Freedom in Structure

The Creative Rebellion • Dispatch #003 • 4 min read

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I'm a big believer in structure and rules.

That might sound antithetical to the life of a creative. Shouldn't we demand freedom and spontaneity? Who can predict the precise moment the muses will smile upon us, open the floodgates of creativity and allow them to wash over us? (If you believe in muses, that is).

Don't rules and structure stifle the creative process?

Well, yes and no.

See, too much freedom can be a bad thing.

We want unlimited creative license, but then we crumble under the weight of decision fatigue, unable to decide which direction to take a project.

Too much freedom can be a form of Resistance.

And then there are rules.

I hear you, I hear you...

Nobody puts Baby in a corner!

We're creative rebels. The hairs on our neck rise up at the thought of someone else telling us how to do something, right? Let us be unique. Let us do it our own way.

Tell that to  Picasso .

Because he did... after he did it the traditional way.

He learned all the proper classical rules for composition, color theory, and technique... then he broke them all with Cubism.

Begin Rabbit Trail #1 - Ideas from disparate fields of interest

The idea for Cubism grew out of the popular fascination at the time with the idea of a fourth spatial dimension, written about by French mathematician  Henri Poincaré , in his book,  Science and Hypothesis . (This is also the book that inspired Albert Einstein's  annus mirabilis papers , which included his  theory of special relativity ).

Picasso learned about the book indirectly through  Maurice Princet , an insurance actuary who explained the new geometry to Picasso and his friends in Paris.

At the time there were a considerable number of people who thought the fourth dimension might be the home of spirits. Others conceived of it as an “astral plane” where you can see all sides of an object at once. Novelist H. G. Wells even caused a sensation with his book  The Time Machine , where the fourth dimension was not space, but time.

Although Einstein was intrigued by the idea of a fourth dimension, Picasso actually incorporated it into his own creations before the famous physicist. Arthur I. Miller wrote about all of it in his book,  Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc .

In the book, he discusses in great detail the history of a single painting,  Les Demoiselles d’Avignon —completed and first exhibited in 1907. In its final form, “the painting represents five prostitutes in a bordello. Although in close proximity, they do not interact with each other, only with the viewer—the client.”

The “plot” of the painting is the increasing geometrization of the figures as one goes from left to right, ending up with a four-dimensional view of the squatting prostitute.

In striking contrast to Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2  (1912) where the figures represent successive points in time, seen as coexisting in the fourth dimension, Picasso’s painting culminates with a superimposed set of three-dimensional projections of an object in four spatial dimensions. The viewer is seeing the object simultaneously from (a sampling of) all possible perspectives rather than from only one as in classical painting.

(I'm going somewhere with this, but its conclusion is an email in and of itself. See Rabbit Trail #2, next week!)

End Rabbit Trail #1

Picasso created an entirely new art movement, but without his classical training, he wouldn't have had the visual vocabulary necessary to reinvent perspective.

So... rules and structure.

When it comes to creativity and art, they give us a framework, an understanding of how things work, and of how they can be broken. After all, true art doesn't lie in the rules or structure of things, but in the inward significance of what is represented. What meaning or emotion is communicated?

“The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance; for this, and not the external mannerism and detail, is true art.”

— Aristotle

Yet rules and structure play their role, but in the execution of art, and in the creative process.

Our minds like routine.

We tend to default to our habits.

So why not build structures into our lives that foster a creative atmosphere?

If we sit down at the same time every day to create, our bodies will learn to create at that time.

If we build rules and structures to protect our creative time, will we not be more creative?

Put the phone in airplane mode.

Close the door.

Eliminate distractions.

Put on music that inspires.

Have some coffee.

Or tea.

Or water.

Light a candle.

And get to work.

Until next Saturday...

Stay rebellious,

Travis

P.S. Do you use structure to get creative work done? How so?

P.P.S. Subscribe to The Creative Rebellion to be sure you never miss a post! Dispatches will arrive in your inbox every Saturday morning.

The Creative Act of Building in Public

The Creative Rebellion • Dispatch #002 • 5 min read

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Building something in public can be scary. If you fail, you fail in front of everyone who's watching. It's safer to create in your basement. Or your work shed. A closet maybe. Or best of all, a remote cabin in the woods.

It's safer to work in secret, where only you can see the warts, bruises, and imperfections of the art you're creating.

But in many ways it's also riskier to work in secret.

Working in secret, you're only accountable to yourself. You don't know if the work you're creating will be received well or not. You won't know until you finally ship it and wait for the opinions to start rolling in.

