Make any mark. Nothing is wrong.

Nobody taught me creativity in architecture school. They taught me to act in the face of uncertainty.

I was given a brief. Nothing more than a loose statement of what the architecture had to be. You started by drawing.

The technique of making a gesture, however humble or inadequate, was the first step in a process of making. You could start anywhere, with any kind of mark.

It was beginning that mattered, not how you begun.

Architecture starts with a fragment of architecture. Poems start with a fragment of poetry. The fragment is not about the subject. It is a piece of the subject.

The Workshop Problem

Workshops and lessons about creativity are like discussions about poetry. They miss the point entirely.

You don't create poetry by talking about poetry. Poetry starts with a fragment of poetry.

Recent neuroscience research supports this intuition. Scientists now understand that associative thinking engages brain regions involved in both semantic and episodic memory, connecting concepts to form ideas, inventions, and artworks.

The brain doesn't learn creativity as a discrete skill. It processes creatively as a fundamental operating mode.

Installing the Creative Operating System

Creativity functions more like an operating system than a skill you acquire. It's a foundational framework that governs how you process information, solve problems, and interact with the world.

Most people want to know the outcome before they start. This is exactly backwards.

I have a saying: start anywhere and just get on with it. Arthur Ashe said it like this: "Start where you are, use what you have, do what you can."

Seth Godin speaks about a practice, a way of acting that has no guarantees but is generous and serves others. Research shows he's right about the commitment to failure being essential to creative work.

The willingness to make marks without justification is to invest in the process. If you can do this, something will emerge that is of value.

Problems as Fertile Territory

When you operate creatively, problems become fertile knots of uncertainty, pregnant with potential.

A problem is just an excuse to act, to begin acting, without fear or conclusiveness. No guarantees.

You see problems as sheer potential. The outcomes can be trusted to emerge, without a plan.

Failure becomes essential. Uncertainty is the clue that you are moving in the right direction, that you are swimming in the right part of the pool.

You fail repeatedly until you reach a conclusion. Every gesture, every mark, every externalized act is a pale reflection of the way it appears in our head, in our intentions.

The first mark will be a failure, and the second less of a failure, and so on until the failed outcome is good enough.

The Ten Minute Installation

Here's how to install this operating system directly.

Do something irrational with a paintbrush and a canvas, and keep going for ten minutes. Don't edit, and don't stop.

Keep the hand moving. Keep the pen moving. It doesn't matter if you repeat the same gesture for ten minutes. Just don't stop.

Let it happen, and then after the ten minutes, accept and consider what has happened. The technique can be transposed to writing, painting, design, anything.

Act first. Consider and edit second.

Studies confirm there's no such thing as writer's block. You solve being unable to write by writing. Anyone can do it.

It only becomes impossible when you tie the writing effort to a preordained or intended outcome.

You Can't Do It Wrong

This is like a principle of mindfulness meditation. Concentrate on the breathing and accept everything is as it should be without the need to mentally push against what is observed.

You don't need to change the situation. It is already acceptable.

You don't have to achieve a certain result. Or any result. The outcome is valid, and has value, regardless of what you can make of it.

Act and accept.

When you remove the possibility of doing it wrong, when you trust the process completely, anything becomes possible.

You begin by beginning. Start anywhere and just get on with it.

I asked Leonardo.ai to depict a 15th Century Flemish street view with crowds and a market. What came back stopped me cold.

The architecture was period-accurate, or at least it seemed to be. (Maybe there is a scholar of 15th Century Flemish architecture reading this who could correct me.) The costuming seemed historically consistent. Even the light looked like a Dutch Old Masters painting. It was contrived but convincing.

I had underestimated something fundamental about this tool. Simple concepts get fleshed out with contextual detail that was only implied, creating a textured tapestry of responses that genuinely surprises.

That surprise taught me something many creatives are getting wrong about AI partnership.

