Apply, Lather, Rinse, Repeat: Creatives in Search of a Method

When the artist lacks vision, he takes refuge in rules

Welcome to all the new subscribers!

My name is Daniel McInerny, and I’m the author of BEAUTY & IMITATION: A PHILOSOPHICAL REFLECTION ON THE ARTS (Word on Fire Academic, 2024), and the novel, THE GOOD DEATH OF KATE MONTCLAIR (Chrism Press, 2023).

With this post I launch a new series on The Comic Muse: Artistic Habits: Towards a Wisdom of Creativity. In this series, I will be reflecting upon the nature of one of the contemporary world’s defining concepts, creativity, and how we might better understand it as part of our human quest for total fulfillment and everlasting joy.

Short audio courses will be offered along the way. As you wait for those to drop, you might enjoy my earlier audio course, very much related to this new series on creativity: A Brief Introduction to Poetic Experience.

I’m a fan, as I’ll bet many of you are, of James Clear’s book, Atomic Habits. I read it this summer for the first time and have already benefited enormously from it.

No surprise, I have a special interest in what Clear has to say about habits related to creativity.

Among his writings collected on jamesclear.com, Clear has an entire category devoted to creativity. There you’ll find articles with titles such as “What is Creativity?” “The Creative Process,” and “Three Lessons on Creativity from Famous Creators.”

I enjoy articles of this kind and often find something in them I can incorporate into my own process.

But consider what Clear identifies as the five steps of the creative process, steps that Clear takes to explain the generation of nearly all great ideas:

1. Gather new material.

2. Thoroughly work over the materials in your mind.

3. Step away from the problem.

4. Let your idea return to you.

5. Shape and develop your idea based on feedback.

I’m giving you just the list of five steps, and not Clear’s brief explanation of each. But even if I were to provide those explanations, there would still be a lot missing in Clear’s approach to creativity. His five steps would essentially be no different than the steps I recently followed in connecting my Bluetooth headphones to my new smart TV:

1. Plug-in the TV

2. Plug-in the nifty new transmitter

3. Connect the cord that came with the nifty new transmitter to the TV’s “Audio Out”

4. Turn on your headphone and press the pairing button on the side of the nifty new transmitter

5. Presto! You’ve got headphones!

This kind of method is invaluable when you want to accomplish a purely technical end, that is, when you want to rearrange the materials of the world in a way that is more useful to you. Want to have a clean head of hair? Just follow the directions on the shampoo bottle:

1. Apply

2. Lather

3. Rinse

4. Repeat

But here’s the problem with this approach when it comes to creativity. Creativity is not just about rearranging the materials of the world—which include the materials of your art—in a way that is more useful to you. There are purely technical ends at play in any art. In the writing of screenplays, for example, at least of the popular kind, it’s indispensable that you master the technique of three-act structure. You have to learn how to rearrange language describing action so that it follows a certain pattern. You could write up a list of the five steps to mastering three-act structure. And yet, something—a lot—would be missing. What?

The screenwriter’s vision of what human action is all about. Which is to say, the screenwriter’s vision of the true meaning of human life.

There’s no method for coming up with such a vision—precisely because it’s a vision, not a rearrangement of material parts. The artist has to experience life and see how it arranges itself into a meaningful order. The artist has to intuit the principles that make sense of human life before he goes about mastering the techniques of a particular craft.

Perhaps Clear would say that such a vision is implied in his five steps. But if so, it’s implied in only a generic way. As if Clear were to say, Before following the five steps to creativity, make sure you have a vision of the true meaning of human life.

But we don’t want to approach creativity as a generic matter. As if any vision of the meaning of human life would do. For what is a work of art if it doesn’t at least aspire to tell us the truth?

P.S. I also talk about the vision of the artist in this post about the fiction of Flannery O’Connor: