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The great difficulty of any artform, hobby, or practice that involves creation is creating something original. It’s easy to simply create, but to create something original takes a long time. In Jazz, and in other mediums too, it is said that the great artists have their own personal and unique style, but you don’t need to be great to have your own style, you just need to find your originality.

In order to create something original, you need to get good at creating. Creating is essentially two processes functioning in tandem. The process of exploration, and the process of understanding.

You need to be fundamentally exploratory, one moment at a time, and when you find something that you like, you can integrate it into your practice or art. This is what I’m calling understanding.

Since you are trying to create something (or something original), you don’t know where you are headed. If you did, you would have already created your content. This is the reason that creation is fundamentally exploratory.

I would say there are essentially two kinds of content that you need to understand in your creative journey. That which is original, and that which is not. What isn’t original can fall into two categories. There’s the basic rules that underly the artform or practice, and then there are things that were original for other artists, but therefore are not for you.

In my experience it can be helpful to internalize someone else’s original work, and especially if they are someone you consider an influence that you truly look up to, and aspire to be (at least somewhat) like. You will probably find that if you do internalize an influence’s work, it’s in a league that is far beyond your own, to the point where it actually doesn’t even really fit into your own work. This is part of the reason why it also critical to learn the basic rules. A good goal for a beginner is to learn enough of the basics so that your influence’s work actually fits into the context of your own work. It’s like that exercise in writing where you start with a great author’s sentence and then write your own paragraph. If you get to the point where the first sentence doesn’t stick out like a sore thumb then you’ve gone miles.  

The other thing that you need to do ad nauseum, which I touched upon in the previous paragraph, is figure out the basic rules. If you’re interested in the process of creation and in creating your own original work at some point, I find the best way to learn the basic rules is through the process of creation itself. You could study them, which is also helpful, but each thing that you study, you need to be able to incorporate into your creative process, or else what use is the knowledge?

There’s no real distinction between the process of creating and the process of creating something original. The process of creativity is the same in either case. Creating original work is the natural course that creativity takes if you persevere in creating for a long enough interval of time, if you delve deep enough into your artform or practice, and if you pour enough of yourself into your creative work.