Creation happens in silence
josem.co
josem.co
* A loading phase where I immerse into the problem. This requires silence and concentration. Basically staring at the problem and its various aspects for a few hours. Hmm. What if? No. But maybe. Nope. Hmm. Hmm. The problem will often seem too big to fit in my head. I can sort of fumble and grasp its outline, but I don't see it clearly.
* A background processing phase, this requires a sense of almost boredom. I need to step away from the keyboard. A disengagement from further input, from intellectual stimuli in general. I can't distract myself with entertainment either. I must be a bit bored.
* All the sudden there will be clarity, deep insight into what needs to be created. Like the microwave going bing, signalling the cooking is ready. I'll solve not only one problem, but half a dozen. The solutions come faster than I can implement them. I need to pace myself and write my ideas down before I implement them.
It's a heck of a ride.
Just curious: Where would you put "gather input or feedback from peers" in that process?
The moment of clarity is when the question is revealed and the answer is obvious. It's a real parting of the clouds moment.
Generally (for me, anyway) the insight is still pretty unformed. Peer input helps refine that idea into something more concise and actionable.
It's not always required, but it is always beneficial.
Excuse the crudeness, but for me your 'Step 2' is to go and sit on the toilet. I have solved untold amounts of problems by stepping away from the computer and sitting on the pot for 20 mins.
I've had absolute avalanches of new insights when I've been away from any sort of computer for days. It feels like the process of loading more "problem" into the working buffer interrupts or even resets these background processes to some degree.
something about the sound that helps detune the parts of the brain that aren't needed, giving maximum energy/flexibility to the background cores
Nearly all my good thoughts come when walking.
During the first phase, the "problem will often seem too big to fit in my head" is so accurate, especially while I'm still focused on understanding the problem (prior to breaking it down into more manageable pieces).
I appreciate this comment, thank you.
But that period of stepping away seems to allow me to combine a few pieces and then treat that new piece as a single piece, so I'm able to hold much more. (Easily noticeable when coding same program over time).
I don't think I can consciously do that. It only happens if I study and consider the problem daily for at least 4-5 days, sometimes longer.
Physical work can help. Or just doing something that's not too engaging.
Some places I've experienced sudden insight for a technical problem:
* playing a video game on Saturday evening
* briefly awake at 3am to use the bathroom
* shopping for tea kettles on Amazon
* reading aloud in a writer's group
The idea just pops into my head, sometimes throwing me off the task I'm actually focused on. I assume there's a subconscious portion of my brain still calculating the problem even when I don't realize it, but I can see why some people believe their insights come from a higher power.
Funny, you conclude that way because a lot of my background processing and moments of sudden clarity happen when I go cycling after work.
Similarly the brain muscles, you work them out actively, then you rest, some background magic is happening, and when you come back and revisit it, all of a sudden the problem can be easier. You can do something / solve something that all of a sudden you couldn't do previously.
The eureka/a-ha moment is a little unique to intellectual work. It's hard to find something that gives a similar rush to cracking a hard problem.
Brings back some fond memories solving USAMO/IMO problems.
1. Immersion in the problem. Work diligently. 2. Relax 3. Insight
Hammock Driven Development, Rich Hickey, Closure Conj 2010
Maybe it's just when I'm stretching my legs in general, be it to get a coffee or refill the water bottle or during a walk in nature.
I can relate very well to the phases of probleming solving you described. But for me it's forgetting about the problem even for a short period of time instead of boredom.
When I'm deep into the first phase I sometimes get a bit too attached to a point were the problem is the first thought that comes to my mind after waking up (well...if I'm really stuck there might be even some weird dreams about it).
In the past I started to cancel non-work-related activities until I solved the problem. But I've learned that this oftentimes just lead to frustration - when the day is over I missed out on a nice evening with friends and still haven't solved the problem.
But when I just let it go for a few hours more than once the solution came right to me when I was on my bike back home. Just when I noticed that I haven't thought about the problem for the past few hours.
Sometimes this can get a bit demanding if I then happen to be past the Ballmer Peak.
> any creation happens in isolation without any signals or external validation until it’s complete. [...] Any idea or creative work you can think of happens in silence. [...] This isolation happens in all fields: movies, music, literature, or product development.
This is just factually false.
