Creative thinking can broaden our command of craft further than habit alone. We get good at something, find our way around it, and get comfortable with what we know works.
Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
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There is nothing wrong with that. Knowing your craft is supposed to make the work more fluid.
But there is usually more there.
Not every piece of work needs to break new ground, and pushing deeper does not have to become some grand exercise in originality. Sometimes it means wondering what would happen if you went a little beyond what you normally do.
There is no medal waiting at the other end. No “Look Ma, no hands.” The reason to push is more basic. You may find something you did not know was there.
When the Familiar Stops Being Enough
David Bayles and Ted Orland put the problem sharply in Art & Fear: “your job as an artist is to push craft to its limits, without being trapped by it.” I’m using that quote as a one-off statement to support the premise of this post. The line appears on page 99 of the 2001 Image Continuum Press edition.
Art and Fear is an interesting read. Do I agree with every idea? Nope.
The urge to push farther can come from a few places. Maybe the skill itself has reached a point where you want to see what else you can do with it. Maybe the old ideas no longer feel strong enough to carry you forward. Or maybe pushing farther means taking a personal risk, trying something that could fail, or showing more of yourself than you normally would.
Perfection can get in the way, but it is only one part of it.
The larger question is whether the craft still has room to take the work somewhere new, or at least expand it.
Often, we want craft to give the work more possibilities, but do not want the pursuit of craft itself to become the whole point.
The question is not whether we know what we are doing. The question is whether what we know is still enough for the work in front of us.
Pushing your craft does not have to mean making everything harder. Faster playing, denser writing, bigger arrangements, more tracks, more detail. Those things can become their own kind of distraction.
Going farther does not have to have drama attached. It may mean staying with an idea longer than usual, hearing something in it you missed the first time, or realizing the first solution was not the best one.
And Then There Is Bach
Bach? First off, way out of my pay grade. He did not need to reinvent music every time he wrote something. He worked with fugues, chorales, counterpoint, and forms other composers knew well. What was different was how he kept evolving within those forms.
That is an important distinction. Creative thinking does not always mean reaching for something unfamiliar. There can be plenty left to discover in material you already know well.
Plagiarism and Creativity
There is an old line that gets at this pretty well: “Stealing from one person is plagiarism. Stealing from everyone is research.”
It is funny because there is some truth in it. Every artist is influenced by something. Music, books, films, paintings, conversations, other people’s mistakes. The more we take in, the more material we have to work with.
The point is not to copy what someone else has already done. It is to let other ideas knock loose something in your own thinking. A rhythm, a phrase, a visual idea, a way of structuring a story. Sometimes another person’s work shows you a possibility you would not have found by staying inside your own habits.
There is a difference between expanding what you can do and turning creativity into a collection of tricks. More skills do not automatically make the work better, and technical ability is not the same thing as imagination.
The value is in having more choices when an idea shows up. If a new skill gives that idea somewhere useful to go, it matters. If it only gives us another way to show off, it probably does not.
You may be farther along than you were a year ago, but that does not mean you are finished finding out what you can do. A craft keeps changing because you keep changing. You hear differently. You notice different things. Something that once felt out of reach may eventually feel obvious.
That is reason enough to keep going.
There may still be parts of your own work you have not met yet.
Can We Help You?
Where in your craft do you suspect there is still more to discover?
We’re grateful you spent some time with us.
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There is always more ground to cover.
Continue The Journey
Because sometimes the wisest person in the studio has four paws.
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