Creating and Joy, an essay

When I sit down to create, I find myself not wanting to continue something in progress, and instead to launch into something new.

Interrogating myself on this, I reply that the rate of completion is too slow, not because I don’t have things I want to make, but because the mechanics and tooling of the act of creating are insufficient for how fast I want to make.

There is a self-discipline that comes from trying to solving this: the desire to reduce the number and amount of activity necessary to achieve the completed work.

I found myself tempted to exclude what I at first deemed nonessential activities: practive, working to earn money to buy better equipment, and once the thing created, not learning how to package and share it effectively. Yes, that includes doing all the things necessary to sell the created things. O to be able to dedicate myself to only making!

Witness the partially-written notebooks on my shelves, and scraps of poetry and unfinished stories!

You’ve heard it said that to be a successful writer, one should: “finish writing every piece.” I’ve heard that too. I’ve heard it in my own car, as someone said it directly to me. (I have the best conversations in my car.)

I contend that as an artist, one must not just create the thing, but that the act of creation is not complete until one has put it into the hands of its audience. I say hands because it’s not enough to give them a taste. They must have something they can take with them, to integrate into their own life.

This is why being an artist is a lifelong vocation, because there are a lot of things to learn and do to achieve this, and one is never finished. I feel at the end of the life of an artist, one regrets only the art one has not been able to fully deliver to its audience, and that one is immensely gratified by the art one had fully delivered to people, in such a way that they have used it as a building block in their own lives.

This, however, is not why I create. I create because it makes me happy. If something does not spark joy, then I do not want to do it. I do, however, draw a connecting line between the difficulty of doing all the things with the joy I feel when the audience takes what I have made.

Going back to the first sentence in this writing: “When I set down to create, I find myself not wanting to continue something in progress, and instead to launch into something new.” I now temper this immediate personal desire for joy with the anticipation of the joy I can provide for others. As I grow in my artistic practice, this joy-in-others becomes the overwhelmingly more important motivation.

In this, the full act of creating changes our motivation from satifying the self to the joy of providing for others.

Written June 24, 2025, and first posted on my Substack. I hope you like it!