A really obvious counterexample is improvisational theater. The creation happens as a team activity in front of an audience. It's absolutely rich with signals. There's nary a pause, let alone silence. The same is obviously true with musical improvisation. And the creation of recorded music can also be deeply collaborative. [1]
If you talk with stand-up comedians about their process, they get ideas from all over, but workshopping material with live audiences is a vital part of the process of creation. Movies have storyboards and read-throughs and dailies and reshoots and intense cross-disciplinary collaboration and iteration. [2] Literature has writing groups and readings and editors and friends who read drafts.
In product development, we have prototypes and user tests and continuous release and instrumentation and cross-functional teams and short-cycle processes, all of which can drive creativity if we choose.
Do some people need silence to create? Sure. Bless them. For those that experience periods of silence, can that be a struggle? Definitely. But the notion of a noble solo genius high on his mountain creating great things is more myth than reality, and it can be a harmful one because it makes a lot of people think they can't be creative, when instead they just need a richer environment.
[1] E.g.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M607TcuKf78
[2] E.g.: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/maki...
I would disagree and say your example is pretty much the only one which works this way, because the process and result requires multiple people to be expressive together.
Maybe dance and musical performance might fit the same rough description, but in those the skill required is personal based, and so most of the contributers will be in silence concentrating very hard on their own part and how it fits into the restas opposed to being completely collaborative.
Which example? I gave 7.
IMO Improvistional Theatre is the only valid example here, the other 6 IMO are silent and I will explain why:
1. Music - Done mainly in ones own head, drawing on personal experience and skill to find something which fits with what you are hearing. The process may not be silent, but the creation is.
2. Stand up comedy - The writing/creation is done by the comedian alone, then when workshopping in front of a live audience they assessing the material against the reactions, and adjusting it in their brain silently. An audience reacting is not creating anything, it is informing the creative process going on in the brain.
3. Literature has editors and friends who read drafts - again all the creation is done in silence. Feedback may be given verbally, but that informs the creation, it is not part of it.
4. Product development - This is not artistic creation. It is commerical development. The initial idea and creation is most likely done by an inventor/designer on their own in silence. It is commercial requirements which push this into the further areas of development as you suggest.
I fully accept this is a subjective opinion so I am not stating you are wrong, only how other people can have different opinions based on perspective of what creation, the creative process, and indeed silence actually is.
You must have miscounted because I cant find another 2?
> You must have miscounted because I cant find another 2?
That you're blaming your failures on me is not a good sign, so this is probably my last reply. I also mentioned improvisational music and movies. I could also add staged theater, in which much of the creative work happens in group contexts (starting with table readings, going through all of the rehearsals, and often after).
I'm sure I have a lot to learn about how to write for this audience from a person who [checks profile] joined this site last week. But that would make you a bit of an expert in both arrogance and dismissiveness, so I'll definitely give it a think.
Same with music, there are plenty of jam sessions where people create music together totally improvised on the spot. I mean pretty much all of them can be done collaboratively if people felt like it, and often do.
You don't write music, do you? And I guess you've never been at a jam session either.
However, I think there's a mismatch of definitions. Getting to a destination, and seeing the big picture usually takes a lot of minds to envision. Once you know the destination, then in most industries, it falls back on the individual to figure out how to get to that destination. That's the quiet part.
In the software industry, it's both collaborative and solo at the same time. How many projects have you worked on where someone comes in and clobbers code you've just committed and then there's merge conflicts and wasted effort trying to understand what they were doing? If that hasn't happened to you yet, you're lucky. So on the one hand, agree, you're both trying to build something together, but most likely you're both off in your corner figuring out how to contribute your part.
I do think some of the loneliest parts of creation are when you see something no one else does and you can't really explain it without building it first. The amount of effort and energy required to do that is higher than normal and the fear that it could backfire weighs on you.
Loneliness is a choice we have made, but I don't think it's a very good one.
It can be a good choice for particular situations (like the author seems to think of), perhaps some situations call for a balance of alone vs. social.
Your original post makes a good case for specific solutions to specific situations (upvoted), but then as usual, the typical root of disagreements are poorly scoped comments.
To be honest, that sounds terrible to me. I can’t think when someone is constantly looking over my shoulder.
Maybe if you get candidates that do great at whiteboard interviews, you’d have a lot of success when pairing too?
Honestly, I think whiteboard interviews are terrible. And pairing interviews can be a challenge to run, which is why I go way out of my way to make people feel comfortable in them. But done right, I think they are no worse than any other kind of interview, which inevitably puts people on the spot. And for many it's better, because coding is way more their strong suit than answering vague questions about their history and character.
