elrhiarhodan

Day 3 - In your own space, talk about your creative process - from what inspires you to what motivates you to how you manage to break through blocks. Does your process change depending on the type of creating you're doing?

This is a hard on to put into words. The creative process is a lot like chasing the next big wave. You paddle out and wait and wait and wait for the water to crest and if you're lucky, you can ride it all the way back to shore.

I've always been creative, as opposed to being a performer. A maker, rather than a doer. The kid who'd make up stories in her head rather than acting out that latest episode of whatever hit show had captured her classmate's imagination.

These days, my creativity runs along two vectors – fandom and jewelry and I might as well tackle both.

Fandom

For the most part, my fannish creativity centers on writing (there's some artwork but my skills don't match my ideas, so I'm going to set that aside for now).

I'm also a pantser to a very great degree. I don't outline, and if I do make detailed story notes, I have found that that's a good way to kill my desire to actually tell the story. But that's not to say I don't have an idea of what's going to happen along the way. I go into most stories with the idea of what kind of story I want to tell – romance or casefic or crackfic – and a general plot, but I don't know the specifics.

Michelangelo once described the process of carving marble as removing the material to find the statutes buried beneath, and in a way, that describes my own process – although its accretive rather than subtractive. I add words until the story I want to tell is finished. Sometimes those words surprise me. Sometimes they take me down paths I've never expected.

An example…

In Fortune's Just a One Night Stand, I needed a secondary character for Neal to interact with and I was riffing through the various WC bit players. I could have gone with the psycho Avery Philips (from Hard Sell), but ended up using Daniel Pikah (from Home Invasion), which changed the entire story. Daniel, in canon, collected antiques and objet d'art, became a central part of the plot (although not a central character, per se). Had I gone another way, the story would have been completely different.

Beading

Three things drive my process when it comes to this this kind of creativity. Color, material and technique.

Sometimes it's color that drives my creative process. I want to make something in a particular shade of green (and don't get me started on talking about color, because I could rhapsodize about getting color-drunk for days), so I pull out all of the beads in that particular color and sort through them until I find my inspiration. Although I am constantly acquiring new materials, I also generally find I'm able to use what I have on hand. There's a saying amongst beaders – you may have more beads than you can use in a single lifetime, but you'll never have the exact beads you want at the moment you want them. While I've experienced that, I also try to make do with what I've got and not go crazy in the process.

Lately, color has taken a backseat to technique – which drives the choice of material. For many years, I was a "pure stringer" of the old school bent. Stringing beads meant silk cord and knotting. There's a grace and beauty in keeping with tradition. It's the opposite of mass production. I have a good friend and we often will sit and bead on a weekend afternoon. Her process is not like mine – she doesn't actually enjoy the act of making, but the work of design. Consequently, she uses a speedier technique, less precious materials, and gives less attention to the quality of her finishing work (the clasps, how the pattern ends, etc.)

A few years ago, in a fit of boredom, I started picking up different techniques, such as bead weaving – which requires lots of tiny seed beads, endless amounts of thread that won't break, and even more patience than Job. Except that I never really got GOOD at it. Which is annoying, because I hate having a bag full of half-finished projects.

But like writing, like any creative endeavor, I've stuck with it and have gotten much better. Part of the problem is that I'm not interested in doing the "baby" projects – I want to jump in and create the masterpieces that I see in books and magazines. And that leads to frustration and waste – of time and materials.

So I backtracked. I found projects and videos made by excellent teachers and followed instructions from start to finish. I did and re-did until I truly mastered the technique.

The following is a project I documented from start to finish, which combines bead weaving and bead embroidery.

To be honest, I am not thrilled by the color combinations – purple and orange are not my thing, but the center piece (a large Czech glass button, about 37mm in diameter) has such strange colors that no matter what I used, I kept getting pulled back into the whole purple and orange thing.

But technically, I am very pleased how this came out. It required a lot of experimentation with technique and a willingness to undo work that was nearly finished.

Which is very similar to how I write. There's a lot of "seat of my pants" approach here, a desire to create without a clear picture of the end product, and to take risks in the actual act of creation.

This has gone on long enough, hope you haven't been too bored.

Here's a pretty for you…