Part II: Quick Hacks

You've got the best idea ever. You're going to impress the world! You'll be a billionaire! Your brain is enflamed with the concept and you see it in your dreams haunting you like a Yurei. The next step is to make it real, to implement it and bring it out of your brain and into the computer. You have to kill the ghost, bring the Yurei back from the spirit world and bind it to a totem of Python and sticks that you throw into the sea of the internet.

Creative enough for you?

The enemy of creativity is the start. How can you realize your dreams if there's an obstacle course of setup procedures and dead yaks in the way? What if your idea is so intense and so big that you begin to worry? Will you be good enough? Will you be smart enough? Will that famous programmer who always yells at you to write your tests first be angry that you don't know how to do it? Getting started is universally one of the most difficult things in creativity, and this part of the book is designed to get you past that.

I am a painter, a musician, a writer, and a programmer so I know a thing or two about creativity. I know even more about getting started and about process. Process is what drags me through the muddy slog of a project when I'm just not interested in working on it anymore. But, I can't get to that slog without first getting started.

The start requires courage and a bit of not caring what anyone thinks. In painting, when I can't get started I just grab any random paint and smack it on the canvas in about the right spot. A whole lot of very accomplished painters work that way. Other painters get through the start by doing research--studying, testing, sketching and then finally pulling it all together to begin. As a writer, the first thing I do is walk around my apartment frantically talking to myself imagining I'm talking to someone, and then when I've said enough talking I sit down and write. I just write down the first things that come to mind.

I don't sit down to write and worry about grammar. I don't ask, "Do I sound smart?" I just write how I speak and flow it into the keyboard, and then when I'm done cranking out a few paragraphs I take a look. Does it make sense? Do I need to clean up? It works and this gets me flowing and going. Maybe what I write is total garbage. But, I started and that's what's important then. After this I rely on my process to turn the starting point into a fully baked word.

How do you learn your creative start? You, my friend, need to figure that out, and this book will help. First we need to bust your fear of the start. Maybe it's not even fear. Maybe you just have a metric ton of totally useless tasks you need to do before you begin coding and you've got to get the friction out of your way.

As I said in Part I, you can't be creative if every time you go to make a thing you have to clean up for an hour and fix a bunch of tools.