The Compounding Effect

The real power emerged when I started layering prompts into the tool. Details compound into more than the sum of its parts.

The creative process becomes enhanced through progressive accretion of detail and adjustment. The dialogue that creates this condition leads to subtle and authored results.

But there is a point where the label of ‘tool’ breaks down. An AI tool is nothing like a paintbrush.

It's more like clutching a robotic arm that has its own choreography and protocols of movement. You can only input moves and manoeuvres: you gesture and imply. The control is less direct. You lead rather than control.

The Dance Metaphor

Your creative vision must allow for the semi-autonomy of the tool. If you want direct control, take up a paintbrush.

The essence of AI collaboration is that detail takes you somewhere unexpected, even while the framework conforms to your vision.

This requires learning to dance with a partner who has their own moves. It implies fluidity and conscious abandonment of rigid control.

Most creatives resist this because they think losing control means losing their authorship and their competitive edge. In fact, they're protecting something that was never real.

Control Was Always An Illusion

Control is an illusion in the practice of any art form. The true artist follows technique and method with exactitude and rigour: this is tight control of process. But this isn't the same as exerting tight control over outcomes.

Art born of rigid control is lifeless and wooden. The dance, the performance, is a letting go.

Research supports this counterintuitive reality. Human-AI teams didn't surpass AI systems operating alone, contradicting popular assumptions about seamless collaboration.

Design and discovery in this process are two sides of the same coin. The Copyright Office concluded that prompts alone don't provide sufficient human control to make users the authors of AI output, but the question remains: does it matter?

The Ethical Elephant in the Room

Right now, I'm preoccupied with the dance while ethics take a back seat. I am yet to reconcile this conundrum satisfactorily.

The training data remains ethically problematic. If you refuse to dance with AI, you avoid sullying your hands with that compromised dimension. But that avoids rather than addresses the ethics question.

Method and technique are separate questions from ethics. Perhaps we need ethically sourced AI tools, like we have ethically sourced food? HarperCollins recently struck deals with Microsoft at $5,000 per title, establishing concrete market value for training data. That seems like a move in the right direction, but the puzzle won't resolve quickly.

Learning The Dance Moves

My advice to creatives still thinking in binary terms of tool versus threat: engage with the technology and see what the dance moves are. See where it takes you.

We need to explore these tools to make informed judgments about them.

The creative professionals who understand AI's semi-autonomous nature will gain advantages over those clinging to outdated narratives about control.

The dance requires conscious abandonment of rigid control. But it's still your dance.

I think outlining is a completely pointless method of writing. Not really a method of writing at all, in fact, but a sham, a sideshow. Busy work people do instead of writing.

The preoccupation with narrative or literary structure is another red herring, in my humblest.

Written works certainly do have a structure that can be analysed, and they can be retrospectively outlined, but neither are any way to commence or embark on a work. These techniques are retrospective, not prospective. At least, they hold no interest for me. If they work for you, more power to you - but you probably won’t like anything I commit to the page, and I doubt I will like what you do either. That’s ok, we don’t really need each other, so all is well. Go in peace.

I have a working methodology that I apply when commencing all my commissioned written works. It goes like this:

“Start anywhere and just get on with it”

This maxim (precept?) suggests that the writing process starts anywhere, with emergence of smaller parts of the text itself (or as I have heard someone say about poetry, writing a poem starts not with an a-priori idea ‘about’ the poem or, even worse, about poetry in general, but with an actual fragment of poetry.)

This methodology is further expanded by my favourite quote of all time, in relation to getting things done creatively (or at all, for that matter):

”Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.”

Tennis player Arthur Ashe said that. It is profound, powerful stuff. Astonishing, really - essential and simple. I think it speaks so directly to me because I find in it an echo of the concept of _equanimity_ drawn from the mindfulness meditation practice that has loomed so large in my daily life in the last couple of years.

