darren r hill

the creative minimalist

Category: Creativity

All posts relating to creativity in general. How to be creative rather than specific creative projects.

Copying Isn’t Cheating. It’s How Creativity Starts.

There is a belief about being creative that treats imitation as some sort of failure of originality. Both by ourselves and by those “outside” watching. Copying is something to be embarrassed about. A phase to rush through and never mention.

I want to make the case that this is completely backwards. Not just as encouragement, but as a description of how creative development actually works. Copying isn’t the shameful opposite of real creative work. It’s the foundation it’s built on.

Everyone You Admire Started This Way

Hunter S. Thompson, one of the most distinctive voices in American journalism, spent years typing out other writers’ novels word for word. Not paraphrasing. Typing. He copied F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in full. He copied Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. He later explained: “If you type out somebody’s work, you learn a lot about it. Amazingly it’s like music… I wanted to learn from the best.”

The Beatles spent years covering Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and every American rock and roll record they could find. At least fifteen Chuck Berry songs were in their set at various points. Paul McCartney learned his vocal style directly from Little Richard, who actually taught him the technique in person. They weren’t hiding the influence: they were studying it so thoroughly it became part of them.

In visual art, copying the masters is still a formal part of training. Students in art schools spend hours in galleries reproducing works by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Velázquez: not to produce replicas, but to understand the choices behind them. The brushstroke, the composition, the light. You can’t learn that from observation alone.

T.S. Eliot put it plainly, in a line that’s been repeated enough times to feel like a cliché but remains true: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.” He meant that the deeper engagement, the one that actually moves your own work forward, is when you take something from another creative and make it genuinely yours. Not just a copy. A theft.

Why It Works

Copying forces you to understand the decisions, not just the results.

When you listen to a song you love, or read a paragraph that works perfectly, or look at a photograph that lands exactly right, you’re experiencing the end product. The choices that created it are invisible. You feel the effect, but you don’t necessarily see the mechanism.

When you copy, the mechanism becomes visible. You discover that the sentence works because of a specific rhythm, not just the words. The musical phrase works because of the note in the bass, not just the melody. The image works because of what’s out of frame, not just what’s in it.

That discovery is the education. And it’s one you can only get by doing it, not by analysing from the outside.

Bonus thought: copying with your hands is different from copying with your eyes. You learn different things depending on how you engage with the work.

How You Stop Copying (And Why You Can’t Force It)

So when do you stop imitating? When does the imitation phase end? Well, it’s not an exact science. You don’t decide when it ends. It ends when your influences have been so thoroughly absorbed that they stop showing up in your work as recognisable sources and start showing up as something else.

Bob Dylan arrived in New York in 1961 sounding almost entirely like Woody Guthrie: same vocal style, same guitar approach, the same folk repertoire. He even visited Guthrie in hospital, learning directly from the source. The imitation wasn’t hidden or apologised for. It was thorough.

Within a few years, Dylan had transformed that absorbed tradition into something that had never existed before: literary, surreal, electric, entirely his own. You couldn’t have predicted the destination from the starting point. What came out the other side was so distant from Guthrie that it barely seemed connected, yet it grew directly from that immersion.

The Beatles absorbed their influences so completely that what came out the other side was something entirely their own. Thompson copied Fitzgerald and Hemingway so thoroughly that when he wrote, what emerged was unlike anything that had existed before. Not despite the copying. Because of it.

The mistake is trying to skip this stage in the name of originality. Originality isn’t found by avoiding influence. It develops through it, over time, through enough output that the absorbed influences stop being visible and become something harder to name.

What to Do Instead

Stop hiding your influences. Name them, study them, engage with them seriously. The writers and musicians and artists you admire aren’t evidence of your lack of originality. They’re the raw material your originality will eventually grow from. I did this with David Bowie’s Heroes when I recorded my track We’re not actors. I think the influence is still a little raw, but I hope you might find a little art there if you listen.

Pick one piece of work you genuinely love and study it closely. Not just how it makes you feel, but how it works. Copy it, if that’s the medium. Transcribe the chord progression. Sketch the composition. Type out the paragraph. See what you discover that you couldn’t see from the outside.