That's where the benefits of building in public come in. Building in public forces you to be accountable. You've made a promise. You waved your hand, got everyone's attention, and said, "hey, I'm doing this thing!"

That gives you motivation to create now instead of putting it off for "a better day," when you might feel more inspired.

You can get feedback and make adjustments as you go.

And you can grow while you create.

Starting a newsletter is a perfect example. (As are a blog, a podcast, building a side hustle, or even writing a book).

Last week I posted on LinkedIn that I had gone from 0 to 10 subscribers as I prepared to send my first dispatch of this newsletter. Those first 10 subscribers came from adding links and CTAs to my LinkedIn profile and adding a brief CTA to the end (and comments) of a few of my posts.

Little actions that created some momentum and gave me some accountability.

Now that I had subscribers, I had to write something.

In the Welcome email that you get when you confirm your subscription to The Creative Rebellion, I talk about how to beat Resistance. It takes action.

And that's what gaining a few subscribers did: it spurred me to take more action.

And that action created even more action. Then I posted about the action I was taking, and that led to 14 more new subscribers before the first dispatch went out on Saturday morning. So Dispatch #001 went out to 24 fellow creative rebels.

Action building upon itself with more action is momentum.

And momentum creates progress.

It gets us from point A to point B.

And as creatives, that's what we all want, right?

We want to create. We want to find the inspiration to start. To make progress. To finish.

So how do we determine points A and B?

Point A is the start. We have to begin. Write the first word, draw the first line, paint the first stroke, play the first note. We have to take the first step.

Finishing looks different for each of us, but there's a quote I've heard said several different ways, that, if the Internet is to be trusted, goes back to Leonardo Da Vinci:

"Art is never finished, only abandoned."

Variations of this quote have been attributed to Paul Valéry, Oscar Wilde, David Fincher, and George Lucas, who said it was the reason he went back and "finished" the original Star Wars films by re-editing and adding new CGI.

So point B, the finish, is often the deadline. Whether self-imposed, or put upon us by someone else, there's a hard date when our work must be finished.

For this newsletter, it's 8am every Saturday morning.

Whether it's my best work or not, whether it feels finished or not, whether I would like to polish it up a bit more or not, it has to ship at 8am Saturday.

Now, if you're like me, you're good friends with Procrastination, one of Resistance's good friends and conspirators.

So I need structures, systems, and deadlines.

I didn't have these when I started this newsletter. But I knew I needed to create momentum, so I started without them.

Part of the reason I picked Saturday is because it gives me the entire work week to write, edit, and polish. That gave me the skeleton of a structure. Because I don't want to be writing this late Friday night or early Saturday morning, my self-imposed deadline is 5pm Friday. That's when I schedule the final version of this email to send the following morning, fully ready or not.

Building the structure out further, I know I'll want time to let the text sit for a bit before I come back to edit and polish it. Before sitting down to write the first draft of this dispatch on Monday, April 10, I built out my complete structure with tasks in Asana. Here's what it looks like:

• Monday - choose subject and write first draft

• Tuesday - let it sit

• Wednesday - proofread and edit content

• Thursday - final polish of content

• Friday - post final content on my website for the Read Online version and schedule dispatch in ConvertKit for Saturday morning

Simple enough, but it gives me daily signposts to know whether I'm on track to having something to send out Saturday morning. This gives action a path to take. It reduces some of the friction inherent to the process.

So back to the building in public part.

When people see you building in public, if what you're creating is of interest to them, they'll join you for the journey. We like having a front row seat to watching something get built.

Case in point,  sharing on LinkedIn  that I published my first newsletter last Saturday bumped my subscribers from 24 to 38. Now I'm even more motivated to keep writing.

Action > Momentum > Motivation > Action

And now there's a cycle that will keep building upon itself.

Will every dispatch be easy to write? No. Will there be days I don't feel like writing? Yes. Will there be days that imposter syndrome shows up in a trojan horse? Yup.

But now I have some tools to fight Resistance. I'm not unprepared, sitting in the safety of my basement, where it can whisper, "Just quit. No one will ever know."

Have you built anything in public before? How'd it go? Reply to this dispatch and let me know!

Until next Saturday...

Stay rebellious,

Travis

P.S. If you found this helpful, please share it with a creative friend.

P.P.S. Subscribe to The Creative Rebellion to be sure you never miss a post! Dispatches will arrive in your inbox every Saturday morning.