Creativity begins with an idea that burns so hot within that the artist has to find a means (or medium) to express it and share it with others.

However, the idea is only the beginning of the creative process.

Creativity begins when you let your imagination take control of your idea. How many authors have meticulously outlined a novel, only to have the story take an entirely different course when they begin writing the second chapter?

When I begin to think about the creativity of others, I often wonder where it began.

• What was in the mind of Beethoven when he wrote his Adagio? Did he already have the first and last notes inside his head… and all the others in between? Isn’t it more realistic to believe that perhaps, in the moonlight, those first few bars that are repeated throughout the piece, echoed inside his head until he had to express them? Then, did he decide, “I’ll write a ‘Moonlight Sonata’, or did the music blossom and grow under his skill and care, until it became the well-known work that is still so beautiful today?
• Did William Shakespeare begin writing Hamlet with word one on the first page or was there an impasse in his life when he wondered, “To be or not to be? That is the question,” and from there, let the idea take shape and the story grow around it?
• Did Michelangelo’s chisel ever slip? Did he ever take too deep a chip out of the Pieta or carve an extra curl that wasn’t planned when he first laid eyes on the block of marble that would become his David?

Artists express their ideas in hundreds of different ways using mediums that vary in complexity from canvas to cake-tops. My medium of choice is a web page. Frequently I hear others talk about being “held back” by the medium because one browser or another or one resolution or another doesn’t present their page as they intended it to look. True creativity begins when I put my text in the center of a page like this one and then let the page take shape around it.

Often though, there may be a gouge in my “marble”. This, to me, is when the artistic process becomes most exciting- when I must find a way to work around a limitation and still finish with a satisfactory presentation of my idea.

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