The Creator and The Critic
Transcript:
Listen.
You have two voices.
The Creator and The Critic.
The Creator likes to make things. They’re unabashedly imaginative. They’re the part of you that makes you dance when you’re home alone. The part of you that doodles at class or work, or that sings along mentally while listening to music.
The Critic judges. It’s the voice you’ve learned from a thousand others. It compares and contrasts. It ranks things out of ten. It is the mental register you have of every other piece of art you’ve ever seen and will tell you where you stand in comparison.
Most people have an overdeveloped Critic. You put your pencil on paper and by the third line you’ve made a mistake. You get writers block two sentences in as you’re out of good things to say. Your notes aren’t right. You think you’ll never be as good. It’s sometimes so loud that you can’t even hear the creator anymore, you wouldn’t even know how to begin. But it’s there. It’s quietly dreaming, of songs, poems, stories, that part of you that wants to make. You hear it sometimes.
If you listen to it, with some work, you can bring it out, and let it roam wild and free. Some people never lose this - it’s how we start as children, with an overdeveloped Creator. It’s joyous, the feeling of freedom, to make and do whatever you want. It’s the feeling of trying something for the first time, the world is filled with possibility once more. It’s the feeling improvisers get onstage, no critic, just creation and elation.
While this is better, there’s a problem here too. The critic isn’t evil, the critic has always just wanted one thing - to help you. Most of the time it’s overprotective, but it’ll change if you start asking it the right questions. “How can we make this even better? How can I make this more fun?” The critic loves these questions. Shutting the critic out ultimately holds you back creatively, it’s a part of you too. You need it to do your best work.
And you can only do your best work when these two voices cooperate. You need the Creator to come up with ideas, and you need the Critic to refine them. You need to be free to make, and you need to be courageous enough to start over. You write, and then you edit. You draw, you erase, you redraw. It’s a process, a cycle, a conversation, a dance between these two voices, these two parts of you. Whether it’s the writer and the editor. The artist and the curator. The musician and the producer.
The Creator and the Critic.
You have two voices.
Listen.
Context:
I read about the idea of having two voices - a creative side and a critical side - in The Artists’ Way by Julia Cameron.
I really liked it, and it seemed to align with my previous experiences of being creative. The book is a little hippy-dippy but I think it makes some excellent points. In the book, she calls the creator ‘the artist’ and the whole book is about getting you from having an overdeveloped critic (the first stage) to actually listening to your inner creative side once more. It’s definitely worth a read.
My main outlet for years was Improv, and one of the main attractions of that art form is the lack of barrier between idea and execution. I think it’s something everyone should try. It puts you firmly into the overdeveloped creator stage.
At the same time, it’s the biggest problem with improv - the lack of time to critique and refine means anything you make will always be shallow to a certain degree. Recently it’s occured to me that perhaps a reason I stuck there for so long was because it was comfortable - having no critic to worry about is easy. In a real way, only doing improv was a way of me being lazy and hiding - improv isn’t scary after a certain point, as your first ideas aren’t that risky. Working on something for a long time, refining it, redrafting it, then showing it to someone? That’s vulnerable. Anyone can make up something on the spot (and all improvisers know this).
When setting out to do A Year Of Bad Art I wanted to mentally shift from an overdeveloped critic to an overdeveloped creator in other areas - believing that this was a necessary step to get the two voices to work together long term.
Obviously there’s more to creativity than just this extended analogy - but I really like its simplicity.
If you’re struggling to do something, is it because you really have no ideas? Or you’re immediately judging how good they need to be in order to be worthwhile?
Make some bad art, refine it later.