I saw a post online a while back differentiating between practice and rehearsal.
Basically, practice was something you did by yourself, rehearsal was something you did with others.
It got me to thinking (as these things are wont to do) about how the creative act breaks down, not just for musicians and other performers but to artists and writers and other creators.
It strikes me we have four levels:
Recreation / recharging
Research / practice
Rehearsal / creating
Remaking / performing
…and then back to recreation / recharging.
Levels Of Creativity
Step one is tapping into the joy that motivates our creative impulse. It doesn’t have to be profound or polished or particularly complex, pulp pop culture will do just as nicely, thank you. The point is to get us ready, less mentally than emotionally.
The objective is to get the creative juices flowing, to get us prepped for The Work.
Step two is more personal, more private, more focused on becoming comfortable with both material and technique. For a performer it’s more about the mastering of mind / body control in order to have the necessary tools to express one’s art; for a creator it’s learning to discern one bit of information from another to find the right expression. (And obviously there’s a spectrum in between; a painter needs to both master the ability to translate intent into execution via pencil / brush / stylus stroke and to discern what ideas to express.)
Step three involves the actual shaping of the material, be it a first draft of a story or the underlying sketch for a painting or for a band, selecting the actual expression of the material.
Clearly, there are overlapping disciplines at work hear: A band or performers must collaborate in some form with a composer, living or dead, who went through their own four stages of creativity in order to compose; actors in a play interpret with a director text created independently by a writer.
And there are other overlaps as well: For many writers and creative artists the research portion continues on through this point as well.
Step four is the presentation of the art in is final (hopefully!) form. Every performance, even of an oft repeated work, is a unique final expression.
And after that, the process starts again.
Now this can breakdown on different timetables. A novelist may take months or even years to complete a work, a band of experienced musicians familiar with their material can improvise a performance on the spot.
But these four steps (or five, if you want to count it that way) are crucial to the creative process.
You can’t short circuit any step -- even if a particular artist is skilled enough, knowledgeable enough to minimize the time spent at any one level -- and hope to be able to do a substantial work.
Every step needs to be completed.
This is where frustration seeps in for many creators and performers: Something happens to stall out the process at a particular level.
Even the recreation / recharging step is crucial. Yeah, it’s fun and entertaining, but it’s also literally re-creating. It’s opening the internal to the external, allowing the creative spirit to regain its vitality not by forcing it to fulfill any function, but to just go with the flow.
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Buzz Dixon is an American writer of comic books, film, and cartoons.
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