Breaking Up the S-Curve (Part 2)
Some more thoughts on the creative process
This is the second post in a two-part series. Part 1 can be found here.
A quick refresher: In my first post on this topic, I hypothesized that creative development often follows an S-curve, or “slow-fast-slow” pattern of progress. (Or at least it often feels that way!)
If we accept that this is true, then there are two natural turning points (or “elbows”) along the way to making something: the transition between brainstorming and drafting—which I think of as a momentum-builder; and the transition between drafting and editing—which I think of as a space for fresh eyes.
(Again, my primary lens here is on writing, but I believe these are generalizable lessons and principles for making anything.)
However, the reality of creation is often much more messy and frustrating than this simplified account implies. In this post, I’ll argue for why “breaking up the S-curve” is still a useful framework, and explore some caveats and other considerations.
Why and How to Break Up the S-curve
My assumption is that most people don’t need to be convinced that making stuff takes a bit of sustained effort. Pretty much anyone who’s made things—which is to say everyone—has also at some point had to push through frustration, despair, or procrastination in making said things.
For this reason, I’m going to focus less on the S-curve to start and more on the importance of taking strategic breaks. These arguments hold whether or not you agree with me that the creative process is inherently S-curvey and that it makes sense to break at the elbows.
From my perspective, there are two primary reasons to break up the creative process.
The first reason is motivation. Any process that takes multiple days—let alone weeks, months, or years—is easier to tackle if broken into smaller steps. The writer Ann Lamott refers to this idea as a “one-inch picture frame” and describes:
All I have to do is to write down as much as I can see through a one-inch picture frame. This is all I have to bite off for the time being. All I am going to do right now, for example, is write that one paragraph that sets the story. (16-17)
Explicitly dividing up a creation into exploration, production, and editing makes it seem more manageable that trying to think about the whole process at once.
It’s not just that breaks help the process seem less overwhelming, though; taking breaks is also an acknowledgment of the reality that a lot of the time, making something feels a lot less like a neat S-curve and more like this:
If we expect progress to come in fits and starts, we’re at least better prepared those setbacks and returns to the drawing board when they happen. And deliberately slowing down the process with breaks makes it less likely that we’ll get out over our skis in the first place; it helps us see the big picture more clearly.
In a sense, breaking up the S-curve helps address the explore-exploit tradeoff: How do we know when to keep playing around/throwing shit at the wall vs. when to just execute on the plan we already have? This can be an agonizing dilemma, and breaks offer a comforting delineation: In the first part of the curve (“Phase 1”), we give ourselves permission to not be very efficient, knowing that the brainstorming process is likely to dredge up many useful ideas; in Phase 2, we’re just trying to get the project across the finish line. (Phase 3 is, perhaps, a return to exploration on a smaller scale? In the sense that you’re reconsidering choices and trying different versions out. Not sure about this!)
Of course, there will always be some degree of exploration and exploitation in every phase; personally I just find it difficult to hold these two goals in the front of my mind simultaneously. It’s easier to get to your destination if you’re not building and flying the plane (i.e., figuring out a project and actually making it) at the same time.
The second reason to break up the S-curve is efficiency. If you try to tinker with something immediately after you finish the first draft, you often don’t have enough distance from the project to assess it critically. By contrast, if you step away for a bit, you’ll usually be a faster editor of your own work.
Granted, stepping away isn’t actually more efficient if your break is spent doing nothing. If for example, you can write 1 page per day without any days off and 3 pages per day with rest in between—but your rests are all a week long—then it’s ultimately faster to just push through without stopping (albeit less efficient in terms of peak productivity).
How then, should creative breaks be used? While it’s important to recharge, I believe the best use of time away from one project is working on another one (perhaps after a true vacation!). If you’re juggling multiple projects, sure it might feel good to just knock them out one at a time—but if you bounce around (e.g., brainstorming for the first one, then editing the second one, then actually writing the first one, then brainstorming for a third one, etc.), this ensures you’re always striking while the iron is hot: that is, working on the project where your effort will translate into the greatest improvement.
