craft and beauty

reflections on the creative process

Paul Gauguin, Van Gogh Painting Sunflowers, 1888

At Stripe Sessions in San Francisco last week, Nvidia CEO, Jensen Huang, said, “I wish upon you great pain and suffering,” by which he meant that anything worth doing is hard. Nothing great can be achieved without some amount of discomfort. Doing work you love doesn’t guarantee you’ll be happy.

We conflate love and happiness not only at work, but in relationships. We expect the person we fall in love with to make us happy. And when we’re upset with our partner, when we get into conflict, our fight or flight instinct kicks in. It’s easy to love a person, a relationship, a project when everything is going well. But the whole point of love—the essence of passion and eros—is to care deeply especially when it gets hard.

Love is attention. Love is devotion. Happiness, by contrast, is a state of mind. You can be happy doing work you love. You can be happy doing nothing. You can be sad and lonely and depressed doing work you love. There are days I’m really into writing my novel, and I can’t wait to get back to my desk, but there are also days when it feels like nothing I write is good. To echo Jensen Huang, “I’m not always happy with my work, but I love every moment of it.”

It’s important to believe in the work you do, but some amount of dissatisfaction is necessary to make good art/products. Patrick Collison, CEO of Stripe, said in an interview with Reid Hoffman, “We want to be micro pessimists and macro optimists.” If I were always happy with my work, I would be a mediocre writer. At the very least, I wouldn’t be improving.

“Craft and beauty” is a concept we talk about a lot at Stripe. Craft is the care and attention to detail required to make something beautiful. Every minutia gets scrutinized before it goes out into the world. We can spend weeks debating the use of a single word on a page (and we’ll be the first to admit we overdo it sometimes). I might not agree with every detail we insist on tweaking, but I’m proud to work for a company that values craft and beauty. It’s a form of devotion. It’s what Jensen Huang calls “love and care.” 

Time is an ingredient in the writing process. You can’t rush it. That would be like meeting a stranger at a party and expecting to become friends overnight. A story is a relationship between you and your truth, and like any relationship, it takes time to develop. There’s no shortcut. You can only hack something if the output is all that matters. But creative work is about the process more than the results. I could follow the three act structure or the hero’s journey or any tried-and-true formula to write a novel in 90 days or less, but I wouldn’t be satisfied with the result unless I allowed the story to marinate in my head for however long it needs, unless I labored over sentences, unless I spent months getting to know my characters so well I can hear their voices in my sleep.

Writing is about getting to the truth of the matter. It’s much harder than it sounds because you’re constantly trying to overcome the urge to deflect and avoid the truth. And by truth, I don’t mean facts. It’s not something you can Google or ask ChatGPT to define. Truth is an ineffable quality in good art. It’s what gives it resonance. The closest cousin to truth is beauty.

I died for Beauty — but was scarce
Adjusted in the Tomb,
When One who died for Truth, was lain
In an adjoining room —

He questioned softly "Why I failed"?
"For Beauty", I replied.
"And I — for Truth - Themself are one —
We Brethren are", He said —

And so, as Kinsmen, met a Night —
We talked between the Rooms —
Until the Moss had reached our lips —
And covered up — Our names —

— Emily Dickinson

Truth and beauty go hand-in-hand, but there’s an important distinction: what’s true is beautiful, but what’s beautiful is not necessarily truthful. Sometimes, I’m tempted to write a sentence because it sounds good. But it’s not really what I’m trying to say. And when I revise, I have to turn on my bullshit detector and ruthlessly eliminate all those beguiling words and sentences that have no business being in the story. The point isn’t to write something beautiful. The point is to write something truthful—and therein, lies beauty.

I don’t think suffering is a prerequisite for making good art, but I do believe that focusing on outcomes tends to lead to suffering because they are largely outside our control. The corporate world overemphasizes outcomes. Companies set key performance indicators and use quantifiable results to determine if a project was successful and the investment worthwhile. That might be fine for certain jobs, but it’s terrible for creative work because failure is an essential part of the process. If I had taken the view that the results justify the investment, I would’ve quit after my first failed novel. Instead, I went on to write a whole new book, which also failed. And I began the process all over again.

Two weeks ago, I signed with a literary agent. I’ve been writing for the past 8.5 years and was beginning to think it would never happen for me. As hard as it was, in the weeks before getting the offer of representation, I tried to let go of the outcome—to stop worrying if I would ever publish a book—and focus on the writing itself, on improving my craft. That mindset shift was a turning point. I’m not very superstitious, but I do believe that by channeling my energy into what I could control and approaching my novel with renewed love and care, I finally got lucky.