Author Allegra Hyde on creative work as a space for new possibilities – The Creative Independent

It seems impossible. But then again, aren’t all creative undertakings rooted in processes that remain mysterious to the creator? Artists have long understood that making is an elusive endeavor, one that makes the artist porous to larger forces that seem to arise from outside herself.

The “idea” isn’t a finished product with identifiable boundaries that one moment sprung into being—one of the reasons artists so hate the interview question, “So what was your inspiration for this?” Any idea is actually an unstable, shifting intersection between myself and whatever I was encountering. By extension, thought doesn’t occur somehow ins

There are so many ideas that I never got around to, and often they became someone else’s projects. Other people told stories that were intimately familiar to me—stories that had once been called to my attention, or seemed to come from my own life, or could have been generated by my imagination. Sometimes I haven’t been so nonchalant about losing th