The Power of Templates in Creative Life
An Unexpected Outcome of a Chaotic Process
"I feel there are so many things inside me to write about. Why don’t I, then? What is stopping me? And yet there’s still that impulse to write. Pure impulse — even without a topic to write about. As if I had the canvas, the brushes, and the colours — but lacked the liberating cry or the silence you need if you are to say certain things."
— Clarice Lispector
A Surprising Breakthrough
Dear friends,
I had a breakthrough this week. It concerns the most unsexy of things: templates—those everyday structures we create to simplify life. They’re not glamorous, but they help us carve out space for what matters.
Modern life asks us to be all things to all people at all times. Many of us juggle roles, jobs, creative aspirations, little dreams in unspoken corners, anxiety over some nameless thing that only ever rears its head in the middle of the night, or an albatross of unspoken potential that, as we grow older, becomes heavier.
Yes, there’s often something we want to do but never quite get to.
This year, I’ve dedicated myself to confronting this. Recording my new album has been its laboratory.
Strangely, out of a chaotic creative process, I have stumbled upon an unexpected outcome.
If the songs were the goal, then perhaps even more significant has been a parallel breakthrough: how we safeguard what is most important to us—and actually find a rhythm in our lives where its beat is at the centre.
This week’s newsletter is about how I unexpectedly discovered a template that I believe will make my musical life more robust in the face of modern busyness—and why it’s relevant to you.
The Cost of Creativity
Earlier this year, I wrote with honesty in this newsletter that I was struggling in my creative life.
Specifically with music.
It was only much later that I realised I was struggling with a universal problem:
Our creative endeavours ask for huge chunks of time without a guarantee of any reward or kickback.
As we get older, we use our time more expediently.
We want time to deliver results.
Investment in, return out.
Whether it's due to societal structures, escalating responsibilities, or simply ageing—we begin to focus more on what we should be doing rather than what we want to do.
The problem with this is that it starts to diminish our creative muscle.
Yup, it’s hard to take, but the less we do something, the less it develops.
Facing Demons
And so we crack on with our lives, throwing ourselves into all the things we should be doing, and then the icy night terror smacks us.
How the hell did I let something I love so much wane so?
And we get onto social media and we’re confronted by the ghouls of success - universally yapping at us nowadays.
All those human manifestations of what we might have been.
We feel that our time is done, and wonder at how subtly and imperceptibly we allowed our fire to fade.
We come to believe that where we are now is where we must always be, as if it’s too late to ever pick up the thread.
And so begins the diminishing of our dreams and our potential.
That aspect of us that we know has something to offer—something other than what we are giving today.
It is in this space that something in us begins to die.
We either confront it directly and make peace with it—a legitimate choice in its own way, and sometimes a noble one.
Greater responsibilities ask for bigger sacrifices.
On the other hand though, too many of us live in a grey zone, in this twilight space of something diminishing.
I felt it, darkly, at the beginning of this year.
And I discovered that being neither here nor there is dangerous for the soul.
Naming the Beast
I started to write about it in this newsletter.
I chose to do so because the only way I felt I could tackle it was to name the beast.
It was doing me no good to ignore the transmutation of my spirit into something I did not want it to be.
And so, you go to the precipice.
There, you either fall over it into the nameless ocean of resignation.
Or you walk back.
I was confronted by a couple of people I know about this darkening aspect of my newsletter.
"You seem unhappy, Jim…. I’m worried about you."
"No," I thought—this is not unhappiness.
The unhappiness was where I was before.
Before I started wrestling the void and its abstract demons.
Embracing the Inner Dialogue
The experience of confronting these aspects of ourselves is not, in itself, a happy one.
But I did wonder about the inquisition.
Happiness to me cannot exist in ignoring my inner life.
I’d rather be in conversation with those demon, no matter how hard their questions — than repress them into namelessness.
Maybe I’m not interested in happiness.
But that’s not right either.
Happiness exists on the other side of the exchange with the demon.
“The best way out is always through.”
— Robert Frost, A Servant to Servants
Here is the paradox:
Happiness is a byproduct of our conversation with our inner life.
Our outer life only ever expresses our inner life.
And at times in our journey, you have to face what our inner life is saying, especially when it's stuff you don’t want to hear.
"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate."
— Carl Gustav Jung
The Curious Journey To Something Joyful
I make no qualms about it. I struggled hard at the beginning of the year.
Maybe that’s just the nature of starting new projects — hard projects.
I went down to Mahalla daily after work: empty, vast, freezing.
No internet.
No distraction.
Just the void echoing back, as is its habit.
Funny, how when starting new things, our first confrontation is not with what is — but what is not.
It felt lonely, isolating but somehow exhilarating, too.
I felt alive again.
The place I did not want to be was exactly the place I had to be.