I’m not sure that’s actually true. The more I work the more I find that a single unit doing all the work is absolutely the most efficient.
Even if you can ultimately get more work done with many people working on the same thing (and some things cannot be done alone at all), the efficiency is lower.
I think that leads a lot of people towards the feeling that lone genius is most likely. I think it’s certainly more likely than any given person being part of a team that’s genius.
Sure there’s other work to be done, all the administration and logistics of adapting the product to the need, all the business aspects, the mechanical, what have you. But the springing to life of an idea into reality… there’s a species of this that seems to emerge in isolation.
For some, and I count myself among this group, the challenge that comes next is in releasing this ore of an idea to its audience or its destination. As soon as you publish it, it’s no longer under your control. People make what they will of it. It may not be what you intended them to make of it. But you can no longer help it. It’s everyone else’s product now.
So you can protect it and hold on to it and keep it in its isolation to maintain its reflection of the conditions that created it, or you can release it, and let it find a life of its own. Sometimes that’s scary and sometimes that’s exhilarating. Whatever it is, the moment of silence between it and its creator is something only the creator will have experienced.
> Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open. Your stuff starts out being just for you, in other words, but then it goes out. Once you know what the story is and get it right — as right as you can, anyway — it belongs to anyone who wants to read it. Or criticize it.
There's always room for iterative improvement with feedback from others, but you need to first make something you believe in.
This kind of clashes with the idea of finding problems to solve for other people, but I frequently see advice to "solve your own problems" first, because you know them better than other people's problems.
Also, to react to the post itself, yes to some degree, but also no? Most crative processes involve multiple people going back and forth, giving feedback along the way. Editors, teammates, talking to family, brainstorming, etc. Yeah it's not the final audience, but it's similar. A mind on its own is so so much less creative then two minds interacting.
Successful product development usually needs more than just the creative process, but it’s not totally absent the upfront creative side either.
It'll help you identify problem areas in the game, how engaged the players are, if they find it interesting, help you with specific design problems you're having, etc. I don't think a single board game design of mine hasn't incorporated at least something from the feedback I've gotten from others, before it was pitched to publishers/released.
The same technically applies to video games as well, but that's much riskier, as if you put it out there too much too early, there's a real risk that another developer will take your idea and beat you to market with it (unless it's a narrative or content-heavy game, like a Stardew Valley or Undertale, which my games tend not to be). I've had a few of my games get cloned and put onto other platforms before I've had a chance to, for example, and I'm just a small solo developer.
I do agree that you need periods of silence, though. Sometimes very long periods.
So there's a spectrum, from creating in silence to creating in public, which is perhaps down to personal preference or temperament (introversion / extraversion?).
I've often seen people launch mailing lists and pre-orders for products, books, courses, of which they have not yet written a single line. So their early users get a discount in exchange for providing invaluable feedback during the development process.
I can spot these people from a mile away.
What they're doing is antithetical to the sentiment expressed in this post, which is about being creative. Not doing pre-marketing for some side hustle course or e-book.
I'd say that counts as a highly creative act, and is the polar opposite of working in silence.
This is certainly the smart thing to do, but there’s something about “creating something for an audience” that stops my creative juices from flowing. I guess there are too many thoughts about how this will be received and what people might think, that it stops me from creating truly great work.
In the past decade people have been getting burnt out on all these lean startup, kickstarting fucks that just want to test for a market or audience before building out a product. The end result is we are bombarded with vaporware products, services, books, that we have to show interest in or worse put some money down before the creator decides to actually create anything. This makes people skeptical of “new” offerings. The consumer wants a product right away, not a promise. Also, the end product becomes subject to the tyranny of whatever can be tested for with pre-marketing.
The risk needs to shift back onto the creator. I’m talking big designs upfront; products coming to market ready to consume. If it does poorly, the creator just takes the hit in the form of wasted time and money. This is how things used to be, before a generation of entrepreneurs decided they wanted to be risk averse and try out a hundred half baked ideas rather than one idea really well thought out. It seems that as the skill of getting products right on the first try began to wane, “lean” processes began to grow in popularity.
Or, more often, their users get nothing at all.
