Become More Creative in the Next 20 Minutes. Pt. 3 On Human Creativity: Creation from Attention

It is a deep mystery.

God created everything out of nothing. Ex nihilo.

Can I do that?

No, I need raw materials.

I cannot even create an article except by mining what’s already in my mind, plus whatever exists “out there” for me to pull from.

I don’t know how God creates what He creates.

But I would like to try to understand how I create in this, the third in a series about creativity.

Taste

One of my favorite sources for endless thinking about this subject is Rick Rubin, the music producer, podcaster, and writer.

Rubin is fascinating to me because he writes about creativity without mystifying (very much).

He does not present the artist as a genius pulling brilliance out of thin air. He presents the artist as a listener. A receiver. A curator.

Again and again, Rubin comes back to the same claim: The artist’s real work is not making things, but noticing things.

What separates meaningful work from forgettable work is not technical mastery or originality, but taste.

Taste, for Rubin, is the ability to recognize what has life in it.

“I don’t know anything about music. I know what I like and what I don’t like.”

“I have no technical ability, and I know nothing about music theory… What I do have is taste.”

If God alone creates out of nothing, then human creativity must begin somewhere else. Rubin would say it begins with attention. Attention refines taste.

With exposure. With the slow formation of an inner sense that can say instinctively, “This matters” and “This doesn’t.”

Taste is not preference. It’s trained discernment. It is formed by what you take in, what you linger with, what you refuse to rush past.

In that sense, creativity is less about producing and more about filtering.

Less about adding and more about removing.

God speaks worlds into being. We listen for what has been spoken and decide what to honor.

That may be the most honest description of human creativity I know.

Go read, listen, look at everything. See what you like and why you like it.

Scripture frames this not as a creative hack, but as wisdom.

“Test everything; hold fast what is good.” (1 Thessalonians 5:21)

“But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil.” (Hebrews 5:14)

Notice the language. Trained. Practice. Distinguish. Discernment is not innate brilliance. It’s cultivated.

The next question is how does taste, which seems like a passive quality, become creation?

Recognition creates direction

Once you can recognize what is good, something happens. Your writing choices narrow.

You don’t ask, “What should I write?”

You ask, “What here has life?”

Taste limits the field. That is a creative function. It removes a thousand options so that one path becomes visible.

And this is why creativity speeds up after taste matures. It’s not that you have more ideas, but that you waste less time chasing dead ones.

Creation becomes iteration, not invention.

Writers often imagine creation as a leap. In practice, it is a loop.

You write something rough.

Taste responds.

You adjust.

You remove.

You try again.

This is how taste becomes creative force. It sits inside the process, steering and removing what is unnecessary so the essential can appear.

That is not after-the-fact editing. That is the creative act.

“Let us throw off everything that hinders…” (Hebrews 12:1)

Creation advances by subtraction as much as addition.

Consume art like a starving person and what you’re supposed to create will come into focus in rough form, then all the rough edges will present themselves to be chiseled.

You will probably have one of two impulses right now:

1. Start making something…

or…

2. Consume art…

Either way you have something to do that comes from your nature as an image bearer of the only One Who creates out of nothing.

Blessings,

Jeff

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