Creative Work is Mountain Climbing

There are many metaphors that could describe the creative process, but one that keeps coming back to me is the image of climbing a mountain. And approaching a project that way isn't always facilitated by modern day workflows and communication styles, because the nature of the creative process is often misunderstood.

Making a film, writing a story, developing a game -- these are all similar in a way because they involve a complex, iterative process which starts somewhere, follows a particular approach, which evolves over time, and eventually arrives at "completion". 

When timelines, schedules, human resource limitations, and all sorts of requirements are imposed on the work, it is often done with the limited view of the creative process as perhaps an endless blank canvas, or an olympic-sized pool that a swimmer can traverse from any given point to another at a moment's notice, or even a robotic machine that simply receives input and converts it to output.

But when you're setting about making something, at the start you're gazing up at the top of a mountain. The peak is your objective, and you can see it from a distance, perhaps envision what it looks like, but it won't actually be clearly visible in detail until you get there. When starting to climb, you have to make choices about what route to take, and those choices will affect the entire journey. Some paths are more commonly tread, others will involve some trailblazing. Sometimes a path will start veering you in a wrong direction and needs to be adjusted. But you can't simply switch over to a new path instantly at any point. And when you think you've reached the top there's always a little bit more to keep going until you're actually at the peak. Then you realize it wasn’t about reaching the top, but the view it allows you to see when you get there.