And when your copy doesn’t quite match the original: pay attention to the space you have created. That’s not failure. That’s the beginning of your own thing.

Thank you for reading this post. Please share your thoughts in the comment section below.
namaste
d
xox

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14 June 2026
The Mistake I Made Trying to Sound Professional

Early in my creative life, I was convinced that the gap between where I was and where I wanted to be was a technical one, a skill issue. Everything would be perfect If I could just get the sound right. Get the production to a certain standard. Write with more precision and polish. Sound more like the people I admired; Bowie et al.

So I kept trying to sound professional before I had anything to say. And it nearly killed my output entirely.

The Trap

Here’s what “trying to sound professional” actually looks like in practice: you start a project and immediately start judging it against a finished standard. Every rough note, every awkward sentence, every imperfect first take gets filtered through the question “does this sound like the real thing?”, or “does this sound like x, or the xx or Charlie XCX?” And when the answer is no, which it almost always is early on, you tighten up. You second-guess. You redo. You abandon.

The pressure to perform professionally before you’ve had the chance to play loosely is one of the most effective ways to grind creative output to a halt. Not because the standard is wrong, but because the timing is.

This isn’t just music. Writers do it too: drafting with one eye on how a published author would phrase the same thought. Painters and illustrators comparing their rough studies to finished work. Photographers chasing a polished aesthetic before they’ve worked out what they’re actually drawn to. Filmmakers trying to match production values they admire before they’ve found their eye. The specific discipline doesn’t matter. The pattern is the same.

The Gap (And Why It’s Normal)

Radio producer Ira Glass has one of the most honest things I’ve ever heard anyone say about early creative work. In a now-famous interview, he described what he calls the taste gap: the space between what you can see and what you can make.

When you’re drawn to creative work, it’s usually because you have taste. You know what good looks like. And that taste is exactly what makes your early work so frustrating to you, because you can hear and see the gap clearly.

But the only way to close the gap is volume. More work. Rough work. Work that isn’t trying to be professional yet. Glass’s point was that every creative person he knew who ended up making genuinely interesting work went through years of this phase, and the ones who got through it were the ones who kept going rather than stopping to polish.

The professional sound, or voice, or eye, develops through the accumulation of output. Not through trying to skip the messy middle.

Style Is a Side Effect

There’s a related idea in Austin Kleon’s book Steal Like an Artist. His argument is that style doesn’t come from trying to find your voice: it comes from working, imitating, failing to copy your influences perfectly, and discovering what’s left over when you can’t quite pull it off. Those imperfections, those places where your version diverges from the thing you were trying to make, are where your actual style lives.

Your failed attempts at professional polish are more authentically yours than the polished imitation would ever have been.

I would even say that, art is found in imperfection.

Think about the creative voices you find most distinctive: the writers with a particular rhythm, the musicians with an unmistakable sound, the filmmakers with a visual signature. Almost none of them got there by aiming for it directly. They got there by making a lot of work and finding themselves in the gap between what they were trying to do and what they actually did.

Bonus thought: looseness in early drafts often produces the most interesting ideas. The pressure to be polished cuts off the unexpected detour that might have led somewhere good.

What to Do Instead

The practical shift is simpler than it sounds. Give the early stage of any project permission to be rough. Not forever, but for long enough that the ideas can develop without being filtered through a standard they can’t yet meet.

Judge early work by volume, not quality. The question in the first draft, the first session, the first sketch, is not “is this good?” The question is “did I make something?” The refinement comes later. The polishing comes later. The professional standard can be applied at the editing stage, not the generating stage.

And when you feel the pull to tighten up before you’ve loosened off: that’s the moment to notice. It’s usually fear dressed up as standards.

The most professional thing you can do early on is keep going.Sources:Reuse notes: Early creative work, style development, perfectionism, all creative disciplines

Thank you for reading this post. Please share your thoughts in the comment section below.
namaste
d
xox

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7 June 2026
Why Fewer Tools Makes You a Faster Creative

There’s a version of creative productivity that looks like this: the right plugin for every job, a different app for every stage of the process, a growing library of presets, brushes, fonts, and gear for every possible situation.

