The Mess of Your Creative Process Isn't a Problem—It's the Most Important Part
I have bad news and good news:
The bad news is creating things always feels like a mess, no matter how experienced or successful you get.
The good news is creating things always feels like a mess, no matter how experienced or successful you get.
We like to put our heroes up on a pedestal, but that pedestal is mostly made of crap. They slogged through a ton of bad drafts and even shipped lots of bad work despite their best intentions to avoid doing so, and yet they persisted even still. The thing is, to help them persist, they didn't find a perfect process capable of removing the messy reality of creating things. Instead, they learned to proceed despite the mess. Then do it again and again. They don't have a perfect process. They made imperfect progress.
I want YOU to embrace these truths and to dance down a messy path, despite any friction you feel.
To help with that, I'm thrilled to release Episode 1 of my behind-the-scenes series, taking you inside my imperfect, messy process last year as I developed and piloted my podcast, How Stories Happen. This 4-part series is called (what else?):
How [How Stories Happen] Happened.
You can watch episode 1 right now. If you prefer to watch on YouTube, here’s the link.
Thank you for your support, and please enjoy your mess of making as I enjoy mine. The series offers silly skits and lots of catharsis, but also answers and frameworks from inside my process—not so you can skip the mess, but so you can approach yours with greater confidence and perhaps even greater joy.
Special thanks to my collaborators in this series, most especially Kel Tracey and Arbez Films.
If you're the type who likes to read things more than watch things, that's wonderful, and I support you. I also have a story for you that's not found anywhere in the video...
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Gut churn and creativity
I'm driving home from a New Year's Eve trip to Vermont. I can confidently say it's early-2010s because this story involves playing my favorite podcast in the car for hours without any tiny humans screaming at me from the back.
So yes, it's early-2010s. I'm sure of it. Gotye was singing about somebody that he used to know (some-BODY!). Carly Rae Jepsen kept urging us to use a phone as an actual phone. (I'll text you. Maybe.) And I'm stuck in my head, coming up with all kinds of reasons I'm bad at writing.
I mean, listen, I knew I wasn't. But it sure felt like it. I kept blaming myself for how messy and how difficult my process felt. Every time I tried to write a piece, I encountered all kinds of friction, not just with slapping down a bad draft in its entirety, but also with making changes. I'd double-back, rewrite the intro, update the entire throughline of the piece, try a callback at the end which didn't work, revisit the opener again, grab a quote from someone else, go watch the video where they said it, lose sight of my original ideas and—shoot, I'm late for a meeting. Then, later, thanks to putting space between me and the piece, and thanks to coming back to the draft with clearer eyes and a calmer mind, I would ... think about tossing it all in the garbage.
As my Italian ancestors might say, this felt, how you say, MOLTO BAD.
Speaking of ancestors, both yours and mine can take part of the blame whenever we feel friction and experience negative self-talk in our creative process.
Streaks of white zip past along the Vermont highway. Inside the car, I'm spiraling. Oh good, another year of slogging through what I'm certain is a broken creative process. I decide to play Radiolab to distract myself from myself. That show and its blend of sound, music, and storytelling always inspired me to create better things. Synth tones and whimsical xylophone notes and the absolute best narrator outside of Tony Bourdain fill the car as the wheels leave the pavement, and I'm instantly back to Boston.
Back home, I googled the name of that narrator, Jad Abumrad. I find a video of the Radiolab creator and cohost describing his creative process. He uses the phrase "gut churn."
Wut.
Abumrad explains that this feeling is an ancient response in our bodies that helped our ancestors respond to danger. When faced with the prospect of, say, a tiger in the bushes, our bodies would shut down anything unnecessary in that moment in order to fight or flee—and survive. Digestion was among the things shut down. As a result, our fear manifests in part as this churning of the stomach. "Run for your life!"
Of course, in our work, there is no tiger. We aren't foraging along a cliff or tiptoeing around a snake. Thankfully, if we don't nail our next project, we won't get eaten alive, plummet to our death, or even bitten. But our biological response when we're stressing about our work is the same, and it wakens the worst version of our internal narrators.
My ideas stink. My process stinks. I stink.
I'm bad at this.
I remember watching that video of Jad, convinced he was about to hand me a solution to the friction I felt when drafting something. He'd described the problem, so surely he would—wait, nope, hold on. No solution, you say? Just part of it? Oh, "magic" is the solution?
Wut.
He described making Radiolab as a journey through a forest. You get lost in there. You THINK you have clarity heading into it, but that quickly goes away as you hack through the underbrush. But every so often, as you're hacking away, flecks of dirt getting stuck to your face and clothes, you find a clearing and see a bright arrow pointing in the right direction. And for a moment, you move faster, with greater confidence. Maybe even joy.