The quote at the top of the page alludes to this:
"I feel there are so many things inside me to write about. Why don’t I, then? What is stopping me?"
The reason so many of us avoid that nameless things we want to do or create, is that we know there is something we must face.
"Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom."
— Viktor E. Frankl
Viktor Frankl wrote of a space which exists between the stimulus and the response. And within this space is the opportunity of choice. It is how we choose to respond that ultimately makes us who we are.
In creative life, our resistance is often because we feel a sense of dread about what we will encounter in this space.
It can be fear about our own lack of talent.
It can be the knowledge that there are things in our past that will ask us to confront.
It can be that we know that our creative muscle is undernourished and that it’s just going to take really hard work - time that we don’t have - to get it up and running again.
We do, however, have a choice.
And sometimes the hardest choice we ever make is the decision that we will return to what matters most to us, irrespective of how difficult we find it.
I would like to say that this choice is always worth making.
It is not always comfortable, but it is the very space where our next incarnation as human beings exists.
And when modern life has lost its centres of meaning, it then becomes our own challenge to build our own.
Stepping out of this universal cycle of alienation, distraction and dissociation with our own potential is the hardest and most important choice any of us ever make.
For me personally, my challenge creatively was that I felt deeply that I still had music in me. I was just really struggling with the knowledge that I would have to sacrifice expedient time — time doing the things which pragmatically build our lives — in order to get to it.
"Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you."
— Jean-Paul Sartre
The Sacrifice of Expedient Time
Later in the year, after I had made my choice, songwriting became fun for me again.
But it required first this time of confrontation.
When you have not exercised a creative muscle for some time, it’s going to ache like hell when you start using it again.
You might injure it.
You'll need to care for it.
And you'll have to use it before it's fully healed.
You have to keep showing up.
You have to do the reps.
And like going to the gym at the start of the year, it rewards you with no sign of improvement for weeks!
Perhaps this is at the heart of any spiritual adventure.
That we have to reconcile with investing in the invisible.
That is where you develop your faith — and it is where courage forms too.
This I choose to do, irrespective of where it leads, irrespective of results, irrespective of status, money, social mobility, or imaginable reward.
That’s where I started finding happiness.
In the basement of a dream.
Who you can become forms in sacred, unseen places.
But hallowed places are not always beautiful, peaceful, or easy.
It’s often exactly the place you don’t want to go.
That is what I started discovering: that the place I did not want to be was itself becoming my hallowed place.
This, this here, this place that feels like the ending of all roads is the beginning of all roads.
The way out is in.
I revisit all this because there’s no way to pass on my little breakthrough this week without contextualising it.
For me, the breakthroughs are coming from the decision to go into the very spaces I didn’t want to go.
That is where the education is.
That is where the knowledge is forged.
The strange thing for me is that I am on the other side of this great investigation—and I’m looking forward to sharing its results in the year ahead.
Creating New Music: A Year-Long Journey
This week, I started work on the 11th and 12th songs of the album.
Yesterday, beginning work on “Please Let Me Know” was a deeply emotional, personally fulfilling—and yes—happy experience.
I have never, ever been so proud of a set of songs.
I’ve never worked harder to get to them too!
But I don’t think I’ve ever written better ones.
The process is etched into them.
I find it hard to express what a mystical experience all this is for me.
I’ve never lost that childlike wonder—that something can exist where nothing was before.
What, I wrote a song?!
I am very aware of my limitations as a musician. I enjoy challenging them.
Gently.
Steadfastly.
To see music as an expression of growth and how I participate in the world, rather than as something I want something from.
12 new songs.
Damn!
I have to figure out what to do with them, but that is a journey I will start when the creation journey is complete.
When I went into the studio this week, it was the culmination of a year-long process which began on the 1st of January—and with writer’s block.
Like many of the sessions, there was a degree of madness surrounding it.
I’d been in the desert in Dubai filming six back-to-back music videos for clients, followed by a job covering the 35th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall here in Berlin.
Now, three weeks ago, I looked at my calendar with a gulp, and realised that I only had two free days in the build up to get the songs together.
It concentrated my mind.
It also gave me the opportunity to utilise some of the lessons I’d learned this year:
Lessons Learned: Embracing Limitations and Simplification
First, I would look at limitation as an opportunity, not a hindrance. This helped me zero in on what could be done, not what could not be done.
Second, I would work on the two songs which were most ready—and not the ones I necessarily most wanted to record. This helped me approach the session in a spirit of utility rather than panic.
Third, I would choose simplification over complexity. This meant choosing to record two songs rather than three, which brought a feeling of relaxation into the session—rather than the mania of some of the earlier sessions, fun as they were!
Finally, the most significant decision: I had three days in the studio, and rather than trying to track three rhythm tracks (bass and drums) on the first day, I would concentrate on one song specifically on each of the first two days in the studio.