And there’s a version that looks like this: a handful of tools you know so well you never have to think about them.

The second one is faster. By a lot.

Not because it’s simpler. Because familiarity is a speed multiplier. And the more you spread your time across tools you haven’t fully learned, the less of that multiplier you get.

Unfortunately, I seem wired to strive for the first 😭.

The Cost of Starting From Scratch

Every unfamiliar tool has a startup cost. Before you’ve made a single creative decision, you’re navigating menus, watching tutorials, second-guessing settings, wondering which of the twelve export options you’re supposed to use. Sound familiar? (As an aside, I just switched back to Final Cut for editing my videos… and all the above were all too real.)

That cost compounds across a session. It’s not just the time. It’s the mental load. You’re using cognitive energy on the tool itself, energy that isn’t available for the work.

The familiar tool has none of that. You open it and you’re already in. The producer who knows their synth inside out doesn’t spend the first twenty minutes of a session figuring out the routing. The photographer who knows their one camera body doesn’t fumble with the menu in the moment the light is right. The writer who knows their software doesn’t lose a thought to formatting.

The tool disappears. The work begins.

That’s not a minor efficiency saving. It’s the difference between a session that builds momentum and one that never quite gets going.

What Mastery Actually Feels Like

There’s a well-studied psychological state called flow: the experience of being so absorbed in a task that self-consciousness drops away and the work seems to happen almost automatically. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi spent decades researching it, and one consistent finding is that flow is most accessible to people with high levels of skill in what they’re doing.

The reason is automaticity. When the mechanical aspects of a skill become automatic, they stop drawing on conscious attention. The musician stops thinking about the chord shapes and starts thinking about the feel of the phrase. The painter stops calculating the colour mix and starts feeling the composition. The editor stops finding the shortcut and starts making the cut.

It’s like creative muscle memory

This is what experienced creatives mean when they talk about a tool “getting out of the way.” It’s not that the tool becomes invisible. It’s that you’ve internalised it. And once that happens, the cognitive space that was occupied by the mechanics is free for actual creative thinking – you can read more about creative flow here.

You can’t internalise ten tools at once. Your time is finite. Depth with fewer tools gets you to automaticity. Breadth across many keeps you at the learning stage indefinitely.

Bonus thought: the tools you use most probably have shortcuts you haven’t learned yet. Those are free speed.

The Compounding Return of Depth

There’s simple math to this that’s easy to miss.

Five hundred hours with one tool builds a foundation. Every hour adds to the previous ones. The knowledge compounds. You get faster, more intuitive, and more creative with it, because you’re not spending any time relearning.

Five hundred hours split across ten tools gives you fifty hours with each. Fifty hours is enough to get started. It’s not enough to get fluent.

Fluency is where the interesting creative decisions happen. It’s where you stop asking “how do I do this?” and start asking “what should this be?” That shift is where the creativity lives.

Writers who commit to one editing tool learn the quirks, the keyboard shortcuts, the structural features, the workarounds. Filmmakers who commit to one editing software develop an intuition for the timeline (as I found out above!). Illustrators who stick to a limited palette learn what that palette can do that a wider one can’t.

The depth pays off in ways that are hard to predict until you’re there. But the path there is consistent: stay longer with less.

What to Do Instead

None of this is an argument for never trying a new tool. New tools can solve real problems. But there’s a useful question to ask before you start exploring: what specific gap in my current workflow would this fill?

If you can name it clearly, that’s worth investigating. If the answer is closer to “I just want to try something different”… that curiosity is fine, but treat it as exploration, not an upgrade to your core process.

The more practical step is an honest audit. How many tools did you actually use in the last month? Not ones you own or have installed. Ones you used. For most people, the answer is a small number. Those are your core tools. Go deeper with them.

Mastery isn’t about owning fewer things. It’s about knowing fewer things well enough that they stop slowing you down.SourcesReuse notes: Tools, mastery, workflow, flow states, speed, all creative disciplinesLink to blog in bio when post goes live

Thank you for reading this post. Please share your thoughts in the comment section below.
namaste
d
xox

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31 May 2026
The Next Tool Won’t Fix It: Why More Gear Doesn’t Make Better Creative Work

There’s a moment most of us creative people get. You’re stuck on something. The project isn’t coming together the way you imagined. And then it occurs to you: maybe the problem is the tool I am using. That new shiny thing they are raving about on the socials could be the solution.

