinced that the solution is beyond our reach. We need to have wrestled with the problem and lost.”

- Imagine, John Lehrer