Going Dark

Last time I was here, I pulled back the curtain and talked about the businesses. I also talked about the novel.

And then I skipped a week.

Not because it fell apart. Because Ope took over.

I finished the novel. All five POVs, all eight days of a Canadian invasion that nobody resists. Racing to finish a draft and doing some rewrites pulled me under and I let it, because that’s how the creative process works when it’s actually working. It doesn’t ask permission and it doesn’t check your content calendar.

Mike Bolton is living this right now. He is a successful creator, but a novel grabbed him and he’s almost finished.

I think there’s a distinction that matters, and I’ve been living on both sides of it.

There’s a difference between being a creator and being a creative. They overlap, but they’re not the same thing.

A creator builds strategically. They think about audience, positioning, distribution. They write the post that performs. They study the algorithm. They build the funnel. They optimize. There’s nothing wrong with this. It’s a skill. I do it all the time. This week I spent a morning working on a reposition of the bedding brand, and the whole breakthrough was just saying the obvious true thing that was buried on a page nobody reads. That’s strategy work.

A creative acts on faith. They make the thing because it needs to exist. They have no idea if it’s good. They have no proof it will work. They just know it isn’t finished yet, and they can’t think about anything else until it is.

Ope was that for me. I didn’t validate the concept. I didn’t test the premise on social media. I woke up at 4:30 in the morning because Commander LeBlanc was crossing into Wisconsin and I needed to know what the hell happened next. The only way to find out was to keep pushing forward. That’s not strategy. That’s something else.

Here’s what you can probably assume about trying to do both: the switching cost is brutal.

Strategy brain wants to optimize. It wants to know if the scene is working, if an agent will respond, if the pacing matches the comp titles.

Creative brain doesn’t give a damn about any of that. It just wants to stay in the scene playing in your head.

Every time you spend a day in strategy mode (building a content plan, pricing a SaaS product, analyzing keyword data) you have to swim all the way back down to the bottom of the creative well, where it’s quiet and nothing else exists. It’s not a toggle. It takes a minute to get there.

Some mornings at 4:30 the creative brain is right there waiting. Other mornings all I can think about is a pricing model or an email sequence. The only thing that’s worked for me is protecting those early hours like they’re sacred. If I sit in the chair and start, it always comes alive at some point. I get the creative work in before the strategy brain takes over and starts making lists.

But then some days, the creative work is still going at 1pm and you are wondering how the hell you managed to write 8,000 words in a day and you still want to do more. And that’s the reward of riding it when it comes.

I think about my friend Scott, a public artist. He doesn’t poll his followers on which sculpture to build. He makes the thing. There’s a bigger conversation here about what happens when the entire creative economy tries to turn people like Scott into creators. I’ll write that post soon. But the short version is: the pressure to be a creator is constant. Everyone with a craft is being told to also be a marketer.

So most of us are both. I’m both. But I’ve learned that the creative side doesn’t run on a schedule. When it takes over, you follow it. You don’t pause a novel that’s pouring out of you to hit a weekly posting cadence. You go dark, you do the work, and you come back when it’s done and clean up the f-ing mess.

That’s where I was. Ope is written. A subscriber already finished it (Jeff, you animal!). I’m a third of the way through a line edit.

Sometimes the most productive thing you can do is stop producing content and go make something without any certainty anyone will care about it.

-Jake