Maybe the DAW is limiting you. Maybe the right plugin would unlock something. Maybe if you had better brushes, a different camera, that specific notebook everyone keeps recommending…

I’ve been here more times than I’d like to admit and my credit card company is happy to support me in my endeavours. But I’ve learned that getting more stuff is almost always wrong.

The Acquisition Trap

There’s a term in music circles for this: Gear Acquisition Syndrome, or GAS. It’s been studied seriously enough to warrant an academic book on the subject, Gear Acquisition Syndrome: Consumption of Instruments and Technology in Popular Music by Jan-Peter Herbst and Jonas Menze. The research describes it as the “unrelenting urge to buy and own instruments and equipment as an anticipated catalyst of creative energy.”

The key word there is anticipated. The creative energy doesn’t arrive with the purchase. We anticipate that it will.

And it makes psychological sense. Buying new gear triggers a dopamine release. The anticipation of what you’ll make with it is genuinely exciting. But that feeling is about the acquisition, not the output. Once the novelty settles, the work is still the work. The blank page is still blank. The same creative friction you were feeling before is still there, waiting.

Musicians aren’t alone in this. Writers have the equivalent in the perfect notebook, the right pen, the new app that’s going to change their process. Photographers chase camera upgrades. Filmmakers justify new lenses. Artists accumulate materials they’ll get around to using – but how much of the stuff in that IKEA cart is being used! The specific tools differ. The pattern is the same.

Why More Choice Makes It Harder

Even when tool acquisition isn’t the problem, having too many options still is. Psychologist Barry Schwartz built an entire framework around this in The Paradox of Choice: the more options we have, the harder it becomes to make decisions, and the less satisfied we tend to be with the ones we do make.

In creative work, that friction is constant. Every session that begins with “which tool do I use for this?” is a session that’s already losing momentum before anything has been made. Every plugin folder with 200 options, every brush set with unlimited variations, every app with ten different ways to format the same thing… all of it adds decision overhead to a process that needs to flow.

The familiar tool removes that overhead entirely. You pick it up and you’re already in the work. That’s not a small thing.

Bonus tip: most apps have a favourites option, use it for the settings you always use

What the Tool Is Actually Promising

Here’s what I think is really going on with the acquisition impulse: tools promise to solve a creative problem, but the problem is almost never the tool.

The problem is usually the idea. Or the skill. Or the discipline to sit with something uncomfortable long enough for it to become something good.

A new plugin can’t fix a weak melody. A new camera can’t fix a weak composition. A new notebook can’t fix a writing block. The tool is neutral. It does what you tell it to do. And if you haven’t got something to tell it yet, more sophisticated tools just give you more sophisticated ways of avoiding the work, and at often considerable financial cost.

Some of the most distinctive creative voices in any discipline got there with very limited tools. Early hip-hop producers worked with one sampler and found ways to make that constraint into a sound. Jack White famously limited himself to recording on three tracks, not because he couldn’t afford more, but because the limitation forced decisions that shaped his music. Countless painters and writers and filmmakers have produced their most personal work with the simplest setups, because the simplicity kept the focus on what actually mattered.

The tool doesn’t make the work. The work makes the tool worthwhile.

What to Do Instead

None of this means never buy new tools, upgrade your setup, or explore new software. That can be genuinely useful. But there’s a difference between acquiring tools to solve a specific, identified creative need and acquiring tools because you’re stuck and hoping something external will unstick you.

The more useful question, when you feel the pull toward the next tool, is: what is this purchase actually solving? If you can name a specific, concrete limitation in your current work(flow) that this new thing will address, that’s a reasonable conversation to have with yourself. If the honest answer is closer to “I don’t know, I just feel like this would help”… well, perhaps the new shiny isn’t the solution for when you’re stuck.

The tools you already have are almost certainly enough. The question is whether you’re using them as well as you could.

