Thoughts About Creative Gestation.
Reflections on the lengthy process between idea and tangible output.
Dear all,
It’s been a long, restless summer. Unlike the rest of my compatriots, I did not spend August parlaying on a white beach, soaking my feet in the crystal clear waters of the Mediterranean Sea. Instead, I spent the hottest months of the year working on mentally straining commissions to fund the digital grand opening of Nonsense and gathering material for our editorial segment. It was fun and exciting, but tiring as well. I didn’t really get to have a break and that may be why there are days when I feel like I should just give up. Additionally, in August I turned 32 which isn’t as important as 30 or 33 but it felt like a big milestone nonetheless.
On the very day of my birthday, instead of kicking my feet up and letting others pamper me, I sat at a desk with my software engineering partner and I released RISERVE, a global index of football-inspired creative talent.
This directory had been on the backburner of my mind for quite some time before I was finally able to make it happen. For months, I had been interrogating myself about what it could look like. I have a big network in the sports category and I wanted to use my access to help others while shaking the field up a bit. Initially, I thought I could maybe compile the list myself. Very quickly I realized that wasn’t feasible. My contact book is too hefty and my memory too weak to draft an exhaustive list worth putting out. Therefore I decided I had to start modestly and crowdsource the entries by simply sharing a Google Sheet link on my social media and asking people to fill it in with their information. In under two weeks, it got to more than 250 items. Wow! People were really eager to get off the bench!
The thought of turning this humble file into a nicely designed website started buzzing in my ears. What if it could be as beautiful as useful? What if it could turn into a real networking platform? A job board? A space for community? My mind began wandering at 200km/h.
I sat down and slowed my roll, reminding myself to take one step at a time—I can’t jumpstart a Ferrari on the fourth gear. I would burn the engine.
I pulled out my notes and went back to the brainstorming session from when the idea first popped up, months before.
Committed to practicing what I preach, I scrolled down the list and enlisted Pilar O’Connor, a phenomenal art director (who, by the way, also has a very cute brand called Sucka Free Certified–check it out) with a background in sports to help me design the logo and interface. Then, I turned inward for the actual development of the website, which was carried out by my team at Nonsense Projects.
The first version is quite simple, however, the plan is to continuously improve it until it becomes the go-to platform for both creatives and companies (brands, clubs, institutions) to find gigs and new talent. So far, it’s helped many fellow artists-marketers-writers get jobs and that’s all that matters to me at this point because that’s the soul of the project.
In total, RISERVE took about one year to manifest. It was a labor of love and passion and it really needed to brew and simmer to come to life the way I intended it to.
Aside from this newsletter, it’s the first project I managed from inception to delivery without incurring any major hurdles (besides continuously reminding myself to get out of my own way.) It felt good.
Moreover, it taught me a valuable lesson: Good things truly come to those who wait—not in a prophetic way, but rather in a philosophical manner.
Acting on an idea after properly evaluating it and strategizing the outcome provides a much deeper feeling of satisfaction, as you have had the time to really savor the meaning behind it.
After all, the Sistine Chapel took 4 years to finish and it is one of the most acclaimed masterpieces to exist. Every day, even after hundreds of years, the necks of hundreds of thousands of tourists are jeopardized by its beauty.
This concept could be applied to literally any project, especially the ones I am currently laying the groundwork for.
They have been in the making for YEARS—since before they were even an idea floating in my brain. Everything I have done can be looked at as a drop in the ocean of knowledge that led me to seek out endeavors of my own. Experience after experience, I gathered insights and skills, absorbed wisdom from others, and extracted what I deemed most necessary for the future of my practice. Not too long ago, I learned that the lengthy process behind making something happen can be identified as ‘creative gestation’.
GESTATION:
the process or period of developing inside the womb between conception and birth.
the development of something over a period of time.
Personal projects, especially in the creative field, are often described with terms that come from procreation.
It isn’t rare to hear someone say: “This piece of work is my baby”, “I am pregnant with ideas”, “It’s a fertile mind” and so on.
Artists (using this as a wide-range term) are as protective of their ideas as they are of their children. But then, why are we expected (and in turn, expect ourselves) to churn out work as fast as McDonald’s? Where does the motherly love for good, well-thought craft go?
These ruminations started to beget after participating in a round table conversation about surviving the patriarchy as a woman in the creative field, specifically in the context of today’s world. It was a breezy night at the beginning of May and the talk panel was part of the programming Ilaria Bianchi curated for the launch of Temperanza, her latest personal endeavor, at Riviera in Milan.
Initially, I was quite reluctant to agree as I am not a fan of discussing contentious topics in public and/or under a specific time constraint (we only had 1h and five different guests were on the stand). Intricate subjects, especially in this era, deserve to be unraveled without the risk of having to cut off a speaker half sentence—God forbid somebody in the audience captures the wrong part of the speech and posts it to their TikTok. Cancel culture is one decontextualized snippet away. Still, something told me to welcome the invitation and propose my work in women’s football as my contribution to the cause.
