When I told a good friend of mine I wrote a blog every day while I worked a full-time job, they responded, “I don’t know how you find the energy.”
I actually generate energy from writing the blog every day, I tried to explain. If I didn’t write the blog every day, I would have less creative energy.
Melanie Deziel coined a new term for this mode of approaching creative work, as well as its opposite:
Generative: Generate energy by making work as often as possible. Think of Turner’s 550 oil paintings, 2,000 watercolors, and 30,000 works on paper. Yayoi Kusama has created nearly 9,000 pieces. Pablo Picasso created 10,000+ original paintings, and Shantell Martin has completed well over 5,000 paintings. That’s me.
Explosive: Accumulate energy and save it all for one burst of work. James Cameron’s nine feature films. Emily Brontë’s one novel and handful of published poems (though she wrote hundreds of unpublished drafts!). Frank Ocean’s two studio albums and two mixtapes. That’s Melanie.
While my inclinations lean towards generative mode more, I definitely also identify with parts of explosive mode. For example, if you told me to write a book in 30 days, I would feel very drained. I’d prefer to accumulate energy for that over a long time—at least months, maybe years.
But if you told me to write a blog post in 30 days, I would also feel very drained. I would end up getting too precious about it, and probably run into a block. I would prefer to write one that day—or maybe a week at most—and then publish it.
That’s exactly what I’m doing now. I’m working on a book project every day, which needs me to channel an explosive mode. I also write a blog post every day, which generates the energy I need to work on the longer project.
Each project requires a different mode. While I do love writing a book, I would not have the energy to get through the process without also writing a blog post every day.
2 responses to “Creative energy: Generative mode vs. explosive mode”
Thanks for the shoutout. Glad the two types resonated with you!
Thanks for writing the original post, Melanie! It really resonated with me.