Thank you for reading this post. Please share your thoughts in the comment section below.
namaste
d
xox

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24 May 2026
The Habits That Quietly Kill Creative Output (And What to Replace Them With)
There’s a version of this I know well. The idea is there. The time is there. The tools are there. And yet… nothing actually gets made.

For a long time I thought that was a motivation problem. A discipline issue. Something I needed to push through or fix about myself. My bad.

But now I see, it is mostly habit. Specifically, a handful of habits that look like creative work but are actually replacing it. Creative habits that are anything but.

Over-Planning Instead of Doing

Planning feels productive. It really does. You’re thinking about the project, mapping it out, refining the idea. It has the texture of creative work without the vulnerability of actually making something. And that’s the issue.

At a certain point, planning stops being preparation and starts being avoidance. Art is safer as an idea than as a thing in the world that might get rejected.

I’ve started whole songs, novels, and other creative projects in my head. In detail. Multiple times. Some of them never made it to an actual instrument or even the blank page.

The fix isn’t to stop planning entirely. It’s to notice when planning has gone past useful and turned into a holding pattern. For me that usually looks like revisiting the same thoughts or notes without adding anything new. That’s the signal to just start: imperfectly, incompletely, but actually start.

Constant Tweaking That Delays Finishing

The other end of the same problem. You’ve started. You’ve got something. And now you can’t stop adjusting it.

One more revision. One more mix tweak. Just fix that line before you move on.

Tweaking is seductive because it’s low risk compared to sharing something done. Finishing is a commitment. It invites evaluation. Tweaking lets you stay in the comfortable space of “almost there.”

But I’ve noticed something about creative work that gets tweaked indefinitely: at a certain point it stops getting better and just gets different. The thing you thought needed fixing wasn’t broken, it just felt exposed.

This pattern is well-documented. A meta-analysis of studies on perfectionism found a clear positive link between perfectionistic concerns (the fear-of-judgment side of perfectionism) and procrastination. In other words, the more we worry about the work being judged, the more we delay finishing it, often disguised as “just one more pass.” (Source: A Meta-analytic and Conceptual Update on the Associations Between Procrastination and Multidimensional Perfectionism, European Journal of Personality, 2017)

At some point, done has to be a decision, not a destination you arrive at. And “good enough to share” is a reasonable standard that “perfect” rarely meets.

Comparison That Drains the Room

This one is quieter but it does so much damage, a real killer. The quiet ones always do!

You hear someone else’s composition and it’s brilliant. You see what someone’s crafted art and it makes yours feel small. You open Instagram, spend ten minutes in someone else’s world, and come back to your own work with the energy gone.

Comparison isn’t always conscious. It’s just the background noise of being a creative person with access to everyone else’s finished, polished, best-foot-forward output.

The problem is you’re comparing their finished work to your in-progress work. It’s not a fair fight. Their rough drafts, their deleted tracks, their abandoned projects are invisible. Yours are right in front of you.

Research backs this up. An Instagram-based study found that ability-related social comparisons (the “look what they can do” kind) consistently lowered wellbeing more than opinion-based comparisons did. Creative work is almost always an ability comparison, which is part of why scrolling through other creators’ output can leave you feeling flat about your own. (Source: The Impact of Social Comparisons More Related to Ability vs. More Related to Opinion on Well-Being: An Instagram Study, Behavioral Sciences, 2023)

The practical answer is obvious: limit the inputs. Not permanently, not fearfully, but deliberately. When I’m in the middle of making something, I go quieter on other people’s output. Not because their work isn’t good, but because mine needs the space.

Simpler Habits, Better Output

The replacement habits that have made the most difference for me have all been boring in the best way.
- Start before you’re ready.
- Set a time limit and begin.
- Keep the tools accessible so the friction is low.
- Give the work a constraint so there are fewer decisions to navigate.
- End each session knowing what you’re starting with next time.
None of these are clever. But they remove the conditions where over-planning and endless tweaking and comparison tend to breed.

Creative output isn’t usually blocked by lack of inspiration. It’s blocked by the habits we’ve built around the work. And habits, unlike inspiration, are something you can actually change.

Thank you for reading this post. Please share your thoughts in the comment section below.
namaste
d
xox

If you enjoyed this post please support my writing by making a donation of any amount.