The concept of _equanimity_ is a foundation skill of mindfulness meditation, and it is one of radical openness - acceptance of exactly what is, right now, as exactly what needs to be, simply because it is what it already is - without intervention or need for alteration. Nothing to solve, nothing to fix.

We always commence meditating by engaging with where we are, right now:_Start where you are_. Accepting your current situation exactly as it is, along with the reality, shape and extent of your resources, is an astonishing and radical basis to approach any given task: _Use what you have_. Accepting the limitations of your ability, as it exists right now in the moment, as entirely good enough is both liberating and humble: _Do what you can_. The logical extension of this last with ‘…and no more’, is implied, and can be fully embraced in the spirit of equanimity.

I love all this, as it is the opposite of the need (and pressure) to ‘be an expert’, ‘be good’, or ‘be a professional’. Expertise and professionalism have to be attained through externalities, proven regularly (and repeatedly) and vigorously defended at all times.

This is entirely appropriate in situations where the beneficiaries of said expertise or professional skill are relying on the consistency and quality of the outcome of your activities, especially for their safety. For example, this occurs in medicine all the time, in engineering, and even in architecture - and there can be practical reasons that jealously-guarded professional boundaries are enshrined, by custom, culture and occasionally legislation.

Of course, there are some very bad reasons as well. Call me anti-establishment if you must (go right ahead) but I think the professions are atrophied, conservatively defended from positive change, and fundamentally protectionist. This is all done under the banner of ‘protection of the public’ and Occupational Health and Safety (OHS), but I’m not buying it. Protection of the bottom line is the more accurate reason.

When I am being an architectural person (the day job), I have to play this game to some extent. But when evening falls, and I retire to meditate, I really want to abandon all vestiges of this expertise and conferred authority. I do not want to be in the mindset of an expert twenty-four hours of the day. The very thought makes me anxious and tired. I long to be, need to be, a beginner and a novice, daily - and meditation is where I find the place to do this, to be this, every day.

I have fully immersed myself in the professionalism of architecture as a daily practice (well, more or less - legally I am still not formally registered as an architect, even though I am qualified and own half of an architecture practice.) However, when I write, I do not want to be a professional of any kind. I do not want to be an expert in any way. I want to just start anywhere, and get on with it, and see what happens. My best writing always proceeds this way.

I want to start where I am right now, use what I have, and do what I can. Absolutely nothing more.

I do not need what I write to be published (more than I have been to date, which is many times) in order to prove anything, to myself or to others; I do not need to know how to ‘make money from writing’ either (and incidentally, the purpose of the popular publishing platform Medium, which occasionally has some good stuff on it, seems to be very little more than an outlet for writers seeking to make money from writing by writing articles for other writers about how to make money from writing. It’s an echo chamber. I’m a member, but not really interested.)

And so to Fernando Pessoa. Pessoa published very little in his lifetime. But let me be clear: I do not (and have never) subscribed to the myth of the tragically misunderstood and starving artist - the ‘beautiful loser’ - but neither did Pessoa. He was too busy for that.

The ‘starving artist’ is similar to the myth of the ‘lone genius’, another toxic stereotype, one that is rampant in the architecture and design professions.

Pessoa embraced the craft of writing on its own terms, but perhaps more importantly, on his own terms - with no practical or sustained approach to seeking or securing the financial or psychic rewards of publication. If his trunk of 25,000 fragments hadn’t been discovered after his all-too-early death, Pessoa would have disappeared entirely from history, which in my estimation would not have put even a minor dent in his achievements, as they were for him and him alone.

We just wouldn’t know about it all; fortunately fate intervened, and we have his work to read and absorb.

This is inspiring.

Of course there was a lot more going on with the many personas (heteronyms) of Fernando Pessoa than the above, but it is a start. More to come.

Having begun this entry with a commentary on outlining and structure, I was going to talk more about structure in relation to the Book of Disquiet. But that is enough for tonight: we will get to that later.