Consider, too, that different creative work has different timelines for completion. When we are in the middle of a long project whose fate is uncertain, mixing in shorter ones can help us see forest from the trees—help remind us what it feels like to actually finish something, and how far we’ve come since we started. (A personal example of this: I jotted down my initial ideas for this post in January 2022 and wrote the first real draft of it in February. You can find those drafts linked at the end.1)
Here’s a visual representation of staggering projects, with dotted lines used to indicate times when something is not being actively worked on:
If this graph looks crazy, or impossible to keep track of, keep in mind that the brainstorming phase is often not very intentional; for me, it’s usually just a word salad of bullets, links, and sentence fragments. So you’re only really actively working on one or two projects at a time. (That said, yes…I do have a spreadsheet :D.)
Again, there are also psychological benefits to cycling between multiple projects: It puts less pressure on any single endeavor. If one creative pursuit isn’t going well, that is, you can always work on something else and return only when you’ve built up a little momentum.
Similarly, “creative diversification” enables you to respond to feedback in a calmer, more balanced manner: If you’ve only got one project going, it can be crushing to learn that it needs a lot of work; if you have others to turn to, the blow is softened by the knowledge that those other projects, at least, might be closer to completion. You’ll also be less tempted to nag your editor when they’re not the sole holdup stymieing your creative progress.2
Caveats and Other Considerations
The first and most important caveat to all this is the one I highlighted in Part 1: This S-curve framework is simply a guideline or approach for thinking about creativity—one that works well for me, but obviously may not work for everyone. Take from it what you will.
There are some projects, for example, that don’t look very S-curvey or don’t really need to be broken up. Any process that can be completed in one sitting can probably happen organically—as evidenced by the Paul McCartney clip I referenced last time. (There are still, I’d argue, micropauses when he shifts between phases.)
But most of us are not Paul McCartney, and most great acts of creation occur over an extended time frame. With enough talent and a guitar, sure, you can bang out a 3-minute song by intuition—but good luck composing a whole opera that way. “Breaking Up the S-curve,” in other words, is not for the projects that are fun and effortless; it’s for the ones that are hard.
Therefore, this framework is most applicable to big, multistep projects that occur over an extended period of time (“extended” just meaning multiple sittings—anything from several days to several years). These are the processes where we need strategies to make the work manageable and sustainable—a way to channel the right energies at the right time. Almost by definition, these larger projects can only be accomplished by returning to them over and over again, meditating on them day after day, getting into flow: the kind of mental state that is near impossible to sustain over a long period of time if you don’t set yourself up right.
(In rare cases does it happen? Sure. In her foreword to Song of Solomon, for example, Toni Morrison writes: “[Before this book] I regarded the ‘mystery’ of creativity as a shield erected by artists to avoid articulating, analyzing, or even knowing the details of their creative process”; writing Song of Solomon, she says, “destroyed all that.”)
We might also ask whether it’s possible to “force it”—that is to muscle out a big project without taking any real breaks, even if we’re not very happy or efficient when we do it. To this I would say it’s certainly possible; it just sucks. It’s a great way to destroy the innate joy of the creative process and accelerate burnout. Personally, I’d rather take a little longer on something and have it be more successful and more pleasant to make. (And again, you’re not even sacrificing efficiency if you use your breaks to work on other projects!)
Another—not issue exactly—but reality of making stuff is that sometimes the scale of projects simply changes. You think you’ve reached the end of Phase 2 (the “second elbow”), but then realize that everything you just did was actually all Phase 1—the initial seed of a much larger work: A short story becomes a novel. A new card trick becomes the basis of a whole whole magic routine. A website you made in college to rate how hot girls are becomes a multibillion-dollar corporation that is slowly eroding trust in democracy.
And some projects are so massive from the start that they can only be completed as a series of independent subprojects with independent creators. I’m thinking here of everything from TV shows to start-ups to urban planning. Of course, it’s naive to think that a single individual could juggle between multiple megaprojects of this size at the same time—or that the projects’ overall development could be reduced to anything a smooth, continuous curve. In these cases, perhaps the S-curve is perhaps most useful as a framework in the back of one’s mind for each of the various subprojects.
(To create a movie, for example, one needs a screenplay—which surely goes through its own phases of messy brainstorming, actual composition, and editing. But this whole writing process is arguably just the first leg of/precursor to a much larger movie S-curve that includes casting, filming, editing, etc.: an S-curve within an S-curve, perhaps. Sort of a fractal thing?)
