The Curious Wandering Method of Creativity
lifelong experimentation as a legit creative process
I listened to Miracle and Wonder: Conversations with Paul Simon (the conversations are with Malcolm Gladwell and Bruce Headlam) this month, and I recommend it if you’re a fan of Paul Simon (which I am) and also if you’re interested in the creative process, because the majority of the book is a deep, deep dive into Simon’s process. Just like with Jeff Tweedy’s How to Write One Song, the songwriting process is, in many ways, the writing process (especially the picture book writing process!), and I found a lot of inspiration in these conversations, but I want to focus on one particular aspect.
Gladwell is amazed when he starts really contemplating the length of Simon’s career, and especially that, while he had many hits early in his career (especially “The Sound of Silence” and “Bridge Over Troubled Water”)1, he also had huge success later (Graceland), and is still writing music. So Gladwell starts to wonder why some artists peak early in their careers (he uses the Rolling Stones as an example), and some have their big hit after decades of work, or maybe continue to have success throughout their lives.2
Gladwell quotes a professor of economics at University of Chicago, David W. Galenson, who wrote a book called Old Masters and Young Geniuses. The book looks at artists’ overall career trajectories, specifically how old they were when they created their “most successful” work, as measured by prices paid for their work or how often their paintings are reproduced in textbooks. There are, generally,3 two patterns: artists who create their most successful work in the beginning of their career and then decline, and artists who produce a lifetime of highly-valued work, peaking later in life.
Galenson specifically looked at Cezanne and Picasso. Picasso4 created his “highest value” work, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, when he was 26,5 and Cezanne created his most successful body of work at the end of his life (he died when he was 67).
Galenson’s point is: there’s no such thing as a standard prime to the career of artists…There are prodigies, and there are late bloomers. Old masters and young geniuses…Is there a difference in the creative processes of these two categories of artists? Galenson says there is. He calls prodigies, people like Picasso, conceptual innovators. They have clear goals. Ideas that explain and direct their work. They work quickly, and systematically. They map out everything in advance, because they can. They know where they’re going, even before they start. Picasso, for instance, is an almost compulsive planner. In the case of his most famous painting, Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon, he made more than 400 preparatory sketches. Then there’s Cezanne. He doesn’t work that way at all. Galenson calls late bloomers like Cezanne experimental artists. Their goals are imprecise. They don’t plan anything in advance. They work by trial and error, and endless iteration. They’ve built their skills gradually, which is why it can take them years to hit their stride. Why does Cezanne take until his 60s to do his best work? Because trial and error takes time. Experimentation involves lots of dead ends.
Ok. So. I would personally categorize Picasso, Cezanne, and Paul Simon all as both old masters and young geniuses, but what I took from it is this: you can have a creative career by being curious and experimenting. You don’t have to meticulously plan every step.
In a paper called “The Two Life Cycles of Human Creativity,”6 Galenson lines this all up with goals. The “experimenters” are “motivated by aesthetic criteria” instead of goals (“their goals are imprecise”); “They build their skills slowly over the course of their careers, and their innovations emerge piecemeal in a body of work.” The “conceptual” artists (the early peakers, the young geniuses) are more goal-oriented. “Their goals for a particular work can be stated precisely in advance. They often make detailed preparatory plans for their paintings, and execute their final works systematically.” He goes on to say that the experimenters have career continuity, and the conceptual folks are more likely to have career discontinuity.7
They identify Paul Simon as an experimental artist, and then most of the rest of the audiobook is spent casually providing examples for this. Paul Simon writes by following whatever he is interested in. He investigates instruments he has never heard of. He challenges himself to use every note in the chromatic scale in one song. He tries to use a particular guitar sound he has always liked, or a particular effect, or he tries to recreate a feeling he had listening to other music. He follows his ear. Like I said in last week’s video, he keeps going, and keeps playing, keeps following his gut, until the song sounds the way he feels like it should. And sometimes it doesn’t work. There’s an example they give of when he became interested in the viola da gamba and the theorbo (these are instruments) (I had never heard of them), found a woman in France who played the theorbo, went to France to record with her, and then ultimately decided he wasn’t going to use it.