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16 May 2026
Is Your Creative Idea Worth Finishing? Here’s How to Decide
Alt: “How to Tell If a Creative Idea Is Worth Finishing (And When to Let It Go)”

Not every song I’ve started has needed to be finished. Some of them I was glad I didn’t. A few I wish I’d abandoned earlier and got some of that creative time back.

There’s a version of creative advice that says: always finish what you start. Push through. Finish the draft, finish the song, finish the painting. And yes, there is a good reason for that. Finishing things builds discipline and skill in a way that giving up repeatedly does not.

But I don’t think it’s the full picture.

Because some ideas aren’t worth finishing. Some are experiments that served their purpose. Some are warm-ups that taught you something and don’t need to go any further. And some, if you’re honest with yourself, were never quite right from the start.

The question is: how do you tell the difference?

Not Finishing Isn’t Always Giving Up

We tend to treat unfinished work as some sort of moral failure. Like if you abandon a project, you’ve let yourself down, your family, your country, your very human reason to be!

But abandonment and quitting aren’t the same thing when it comes to creativity and our art. Seth Godin, in The Dip, draws a useful distinction between the Dip and the Cul-de-Sac. The Dip is the hard stretch that separates people who push through from people who stop short of something genuinely worthwhile. You want to push through the Dip.

The Cul-de-Sac is different. It’s the road that leads nowhere. It looks like progress, it feels like effort, but no amount of pushing is going to get you where you want to go. The smart move is to recognise it early and stop.

Some creative ideas are Dips. They’re hard because they’re worth doing. Some are Cul-de-Sacs. They’re hard because they’re not going anywhere. Art should not be an impasse.

The problem is, when we’re in the middle of creating something, we often can’t tell which is which.

What to Look For Early

The earlier you evaluate, the less time and effort you lose. And there are a few things worth paying attention to before you’re too deep in.

Energy. Does the idea still pull at you? Not in a comfortable, familiar way… in the way where you find yourself thinking about it when you’re not working on it, ideas continue to flow even when you’re not at the desk, easel, or holding the guitar. A song that’s worth finishing tends to nag at you. An idea that’s run its course tends to just sit there.

Momentum. Are you making progress, even slow progress? Or are you stuck in the same place every time you come back to it? Genuine difficulty often feels like resistance with direction. A bad fit tends to feel like circular effort: lots of motion, same spot.

Honest resonance. If you played this for, or shared your art with, someone right now, how would you feel? Not “would it be good enough” but: does it say something true? Does it feel like yours?

Austin Kleon wrote about “relocating your darlings” rather than killing them. The idea that if a line or an element feels precious but doesn’t fit, you don’t have to scrap it. You move it somewhere it can breathe. That’s a useful reframe for half-finished ideas too: a piece that’s stalling might not be a dead end; it might just be in the wrong project. A melody may fit in another harmony, a character in a different plot or an image in a different composition.

Making the Call

There’s research that suggests we’re wired to stay in things longer than we should. Psychologists call it the sunk cost fallacy: the more we’ve already invested, the harder it is to stop, even when stopping is the right move. Time spent, effort made, the version of the piece we’ve imagined, all of these things make walking away feel like loss.

But time you put into a Cul-de-Sac is time you’re not putting into something that has genuine pull. And unfinished projects that have lost their energy don’t just sit quietly. They take up mental space. They create guilt. They crowd out the ideas that might actually want to go somewhere. They are the mountain pile obscuring your creative vision.

A few questions I’ve found useful:
- If I started this from scratch today, would I?
- Am I still curious about where this is going, or am I just trying to resolve it?
- Is the difficulty coming from the work being hard, or from the idea not quite working?
None of these questions will give you a definitive answer. But they’ll often give you a feeling. And that feeling is usually worth listening to.

Some ideas are finished when they’re done. Others are finished when they’ve taught you what they had to teach. Both are valid outcomes. The goal isn’t to finish everything. It’s to finish the things that deserve it.

Thank you for reading this post. Please share your thoughts in the comment section below.
namaste
d
xox

If you enjoyed this post please support my writing by making a donation of any amount.

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9 May 2026