Knowing what you like is not the same as knowing your creative point of view.
You can appreciate something without wanting it to inform what you create. What makes that distinction difficult is recognizing it while you are still developing your own creative point of view. We’re often taught creativity through other people’s processes, but what they are teaching us is their retrospective understanding of that process.
Their experience can give you useful insight into how they create, but it cannot give you the discernment they developed while arriving there. Developing your own creative point of view requires learning to recognize what you are responding to so you can understand what belongs within your own creative vision.
What You Like is Not Necessarily What You Want to Express
Taste gives you somewhere to begin. You encounter something and recognize that you like it. Your response may be instinctual before you can explain what produced it. The mistake is assuming that attraction shows you what you should express.
Developing a creative point of view requires understanding what within your response is worth retaining. Instead of asking, “Do I like this?” you begin asking, “What am I responding to?” That question takes you beneath the creative expression and toward the relationship you are recognizing within it.
Creative Formation Helps You Understand What You Recognize
Recognizing intuitive fit within your imagination gives you a reason to continue considering the possibility. As you continue developing what you are imagining, relationships within the possibility begin to form more clearly. That creative formation allows you to better understand what you initially recognized.
You begin recognizing which relationships within the possibility matter, including what you want to retain, reconsider, or express differently. Creative formation allows you to develop your understanding of what you are recognizing before deciding what it should become.
Experience Reveals More About Your Preferences
You cannot learn everything about your creative point of view by only observing what you like. Sometimes you have to experience something for yourself before you can truly understand your preference.
Food is a simple example.
You may assume you dislike a flavor because it is unfamiliar, only to try it and discover that your palate extends beyond what you already know. The experience gives you information that preference alone could not and helps you dimensionalize what that preference means within your developing creative point of view.
Discernment Develops from Dimensionalizing Your Experiences
Experience creates feedback, but feedback does not automatically tell you what to do next. It gives you something to recognize about what works and what does not. You try something, experience the result, recognize a mismatch, and determine what produced it. The next time you encounter something similar, you are no longer evaluating it from the same position.
You have another reference point.
That is why someone can give you the right answer years before you are able to recognize why it is right for you. Over time, those reference points allow you to make increasingly precise distinctions between what interests you and what you want to retain.
Understanding Your Preferences Gives You Criteria for What Belongs
The more you recognize and understand your responses through feedback, the more you begin recognizing what you consistently retain, where you want consistency, and where you prefer experimentation. Those patterns begin giving you criteria for what belongs to your creative point of view.
Think again about trying an unfamiliar food.
As you experience more flavors, you begin recognizing not only what you like, but the qualities that consistently appeal to you. You have developed a criterion that did not exist before that experience. You took something unfamiliar, experienced it for yourself, and developed a more precise understanding of your own preferences.
Your Creative Point of View Gives You a Position
Taste alone does not accomplish this.
You become better able to recognize what belongs without assuming that everything you appreciate, or everything that is considered good, needs to influence what you create. Your creative point of view becomes the position from which you make intentional creative choices.
Your Creative Point of View Can Expand Beyond What You Know
Your creative point of view also changes how you engage with what exists outside what you already know. Food can learn from fashion, and something from one category can influence how you think about another.
The value does not come from importing something unrelated simply because it is different. You learn to recognize what within that reference has meaning for the context you are considering.
That allows exposure outside your category to expand what you can imagine without requiring every reference to become something you use.
Your Creative Point of View Gives Your Imagination a Place Within Your Creative Vision
Developing your creative point of view does not mean your preferences stop changing. New experiences will continue providing feedback as your knowledge expands and what you want to create can change.
The difference is that you are no longer relying entirely on external references to tell you what good should look like. You have developed enough discernment to recognize what belongs within what you are forming. That gives your imagination a developed position from which to consider future possibilities without determining where those possibilities have to end.
Your creative point of view can begin informing your larger creative vision, allowing you to recognize what belongs within what you intend to create. It also changes how you use someone else’s creative process. Instead of allowing their process to determine what you create, it can become a reference point that expands what you are capable of imagining.
—by THE BUILD BRIEF