Paul Simon says:
Anyway. Recorded with these musicians. Got nothing. Nothing that I wanted, except for a piece of information. I can’t just go in and say, ‘go and play.’ So, I said, ok. Whatever. It’s just a piece of information. A big part of my thinking is: trial and error. It’s all trial and error. And there’s no reason to be upset about the errors. It’s part of the trial and error. There’s going to be more error than there are going to be successes. So, when they come, you just put it away as a piece of information.
All of this is incredibly inspiring to me, as someone who understands the concept of goals and continually cannot set them in the way society keeps urging me to. I can follow my intuition. I don’t have to have spreadsheets and S.M.A.R.T. goals if I don’t want them. I still remember an episode of Love, Sidney8 when Sidney met a young journalist who detailed all of her journalistic aspirations: what kind of jobs she was going to have, ending with writing an article that landed on the front page above the fold by the time she was 30. And one reason I remember that now, 42 years later, is because I remember thinking, “Am I supposed to do that? Do I need goals like that? Should I have a plan for where I want to be by the time I’m 30?”
And listen! Maybe I should have! But I also know that whenever I’ve tried to do anything like that, any type of long-term goal setting more than a post-it note, I feel like it’s not who I am. It feels weird in my body.
So I am here to say, if you’re also like that, Miracle and Wonder validates this other way of being – the curious wandering method to creativity. You don’t often hear that this is a legitimate way to approach things. We hear more about Getting Things Done and Productivity and Hustle. What I’m talking about here isn’t slacking. It’s still doing the work. It’s just doing it by following the flow of our intuition and by doing what seems right.
I’ve been sitting down to write every day and asking myself what I’m curious about. How do I want to challenge myself, creatively? What would be cool to make? What kind of stories do I want to write next? There is freedom in not controlling the process, in not requiring specific outcomes. I mean, you could. Then you’d be like Picasso, and, I mean, I’ve heard of that guy. But you can also be looser, more meandering, surrender to the trial and error, and do the work in whatever way makes the most sense to you.
I always feel like I need to warn before a noise-making link, like a song. Rather than, I don’t know, an informational webpage about a song? You probably all understand that it’s going to start making noise, and that if you’re on your phone pretending to make dinner, everyone will know you’re not frying the eggs but instead reading Substack. But the songs are here (Sound of Silence) and here (Bridge Over Troubled Water). Also is that what you’re doing now? Frying eggs for dinner? In this economy?
I did listen to the Outliers episode of If Books Could Kill, so I am taking all of the Malcolm Gladwell methodology here with a grain of salt, but it’s still interesting.
And I’d argue this is VERY general, since many creative people, including me, don’t have a lifelong career as an artist, and it feels like this is discounting anyone who didn’t start creating professionally as a 22-year-old.
Apparently? I will admit I tend to think of Picasso as someone who was successful his whole life, but let’s at least focus on the creative process parts of this example, because my point here is not to debunk the audiobook but to share what inspired me about it.
I have no idea how to value a work that’s in a museum, but the internet is telling me Picasso’s highest grossing painting sold at auction was Les femmes d'Alger (Version 'O'), which is from 1955, fully 48 years after Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, when Picasso was 74, and I swear I am not here to debunk this audiobook but instead to talk about how it creatively inspired me, and yet here we are. Galenson wrote a paper where he says he figured it out by doing regression analysis of auction sales, so maybe he’s right. Although that paper is from 2003, and Les femmes d’Alger (Version ‘O’) sold in 2015. But I’m no economist! I haven’t done a regression analysis on any of this. Because I don’t know how to do one.
Picture book idea: The Seventeen Life Cycles of Hamster Creativity.
It’s hard not to read all this and assume Old Master/Experimenter = better, but then I remember that the continued Young Genius/Conceptual example is Picasso, and I’m not going to be like “don’t be an artistic loser like Picasso.”
