The Creative Act: A Way of Being

An absolutely wonderful book that I've been recommending to everyone over the past couple of months.

It's about creativity in the broadest sense. Creativity on an individual level. With a mix of practical advice and deep insights into the process of making something new.

Ten years ago, I might have dismissed it as fluffy talk. As someone used to working with very concrete, often mechanical things, even the language used to describe creativity sometimes used to feel meaningless to me. But after many years of working on video games, you start to notice patterns that are hard to explain with logic alone. What seems right and logical at the start doesn't always lead to success. And conversely, a fleeting joke can sometimes become the seed of something great. This book is about why that happens and how to navigate the creative process to reach good results more often.

Personally, I found the sections where Rick talks about decision-making to be the most enjoyable and inspiring. It's reassuring to realize that when you're uncertain about something, it doesn't mean you're dumb or that someone else knows better - it's simply part of the nature of creativity.

The book is divided into a few dozen short chapters, each focusing on a specific aspect. You can read any chapter in just a few minutes. You can go through them in order, or jump around to whatever topic feels relevant at the moment. You can finish the book in a week. But I'm sure I'll return to it many more times and will probably reread it entirely in five years. I'm also pretty sure my perspective on many things will have changed by then. Of course, I'd also like to be confident that the world will still be in some reasonably livable shape five years from now ;)

As you can probably tell from this post, this book won't teach you how to write in a week, but if you have any connection to creative work (and you almost certainly do, even if you think otherwise!), this book is absolutely worth reading. It could save you years of your life. For example, it might help you better choose which projects are worth your time.

I tried to distill a few key ideas from this book and another essay into a one-hour talk (in Russian). It probably could've fit into 15 minutes, but this is what I've got. It might be worth watching if you're in the process of choosing your next project.