To my pleasant surprise, the dialogue—which sounded more intimidating on paper than in real life—steered away from pure feminist discourse and concentrated on the subject of creativity and creative execution as a female human in a commodified industry.
The central argument focused on capitalism rather than gender rhetoric and, as a result, I was able to walk away from the event with a few interesting takeaways (and a delicious limited edition bottle of rosé picked by Ilaria herself) on creative exploitation without coming off as too much of a contrarian.
During the informal chat, after each one of the participants was invited to a monologue about their “art” by the moderator, the session began shifting toward a more specific train of thought related to the items that were lying all around us. Pointing to the laden table at the center of the room, Ilaria explained how she first came up with the concept for her illustrated pottery and artworks and the two-year-long interlude between idea and execution. She called it creative gestation—or, as mentioned above, the period required to transform a creative idea into a tangible product.
Creative gestation is an important “something” that I find myself returning to whenever a new idea lights up in my brain. I know what the end result should look like, I know what steps I should be taking but, often, the journey to delivery ends up being rockier than I expected. Just like Michelangelo’s most famous painting, I suppose that’s why it took six centuries to complete Milan’s Duomo and the Sagrada Familia is yet to be finished.
Nonetheless, these monuments are so stunning and majestic that nobody ever criticizes the amount of time it took to complete them. Great things take time and sometimes we don’t even have the tools necessary to plant that first seed, so how can we expect it to sprout the next day?
The fastness with which we are expected to manufacture our ideas into commodities is unsustainable. Very few things we regard as valuable, impactful, and life-changing came out of the oven in perfect shape in seconds. Not even something as simple as pizza. Delicious, digestible pizza is made overnight—the dough needs to rest and rise, and then after 24 hours of fermentation, it’s ready to be baked. The baking, in this instance, requires only a few minutes, however, the oven has to be fired up and heated for quite a while. If the temperature isn’t right—hell-grade hot—the dough won’t react well.
Ultimately, extracting a creative idea from our mind and assembling it into a physical object, experience, or business from scratch looks more like an aimless journey than a straightforward path. Too many factors need to be taken into consideration: Where are we in our personal and professional lives, our knowledge about what we are trying to do, the funds we have to make it happen, and our commitment to the end result. What is our plan once the project is ready to be launched?
I feel, at least from personal experience, that the anxiety and sense of inadequacy that comes with trying to create “stuff” would be less crippling if I began looking at whatever I am trying to make through the eyes of pregnancy. I wouldn’t rush to push a baby out, would I? Matter of fact, that’s something doctors advise against.
For a pregnancy to be successful, you need to pay attention, be careful, and accept whatever sensation or symptom is part of the journey. Multiple check-ins are needed: Tests, trials, and even prenatal exercises are favored. There’s no one-size-fits-all path to delivering a baby. It’s your own personal trip. The same goes for ideas.
After being conceived, they need to marinate in our heads, loom, and get taken care of before one day, all of a sudden, they are ready to pop and come out to the world. When creating in today’s day and age, we often don’t have the luxury of free time. Time away from concerns, bills, people, and family commitments.
Sometimes, the idea needs to ripen before it can reach the manufacturing stage. Multiple factors can hinder the process and falter the progress, but we should not look at these pauses as discouragement. We should acknowledge these hiatuses as necessary pitstops that can help us fuel us further.
With that said, as you may have noticed, I have had to temporarily press pause on “My Father’s Project”, my attempt to write a book in public which doubled as the paid segment of this newsletter.
It turns out that writing my father’s biography requires more time and research than expected and I currently do not have the bandwidth to make it happen as fast as I wanted to.
As this is probably the only book I will ever author, I am shooting for the stars in terms of excellence—obviously, I also want to honor him.
While I initially self-flagellated, I have come to terms with the fact that this is a long-term endeavor and it doesn’t really matter if it takes two, five, or ten years as long as I keep working at it amid everything else.
For those who paid to read, I appreciate you believing in me. For those who are here regardless of what and when I write, thank you for continuously showing up even if the flow of my weekly letters has been disrupted. It will continue being at random for the foreseeable future, but I promise, I will do my best to always send some useful messages.
See you next time!
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Loved this soooo much !!! I always felt bad that my project took very long. But this was affirming!
Now it’s my turn to say thank you for your support with my project. It’s such an honor to see myself on that list, thank you :)
I appreciate you taking the time to write and share this new post, I was craving some of your writing. I agree with your idea of good things taking time and I’d never thought of comparing it to a pregnancy, it’s a good simile. You’ve brought out two new projects this year while carrying on with your freelance work, that’s pretty impressive if you ask me. Writing a book is a whole other full time job and it’s understandable that you can’t focus your brain entirely on that at the minute, but the reflection you shared, in my opinion, is a great way of facing it: Taking your time, doing it with love and enjoying the process.