A television show that doesn’t have loads of websites and wikis dedicated to it, apparently. I thought everything on the internet had detailed archives? It was a sitcom with Tony Randall as a closeted gay man who lives with Swoosie Kurtz and her daughter.
Behind the Paywall
This month, paying subscribers had access to:
An essay where I saw my now-robust sourdough starter as (of course! I’m nothing if not predictable) a metaphor for writing.
A story prompt photo about rogue milk that led to some CREAM OF THE CROP puns in the comments.
Thoughts and Links
The Great Indoors, a picture book which I wrote and Ruth Chan illustrated, was the honor book for the Arkansas State Library Diamond award.
In more The Great Indoors news, Read, Discuss, Do shared some ideas for activities to do after reading.
I very much enjoyed this half-hour documentary about library cats.
Thank you to
for linking to this poem by Anna Dempsey, “How Google Maps Treats Women,” which I love very much.Some good trash can graffiti I found. Let’s say goodbye to TIRED SWING 22. This year it will all be about UPBEAT POLKA 23.
Books I read recently and loved
Disclosure: book links in this newsletter are affiliate links to Bookshop.org, a site which supports independent bookshops.
I Don’t Care by Julie Fogliano, Molly Idle, and Juana Martinez-Neal is beautiful magic.
I’m so jealous of Carol and the Pickle-Toad by Esmé Shapiro. It’s one of those “I wish I’d written this!” kinds of books.
If you’re doing a Rick the Rock story time, you might want to pair it with Sprout Branches Out by Jessika Von Innerebner, and then have a good discussion about “do all of these Nature Finds want to go on adventures?”
- is now on Substack, and you should subscribe to his newsletter and go get his newest book, Digestion! The Musical. There are singing baby carrots. And a musical finale that is perfect. Turns out Ramona is learning about digestion in 7th grade science (they apparently chanted "peristalsis! peristalsis!" while "digesting" a tennis ball through a plastic tube) and she was particularly enchanted by this book (literally rolling on the floor laughing).
Nell Cross Beckerman is so great at narrative non-fiction, so it’s no surprise that Caves is as incredible as it is.
Princess of the Wild Sea by Megan Frazer Blakemore was a glorious adventure. It’s a completely unexpected Sleeping Beauty retelling, and so good.
I think I liked Garlic and the Witch even more than I liked Garlic and the Vampire, which is saying something.
This was great! I'm currently reading Start More Than You Can Finish A Creative Permission Slip to Unleash Your Best Ideas by Becky Blades. I can't take credit for finding it, I read about it on either a social media thing or one of the many newsletters I read! It is on my list to better track where I find these things, so that I may credit the founder when I share them!
In any case, this book talks about just doing your ideas. Not overthinking them, just start. And see what happens. It doesn't matter if you don't finish, you may finish later, it may spark another idea, that you do finish. The point is to start, to explore, to create. Which I think is how I operate. A series of trial and error, starting before I actually know what I'm doing, and figuring out along the way! This book has finally made me realize, I think, that I need to stop trying to make myself fit into the planning, goal setting, plotting, organized way of doing work. That isn't how I operate. It's never been how I operate. I just do what feels right. And hope that it comes together! So I think I'm like Paul Cezanne, I just keep trying things to see what I like, and what works. And I'm going to keep doing that!
I've also placed a hold on the audiobook you mention. Seems like something I might enjoy!
I'm on vacation this week, visiting family on the East Coast, and it's fair to say I'm behind on absolutely everything. BUT I still am trying to keep up with my Julie! Which is good because the wandering method is definitely my method. 🤯 I love iterational work--and letting curiosity lead.
Unrelated: you might have hit on the only TV show from the 80s that I don't think I ever saw with Love, Sidney! I looked it up and didn't recognize the photo stills at all. Somehow, that made me simultaneously sad (I missed a show!) and happy (I missed a show!)
Good luck with Upbeat Polka this year! 🪗 Also, guess who has two thumbs and tried her first Cel-Ray today?!?! That's right! "It me!" Yum!