A slightly different angle here, having been inspired by this longform interview with Jack Antonoff. I was interested in the way this interview drew out the insights into his creative process, the tension between process and product, and how these themes relate to creative work in general. It is long, but there’s very few skippable moments:
I was especially interested in his reflections on the pressure to reveal, curate, and explain his ‘process’, which is necessarily ironic because that is precisely why I watched the video in first instance. He acknowledges the industry wisdom that “every great producer will tell you they should hide their hand”. And yet there’s tension: artists feel pressure to reveal the secrets behind the final product, especially in an era when every aspect of creative work can be shared, analysed, and archived. He speaks of his studio scene as intentionally undocumented and insular. He treasures that most of what happens there is ephemeral, and only glimpses make it to the public outside of the final result. There’s a relief in knowing that “if you’re not here, you’re not here”, protecting the magic from overexposure and commodification.
This resonates strongly with me in the narrative play and game design space, which is of course a world away from what Jack is doing in the music scene, around the need to ‘show your working’ to demonstrate your creative productivity. It is in some partial way a rationale behind this website. But what I’ve taken from this video is the wise insight that the pressure to explain can distort the process itself – the urge to dissect or publicise every part of collaborative creation can kill spontaneity and undermine creative risk-taking. Storycraft does need to keep a little behind the curtain, to shield some of the process. The stories or artifacts that emerge from a collaborative process are only a fraction of what has actually transpired, which happens in the room, among the people, in the act of making.
The pressure to promote actually undermines emotional safety of participation. To go deep, participants must feel free to be “misunderstood” and to express personal truth, knowing not everything needs to be explained or justified.
When you get to the end, let the product speak for itself. Allow it to exist on its own, accepting that reception and interpretation are outside your control anyway…
The House of Nerdery and Curios 