I steer clear of people doing this. It's one thing get other people's feedback on what's clearly communicated as just an idea, or a work in progress. It's another thing to claim you have a ready (or launching any minute now!) product/service, while all you really have is a webpage full of lies and a textbox for victims of your con artistry to leave their contact information, so you can "gauge interest" / "determine market size" (and possibly spam those e-mails later with something else). The latter I consider dishonest, and on the off chance someone doing this actually launches their thing, I'll already be biased against purchasing/subscribing.
On that tangent, I believe this is very much dependent on the person in question. I personally like to do knowledge work in library silence. I even find music distracting, although instrumental music without vocals is better than open office noise. On the other extreme I've heard stories that Richard Feynman liked to do physics in strip clubs. I'm not ashamed to admit that Feynman was more creative than I'm likely to ever be, but I don't think that my relative inferiority in that regard is because I'm not working from a strip club.
Like you, I mostly prefer creating in quiet solitude approaching sensory deprivation. However, sometimes I find it possible to coax a creative idea or concept into conscious awareness when surrounded by a familiar roar of external stimuli but only as long as I perceive that cacophony as a fairly uniform wall of noise. Personal examples include aimlessly walking alone around a massive trade show floor with booths all blaring their visual and sonic messages. For me, such noisy environments seem especially good for more "connectionist" type inspirations.
I've heard the Feynman strip club story and others like it, and always interpreted it in a similar way. It appears that environment was both familiar and comfortable for Feynman and perhaps his ideas could emerge as signal from the wall of perceptual noise.
debatable.
I'd say this is just the first stage of creating something, an MVP of sorts. After that you do need to get some feedback, iterate and improve it step-by-step to get the finished product.
Author here :)
It was more a metaphor from that moment when I was writing in fact in silence and the lack of any external input / voice telling me whether something I'm doing is good or bad but I know what you mean, perhaps using "isolation" would have made the article clearer, thanks!
Sidenote - if you can find the time, you should write more often. I just went through your articles and there is a lot of useful advice to be found. The projects are pretty interesting too. Cheers!
What you described is the often invisible first parts of creation which involve exploring the space, then posing the question or framing the problem and finally stewing on it until the seed of the thing is ready to emerge in that moment of solitude. The best collaborators and producers understand the necessity and shape of this process.
The mere presence of another person in the room, whether they're contributing and providing feedback or not, generates idea after idea for me. Some of the best ideas I've had have come from sitting in my living room watching my roommate play Rocket League, with us occasionally discussing the game. It feels so difficult and pointless and uninspiring alone that I've considered hiring an intern or apprentice just to sit there in the studio with me.
> As painful as it is, any creation happens in isolation without any signals or external validation until it’s complete.
This is the exact opposite of my experience writing lyrics. We're all constantly bouncing ideas off of each other, immediately and repeatedly. Speaking the lyrics out loud to someone else to gauge how they'll be received in a song is a go-to method in my circle. And if that's just revision and not creation, well, most of my song ideas stem from random phrases spoken out loud to someone in conversation.
> While you’re reading this, creative people are working hard now across the world on the next novel, movie, or song you’ll love, and yet, you don’t know anything about it, and they don’t know if you’ll like it either.
I guess this is saying that artists generally don't share half-complete ideas, which is true, but that's because audiences don't do well with filling in the gaps on their own, not because "creation happens in silence". Creation is collaborative and chaotic.
If you think I'm misreading this article please let me know! It's a real head scratcher.
edit: one exception comes to mind - I'm only inspired around others, but when there's a musical problem to be solved (e.g. how do we go from the chorus to the bridge), we all tend to retreat into our heads to work out possible ideas instead of playing them out loud for people and seeing what sticks.
of course this opinion won’t be popular with all the people who just grind for their kids and locked in mortgage
For remote work to work you really need to build a designated space where you go to for the 'work' part of your day. It could be a part of a bedroom, an attic, a basement, a co-op office, the point is that it must create separation and you also have to explain this separation to your family and ask them to respect it.
Just because you are remote doesn't mean you are working 'from home' there is a huge difference perhaps not in distance but in mindset.
Again, do be reasonable and assume that everyone who has issues with it has tried all of what you suggested multiple times over the last years and has gotten to a solid conclusion that it doesn't work and the separation at home is not going to happen for their particular situation of family and housing. And if someone needs to work not from home but in an office away from home, most people can't simply afford a proper office if they're not using an employer-provided one.
EDIT: I think in knowledge work, a kind of "sow and harvest" model works well. Going around during the day collects little "seeds" of knowledge which are then synthesized (harvested) in quiet periods of deep work at night.