Establishing a New Recording Template
It was making these decisions that I stumbled upon my breakthrough—a breakthrough that has led me to an approach to recording that I believe will become a template for my future process.
I write many musical ideas, but the challenge is always developing them into full songs.
Funnily enough, John Lennon once quipped that writing the dreamy, introspective verses of "A Day in the Life" was "the easy bit." He then handed the middle 8 to Paul McCartney, who came up with "Woke up, fell out of bed, dragged a comb across my head."
I don’t have a band or a sparring partner, so the heavy lifting always happens on my own. Completing a song is always somewhat galling, but it’s also where I test myself musically, grow, and discover the most unexpected aspects of myself.
What Lennon alluded to was that most art is composed of a strenuous tension between inspiration and craftsmanship.
Craftsmanship is a type of manual labor, and it just takes the time it takes—which is one of the reasons we avoid it so much.
The breakthrough I experienced in the studio was remarkably simple.
I realised that despite the challenges of completing songs and the strain of life's busyness on my time, by reducing my workload and setting clear goals, I could potentially achieve more output than ever before—even compared to when I was a full-time songwriter.
My New Process
My process is now:
Take one idea at the start of the month and strive to complete it.
Repeat this for two months (completing two songs).
Record the songs over three days in the studio.
The End As Beginning
As I come to the end of a year working towards my goal of writing and recording 12 new songs, a strange thing has happened.
Despite my writer’s block at the beginning of the year, I now have at least another 12 ideas that I’m enormously excited about.
I started the year determined to see if I could write another song and have ended it not only reaching this goal but, more importantly, with my musical heart returning to me.
I am determined to develop these ideas into songs next year and feel I have discovered a formula—a template—that will help me do so.
As always on the creative path, there are many challenges ahead:
How to get these songs into the world
Figuring out a way to promote them
Deciding whether I will play live again
Seeing if I can again make even part of my living from music
We all need our creative life to wash its face, and it’s a tremendously challenging time for all musicians.
However, to answer those questions, we have to create, and to create, we sometimes have to enter the spaces we most avoid.
You’re going to have to show some heart. You’re going to have to show some resilience.
Some days you may question what the hell you are doing, and other days you will worry that you are setting yourself up for failure.
Do it anyway. Go out and express your gift. You have no idea what is waiting for you.
There is a reason something pounds in your chest. There is a reason you are hungry to answer life’s call.
If you are on the verge of something new, go and try it. Don’t try to formulate it in advance. Let it be messy.
My experience this year has shown me that you only get to a more stable pattern—like a template—by daring to advance first into chaos.
Everything you learn will become data points.
Your process will start speaking to you. You will notice its inner workings, the pattern that forms from its stitching.
The challenges we face with creativity stem from our inner life constantly interacting with time, money, and our place in the world.
That is a daunting challenge at times, and it is one you don’t need to figure out all at once.
On a personal note, by attempting to explore these questions in my own broken, chaotic, and grasping way, I’ve arrived at a new lease on life.
I have arrived not just with an album, but with a map.
In some ways, the map is far more important than the songs.
Because the thing with a map is that though you can learn from others, at the end of the day, you have to go your own way.
Your map cannot be given to you because it is yours to write.
Go out into the unknown, plot its terrain, wrestle with its heights, its crevices, its darkness, and its beauty. One moment you will feel terror because you have no idea where you are. The next moment you will feel exhilaration because all the world feels yours—a totality, full of aching, wonder, and potential. That is when you know you are living. And that is the point of all of this—to know you are alive, that you are in the heart of your life, and that whatever happens, you are participating.
Conclusion
My breakthrough—born out of the challenges I faced—has reshaped how I approach my creative work.
I have a template for navigating the maze of modern busyness and staying true to, creatively at least, what matters most to me.
What began with the hope to write one song has led to what I believe may be a song cycle of 24.
I’m putting no pressure on myself—I’m just glad to be within a new process.
This process formed out of trial and error and a determination to move forward, irrespective of what I found.
As you do also, I would counsel you to remember that trial and error requires you to go through the error part. I’ve discovered a template for my next steps because I got busy and went out and collected enough failures to give me some data points.
You only learn what you do want to do by having done what you don’t want to do enough. So no matter where you are, even if it’s difficult, remember—this may be exactly the starting point you need.
Good luck out there—now go forward and start plotting that map!
Jim
You gave us this big gift to seeing you work you through this year. Standing in front of an ocean fulfilled with no‘s and maybes, not seeing the new land behind the horizon with waving soundscapes. It was hard for you, but so for us. But you faced it, scratched the wounds to healing and took yourself by the scruff of your neck holding on to new grounds and a carpet, so fine like silk. This journey is not finished, but let us rest here for a moment. Just enjoy the pure happiness of a feeling you know under your feet.