I’ve never listened to Nick Cave’s music. But I will get around to it.
I recently randomly discovered his blog, The Red Hand Files. Here is something he wrote that describes the creative process very well. Replace references to writing with whatever your chosen method of artmaking is.
In working on putting together books of my photography, I experienced myself the ‘shimmering’ that he speaks of. There can be whole worlds to be discovered in the relationships between random ‘lines of no consequence’, paths are revealed.
“But still you write, because over the years you have learned – midst the nonsensical hieroglyphics you compulsively scrawl in your notebooks, the dumb single lines that stare contemptuously back at you, the song titles that excite you then lose their magic the next time you look at them, the half-baked and derivative ideas, the stolen lines, the Freudian doodles, the desperate over-egged metaphors and lunatic, pencil-snapping, last-ditch attempts at something, my God, anything – you have learned to hold fast and trust. You have learned from hard-won experience that within this pile of words something mysterious is going on, something beyond the reaches of your understanding, something that simply takes its own sweet time and of which you are a tiny part – you are the guy who turns up to hold the pencil – and that suddenly, without warning, you find you have taken one line of no consequence and attached it to another line of no consequence and a kind of reverberation begins between the two lines, a throbbing – or as I like to call it, a ‘shimmering’ – it is something you can actually see! And as the two combined lines pulsate, they begin to collect significance impossibly, and at a rapid rate, to load up with meaning, even to call down a melody, and your heart begins to beat as if for the first time in God knows how long, and you come alive, you become an actual person, a functional, competent human being deserving of their place on this earth, because you know, suddenly, more than anything, that you are on to something and this shimmering convergence of words is setting off on its journey to change the world.”
– Nick Cave, from The Red Hand Files