If I knew how hard it is to square software work with having a family, I'd have chosen a different career track.
A lot of this is standard advice for various creators. I think, however, that it's possible to optimize yourself for the process. I find in my professional life and watching others that there are creative stages which are followed by forgetting these lessons, then re-learning them all over again. Humans are complex machines.
Shameless plug: https://danielbmarkham.com/forced-boredom/
In Princeton, he [John Von Neumann] received complaints for regularly playing extremely loud German march music on his phonograph, which distracted those in neighboring offices, including Albert Einstein, from their work. Von Neumann did some of his best work in noisy, chaotic environments, and once admonished his wife for preparing a quiet study for him to work in. He never used it, preferring the couple's living room with its television playing loudly.
References
I don't like it. For starters, the length is only slightly longer than a handful of tweets. Barely qualifying as an "article", it ends abruptly, without really saying anything. Almost like someone called out "dinner is ready", and because the article wasn't going anywhere, he just ended it with "we don't care".
> "As painful as it is..."
Painful? How is it painful? A more interesting article would elaborate on this pain.
The irony here is that nothing has really been "created" with this piece. It's like a comment. This comment I'm writing here in painful silence, has more substance than the article in question!
Some of the best ideas I've had have been developed with other people. Role playing games especially are all about collaborative creation. The viewpoint in the article is nothing but tunnel vision, focusing on what works for them and projecting it out into a rule.
I'd wager what the author really means is that to have control over their work, and not having to bend their ideas to develop alongside the ideas of others, requires isolation. And that's something I can relate to. But that isn't about creation, it's about control, and fulfilling your personal vision rather than prioritizing a shared vision.
While a nice ideal, this feels 100% incorrect. All of those are commercial endeavors that have people coming to you telling you to create something. Some of them even come to you with pre-written requirements, scripts, etc. and tell you to create it. Or you have a contract committing you to creating a certain amount of work.
Individual periods of creative flow may be done in isolation, that is true. But the article went too far to claim that isolation is a given in creative work.
Creation, building a wholly new thing, is a different activity than engineering or problem solving, and I agree - requires silence. Creation also implies an increase in the number of problems - maybe that’s why I tend to avoid silence… nice article - I think I’ll turn off YouTube and code in silence today!
I am not a isolationist. Just stating observation.
We have a whole bunch of programming techniques that allow us to make progress and lay groundwork outside of flow state, and then when we are certain that we have the solution, jump in for brief periods and come back out to check in with the world.
Saints preserve me from people who disappear for eight hours at a time and expect me to compliment them for their echo chamber work. Software is a team sport, not a painting.
I agree with the author(As a blogger and fiction writer)-- you have to do your work alone, and then just put it out there. Sure you can get feedback once you have something polished (I dont but I know some peole like to), but the actual creative process has to be done by yourself. It is hard and lonely, but you have to push thru it if you want to get something done
That's a well-known meditation thing.
There are lots of ways to get silence : solitude, peaceful lifestyle, concentration...
Concentration is a big one. It de-agitates your organs of perception. And it can be taken to profound levels of refinement. And then you see ... deeper.
As any scientist/engineer/artist is surely familiar.
I sometimes need silence for periods of intense concentration, but that's really not sustainable for me and more often I need collaboration to create, bouncing ideas off other people and getting feedback and additional ideas. This doesn't work as well for really intricate sorts of creativity, but the reality is that, for me, the majority of creativity isn't that.
I particularly had to chuckle when the OP mentions music. Sure, they don't directly say it gets created in silence, but they do say it happens in isolation, which is true in some cases, but just isn't true for the vast majority of bands.
Even creation which has little to do with sound, such as novel-writing, is often done with sound and collaboration: if you read enough about writing you'll discover that many novelists seek other novelists to discuss ideas with, or you'll find that certain novels were written while listening to certain albums.
Of course, some creation does happen in silence and isolation.
Quite the opposite.....
I need that constant thrum to block out so I can focus and really put out the good stuff.
Maybe you're not everyone and should shut the f up while the rest of us enjoy the non-negative noise all around us.
For me, it's similar.
Not sure how much it resonates with today's software development zeitgeist, however.
It seems that most software development companies believe that creation happens in large, open-plan offices, filled with chattering people.
The article you're commenting on is also in english.
calm mind that enjoys quietness can often achieve inner peace and deep perception
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Du_Fu
[1] https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/2742...
Not according to Amazon and their 3 day return to office policy.