So we could further specify the S-curve by saying that it best describes projects undertaken in one medium and by one person (or in a close collaboration). Any translation that alters the scope and nature of the work—the page to the screen, two dimensions to three dimensions, etc.—serves as a kind of reset/rescaling.
Finally, I think it’s fair to ask whether “breaking up the S-curve” imposes an unnecessary—even counterproductive—rigidity to what should be spontaneous, intuitive processes.
Admittedly, this is something I worry about from time to time. But, as many people have pointed out, some structure can often help spur generativity—especially if you don’t get too religious about it. Constraint breeds creativity. When you’re actually in production mode (“Phase 2”), I agree there shouldn’t be anything holding you back; the rails are just in place to help move the train forward.
And of course rigidity also depends a lot on what exactly one is making. Some products really are best if made totally organically. Per Elements of Style:
In some cases, the best design is no design, as with a love letter, which is simply an outpouring, or with a casual essay, which is a ramble. But in most cases, planning must be a deliberate prelude to writing. The first principle of composition, therefore, is to foresee or determine the shape of what is to come and pursue that shape. (Strunk & White, 15)
This is a certain perspective (a traditional one), which elides the significant challenge of how to “foresee or determine the shape” of the project before you’ve started it. But you can see the necessity of planning when dealing with work of sufficient scope and complexity: Personally, I don’t mind if the people trying to develop new vaccines or clean energy solutions want to be a bit more rigid in their creative process than, say, Jackson Pollock.
(Also, yes—there’s a distinction to be drawn here between rigidity in how one structures one’s time working on the project, and the structure of the thing itself; I’m talking more about the former while Strunk & White seems to be referring to the latter. Still, I think the constraint-breeds-creativity point stands.)
I’ll conclude this discussion with a final hedge—really just a particularly lovely illustration of one I’ve already offered—in the form of an image from George Saunders’ A Swim in the Pond in the Rain:
In Buddhism, it’s said that a teaching is like a “finger pointing at the moon.” The moon (enlightenment) is the essential thing and the pointing finger is trying to direct us to it, but it’s important not to confuse finger with moon. For those of us who are writers, who dream of someday writing a story like the ones we’ve loved, into which we’ve disappeared pleasurably, and that briefly seemed more real to us than so-called reality, the goal (“the moon”) is to attain the state of mind from which we might write such a story…The criterion by which we accept or reject a given finger: “Is it helping?”
I offer [this book] in that spirit. (8)
I offer “Breaking Up the S-curve” in that same spirit.
I would just humbly add that the flight to the moon can be a bumpy ride, and it takes a lot of fucking rocket fuel.
TL;DR
Envisioning the creative process as an S-curve, building in breaks between phases helps with motivation and efficiency—especially if you cycle between multiple projects.
The S-curve is most applicable to big, multistep projects in a single medium and completed by a single individual (or by close collaborators). It is an approach, not a mandate.
Given everything I’ve been talking about, I thought it would be fun to give a peek into each stage of the process for this post, with drafts linked below:
0-3 hours—Phase 1, 1/6/22 (This phase also involved a lot of sketching and jotting down ideas in a notebook, plus lots of mulling them over in my head.)
3-14 hours—Phase 2, 2/14 - 2/16
14 hours - 28.75 hours—Phase 3, 2/25-2/26, 5/2-5/6, and 5/11 (The version you are currently reading—big thanks to Charlie for edits!)
Interesting to note that Phase 2 and Phase 3 took way longer than Phase 1. In retrospect, I do wish I’d spent a little more time brainstorming and planning before diving into actual writing.
That said—to my point that the S-curve is more about perception than reality—I remember Phase 1 as being just as vivid and involved as Phase 2 or Phase 3, if not more so. (That is, they all feel equally weighty.) I think this is because Phase 1 involved the biggest/fastest conceptual leaps, even if they were not yet expressed in language.
As neat as it would be, I should note that there’s not necessarily a one-to-one correlation between the three phases of the S-curve and the Expander-Editor-Affirmer trichotomy I laid out in an earlier post. An Expander certainly can be useful early in the creative process—but personally, I tend to rely on all three modes of feedback only after I have a solid draft of something.