But then the bushes get thick again and you need another arrow.
His message wasn't, "Here's how to skip the mess." His message was really, "You should embrace the mess." Because it's inevitable. Because if you don't proceeding confidently through it, you might miss something great and important and transformative—and if you don't proceed at all, you definitely will.
I thought to myself, "Wow, HE feels like that?" Jad Abumrad is a giant, a legend, an OG, a genius. He transformed audio storytelling. He's on the Mount Rushmore, right next to Ira Glass. His show is beloved by millions. A live tour. Merch. Sponsorships. Peabody Awards. Spinout projects. He's sought out for his wisdom on creativity. Surely HE has this all figured out. But here he is saying of his process and his team's, essentially, "No matter how much experience you get, no matter how much success you experience, you're always in a forest and trying to find your way out."
Years go by, and I take his message to heart as best I can. My self-talk improves, but I never really stop believing there's some magical solution to the messiness of my process and the friction I feel when creating. I just assume that Future Jay will have shipped enough stuff and learned from enough people, he'll have it all figured out. He'll have this smooth, beautiful process each time. Let's say he'll get there by, oh I dunno, the year 2025.
But nope.
I remember reading another quote from Abumrad where he continued his forest metaphor. Turns out the most important lesson from this idea was missing from the first video I'd seen. I can't quite remember when or where I heard the next discussion with Jad. Gotye was no longer around to mark the year for me. (I guess now he's just somebody that I used to know.)
The end of the forest metaphor matters most. According to Jad Abumrad, Creative Genius and Certified Storytelling Legend, he routinely exits the forest, looks back and wonders how the heck they could ever do something like that again ... and then he tries to do it again. He voluntarily wanders into a new forest.
Wuuuut.
Writing to you in 2025, I realize now: that's the work. That's ALL of creativity. There's no skipping the slog, no avoiding the mess. The mess itself is the work, and the mess is where we find all the important bits and ideas and breakthroughs and pivots and turns of phrases and inside jokes and personality quirks—it's where we find those bright, floating arrows that we need to move from an idea to a finished thing we adore and others love too.
There is no other way. The mess isn't just part of this work. It *is* the work. But it's in the mess we find our best.
If you feel friction, if you feel messy, that's not a problem with you. That's just you being creative. That's a sign you're pushing yourself outside your comfort zone. To do anything else, to feel anything else, would be repeating something you've done countless times before, meaning you're not actually being creative at all.
When you work out, lifting weights or running or stretching, you necessarily go a little further or try something a little different each time. That's the same in creative work. The discomfort and uncertainty is actually a sign the work is unfolding the right way.
We can't skip the forest. We can't avoid the mess.
But we CAN approach it more confidently and happily. That's that part we can control. Maybe we need some tools to direct the mess. Process and technique are your friends. Maybe you can find some traveling buddies in the forest through community groups or accountability buddies. Maybe you just need to see the mountain peak in the distance, so you land on a clear premise and a driving mission. There are things at our disposal to empower us to proceed through the forest, but we can't bulldoze the terrain in front of us, nor will we find a path at the beginning that lets us sprint to the other side.
I take heart in the fact that this stuff feels hard for everyone, even our heroes. Despite what we might think when we start something, we don't have real clarity until we put stuff in front of us and use our taste to make sense of it. We can't gather up all the answers we think we need to create. We must create to find our answers. Then we do it again.
Crucially, we don't do it again but smoother. We do it again but happier. We stop tiptoeing through the mud and launch ourselves off a boulder and roll around in it. That's what I want for you, too. I want to be hacking away in the forest when I hear you approaching, and when I look over, I see little flecks of dirt on your face and some twigs in your hair, and you look over at me with the biggest goddamn grin I've ever seen.
That feeling doesn't come from avoiding the gut churn. It comes from recognizing it, thanking it for letting you know you're doing the right work, and then you gleefully hack through the forest in search of arrows and the eventual exit.
It's always a mess. For Jad Abumrad. For me. For you.
Always.
But in the mess, you find your best.
A lot has changed since I could drive from Vermont to Boston, lost in my favorite show. But one thing that hasn't changed despite how much work I've shipped (and whatever success I've had): every time I create something, I feel friction. I encounter a mess. I'm slogging through the forest. Being creative means things big and small feel new, or else you're not doing it right. It's always a mess. That never changes. It hasn't changed for me.
But what does feel different is how I approach it. Instead of fearing it, I'm glad to meet it. I approach my mess with a smile and with positive self-talk that, awesome, I'm on the right path and, wow, I'm MAKING STUFF which should be FUN, and heck yeah, I've found myself in a forest once again. I'm happy here.
I know now I can't avoid the mess, nor would I want to skip it. Instead, I can approach my mess with greater confidence and perhaps even greater joy.
I hope you can too.